Once again, I give my deepest thanks to my patrons Darius, Ferny, Jaina Bee, Dave, Casey, and Keeper. In this new year, you are the foundation of my work. If anyone reading this would like to give your intrepid author a belated holiday gift, please become a patron on my Patreon. Whether you can give a dollar a month or five hundred, I appreciate it greatly! As one of my religions says: Haec est unde, haec est unde, haec est unde uita uenit. Haec est, haec est, haec est uita uenit! (This is whence, this is whence, this is whence life comes. This is, this is, this is life coming!)
I've yet to really run a true D&D (or Deadlands: Hell on Earth or Rifts or Traveller) hexcrawl, but I've been thinking of doing so lately. My mind has been drawn to my as-yet-unnamed sensual psychedelic fantasy setting over the past month or so, and I am getting something of an itch to run a hexcrawl within it. The blame for this recent obsession might be laid at the feet of Critical Role's travels through Eisilcross.
A big part of hexcrawl play are the emergent stories that come from random encounter tables. Matt Mercer's been using such tables excellently during this arc, epitomized by the sudden appearance of Avantika and the effect that had on his players. That alone had a major effect on the generalized random encounter table below, spurring me to add the chance for random encounters that further the PCs' individual storylines.
As for how likely encounters should be in each hex, that's really an aesthetic decision by the DM (obviously.) I learned my favorite method of determining the size of one's hex from an RPG blogger/writer/developer who sadly turned out to be a hideous and horrible human being, so I won't be linking to the articles. Figure out how far your PCs are likely to travel in one day, based on their most common method of travel (walking v. riding v. sailing v. flying v. . . .) and the terrain through which they are travelling. Multiply that by the amount of time, in days, which should probably contain each encounter ~ that is, do you want the PCs to have one encounter a day (1), one every 30 minutes (0.02), one encounter a month (30), etc., and call this number x. Then figure out how predictable you want encounters to be. Do you want the PCs to have an encounter in every hex? Then there's a 100% chance for one. Maybe you want to be really random with your encounters, for whatever reason, so maybe there's a 10% chance. Or a 50% chance or an 83% chance or whatever. Call this percentage of an encounter y. Multiply x by this percentage, and subtract it from x (that is: x-xy) and the result is the size of your hex.
Of course, like any algebraic equation, you can flip it around. If you know how large you want your hexes to be, but not how likely you want the encounters to be, take that x you just figured out and subtract the hex size from it. Divide the result by x again, and BAM you have a percentage chance!
- 1-29: Ecological random encounter (the subtables here are worthy of a whole post of their own)
- 30-31: Ecological random encounter from nearby territory, climate, or terrain
- 32: Ecological random encounter from somewhere far away
- 33-58: World-building random encounter (that is to say, an encounter that communicates or allows interaction with the cosmological, political, etc. aspects of the world; some of these change, but only occasionally as the currents of history flow)
- Each hex would have its own subtable, without approximately one interesting location, NPC encounter, or other such thing per square mile; some events (such as encounters with the military or powerful NPC/monster, deific interventions, the mechanics of life & death, or things like processions of Elves leaving Middle-Earth) are likely to show up on several hexes
- 2-mile hexes would have a d3 chart each
- 3-mile hexes a d6 chart each
- 4-mile hexes a d10 chart each
- 5-mile hexes two d8 charts each (admittedly, at this point, the options get a little bit too large to be easily done for every hex)
- 6-mile hexes two d12 charts each
- 7-mile hexes three d10 charts each
- 8-mile hexes four d10 charts each
- 59-78: Story-based random encounter (if you have 3 or 4 players, make a d12 chart with 4 or 3 story events that could happen anywhere anywhen for each; if you have 5, make it a d20 chart with 4 each; these will usually get replaced as they are rolled up)
- 79-92: And now for something completely different....
- Currently, this chart of Morrisonic bits is the only subtable here; I plan to grow a garden of these
- 93-100: Roll twice. This can cascade into many more rolls.
Grant Morrison is one of my favorite comic book writers, with numerous amazing titles under his belt ~ The Invisibles, Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth, The Filth, Doom Patrol.... I was reading the one remaining trade paperback in my collection of that last title recently, so I threw this together.
Part of what makes Grant's writing so perfect for this kind of thing ~ besides the fact that his writing is a major influence on my ideal of and preference for sensual psychedelic fantasy ~ is his baroque style. Fed no doubt both by psychedelics and adaptations of William S. Burroughs's "cut-up technique" (and other things, most likely), Grant's books are filled to the brim with quick asides and mentions of things that spur the imagination into fresh and wild flights. Often lasting for only a panel, or even less, these help build the sense of a truly weird and unknowable world whose dream-like rules only mimic sense, while allowing sensical stories to be told of the people who live in and by those rules. In other words, they resonate strongly with the dice-driven bathos that is the very essence of RPG storytelling.
d100 Morrisonic bits from Doom Patrol: The Painting That Ate Paris in this hex (fantasy edition)
- A brutal hero of the realm followed by a crowd of bards and visual artists
- An unbelievably powerful magic-user who is deathly afraid of dirt
- A glittering fog monster that absorbs people
- An abstract shadow of a man, half unseen, with a hole where his heart should be
- A house with a door that locks behind you and can only be unlocked by reciting a list of names
- A secret, sacred, sub-educational sanctum
- A sentient golem cannot dream and yet tries to map the Plane of Dream and its inhabitants by interviewing those who can
- A villain forgotten by history, now in hiding and very bored
- A bodysuit that inhibits both movement and hearing
- The White Room, a room whose perfectly smooth, spherical shape and uniform white color confer the illusion of limitless space
- A completely uneducated air genasi barbarian
- An army dedicated to the total absurdity of life, the gigantic hocus-pocus of existence, whose banners read "From this day on, Let unreason reign!"
- Two overly-educated opium addicts contemplating the infinite majesty of the gods' creation as they look upon the constellations trembling in the blue, immeasurable chambers of the central heavens
- A painting that can physically devour those who behold it containg an ancient and inhuman power with a nihilistic intelligence
- An enigmatic and sadistic Count who collects art
- An androgyne, entirely covered in bandages and floating in the air, contemplating a series of levitating Russian dolls
- Someone warns the PCs to beware of men who aren't there
- The yodelling skull of Tavistock
- A statue of a mythological mother-figure, rescued from a war-razed city, that bleeds sour milk every 28 days
- A spell to turn people into statues of glass
- A temple to the Listening Gods
- A spell that causes missiles to grow to enormous size once fired, causing their weight to pull them to the ground before they can strike
- The Colliding Bishop among the Sweating Windmills
- A portal to another plane that can be opened by means of any contradictory ideas or images
- The avatar of contradiction
- A race of people who gain simply unbelievable levels of strength when they're asleep; they all sleepwalk
- An infinite recursive demiplane
- A barbarian power that allows you to hit multiple people at once and send each of them into a different plane or demiplane
- Light falling like snow, like chamber music
- A multicolored polyphonic city
- The sound a key makes when hovering
- A surreal beach that disorients and makes it hard to concentrate
- The Negative Spirit
- A spell that puts you into an untouchable abstract state for as long as you can keep your thoughts non-referential and nonsensical
- A broken jar which has spilled the viscous fluid that once fed the brain contained within
- The Kingdom of No
- Beethoven birds squawking for food; they eat musical notes
- A totally humongous hoofprint
- And his name that seats on him is Extinction. And Oblivion. And he is trapped in a painting.
- A massive horse-riding knight rising out of the sea, as wide as the beach
- Villains having to save the heroes they defeated fair and square in order to fight something else
- The structure of a knights body in a scaffolding of steel bands, riding through the sky
- The empty cage of its heart
- A magical ritual powered by the embarrassment created by its performance
- The defeat of Oblivion by Senselessness
- A gun that shoots pigs instead of bullets
- A Horseman of the Apocalypse reduced to a child's rockinghorse
- A great hero of legend gone cataleptic, retreating into their mind where it's safe
- A spell to act as a psychic conduit allowing someone whose brain you're touching to travel into the personal mindscape demiplane of someone else you're touching normally
- A train with the infinity symbol for its engine number
- The Psychocosmic Subway Demiplane
- The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter
- The surgeon comes, walking on blades, spider-gloves twitching in light gone stale
- Someone named Baby Doll
- An army composed of the psychic projections of a single person's personality aspects
- A hulking knight with a heavy, thick helmet shaped like the head of a hammer
- The Suffocating Dark, the Screaming Dark
- An ogre who gains power from the childhood traumas of those it fights
- A spell to immediately destroy something in the instant you first admit to yourself that you hate it instead of loving it
- Fear the Sky, a group of assassins who ritually behead themselves, gaining a tiny planet as a replacement head
- The Friend of the Children, who is unseen and unheard but is present abroad or at home when children are happy and playing alone
- A golem or warforged experiencing the senses of touch and smell for the first time
- The papercut ritual that summons an oracular head, a metaphysical agony aunt
- Dermo-optical perception, the psychic power to see through one's skin
- The Antigod
- Pain surgeons gathering the dry skinflakes everyone sheds so they can sew them together with the old love letters people throw away when love turns sour. The final product are the constructs known as dry bachelors.
- The skins of murder victims stretched across bone frames whose occult geometry imprisons their souls
- The Book of the Fifth Window
- Three masked halfling riders who can ride on any surface, regardless of what gravity says, and transform those they look at into blind, smoking shadows
- The psychic power to hear fear
- The needle children, who cannot be seen through glass
- The Cult of the Unwritten Book
- A drunk man raising his bottle to toast a fight
- A newborn baby born almost completely covered in tattooed words
- The Shroud on Stilts (one of the Minor Grotesques)
- A man with a wound that's slowly getting bigger, taking over his whole body; cultists use this wound as a portal to travel throughout the world and the planes
- A plague of bodiless mouths disagreeing violently with each other
- Windows of Warning
- The Little Sisters of Our Lady of the Razor
- Emu, we wail deviant for toy ego, lo!
- Guilty guilty children tear like paper and milk
- All the stars in the sky disappear
- An enormous blue-lashed bloodshot eye in a shattering sky
- Words disappear from books, books disappear from shelves, shelves disappear from libraries
- Doctor Mirabilis's Most Excellent and Unusual Puppet Theater
- Hoodman Blind and Hoodman Shame, who eat all the words on the tips of people's tongues and convert them into tame lightning
- The Spider Bridge
- The Cathedral of the Sacred Family
- Walls dripping with the tears of children
- Painted gods by whose power existence itself is brought to an end
- Someday these doomsday bells will ring and this ghost of a city will reveal itself to the world
- A whole cathedral of singing stone and choral architecture
- A city trapped in a snow globe
- A spell to create a temporary portal out of a smoke ring
- One artificer complaining about another artificer's shoddy work
- A series of doors ~ the Door of Boredom, the Door of Irritation, the Door of Panic, and the Door of Hallucination ~ leading to the Room Without Doors
- A warforged's body wanting independence from its mind
- An intelligent ape pushing a baby buggy containing a brain in a jar
- An enchanted revolutionary beret that can only be passed to someone who defeats the wearer in combat or strip chess
- Two brains in a jar talking to each other
