Up on the Mountain, After the Flood
The next campaign I'm starting is an idea I've been holding onto for 5-6 years now, inspired by actually being up on a mountain while thinking about hexcrawls and also Shadow of the Demon Lord. This is going to be something of an experiment in running a hexcrawl in the Demon Lord Engine (specifically Shadow of the Weird Wizard), because those two don't quite go together out of the box (but put a pin in that). The immediate problem when considering this approach with this system is that PCs level up in Demon Lord Engine games after completing each adventure. How do we quantify a unit of "adventure" in a hexcrawl?
My solution: the players have a hexmap. There are ten... problems?1 on the map, the group levels up when they deal with one. The PCs know the rough locations of each of the "problems" because their home base is a stronghold on the side of a mountain with a telescope allowing them to roughly keep track of things. These ten 'problems' are not the only things on the map - there are other points of interest to distract the party and provide their own rewards. Some of these locations will be known to the party at the outset, some of them they'll have to stumble on or look for. A hexcrawl means exploration, and exploration needs fun things to find to be worthwhile. It's entirely possible the party will just beeline between the 'problems' and knock them out one after another, ignoring everything else on the map, but that's an acceptable outcome. Giving the players the freedom to do that is also important to a hexcrawl. The plan is to have at least some of the optional locations be relevant to NPCs, giving some additional incentive for the party to get sidetracked. And, to spice things up, the 'problems' are going to blend and feed on each other as each one gets taken down. This is something I'm mostly going to have to play by ear and fill in between sessions as a stand-in for the faction turn. I could pre-prep each possible combination but that risks becoming a lot of wasted effort.
The 'problems' are going to increase in danger and difficulty as the PCs level up, allowing the players to tackle them in whatever order they want while still providing an appropriate level of challenge. Somewhat artificial, but it provides the freedom I want to see in a hexcrawl and Shadow of the Weird Wizard is a game that does care about balance in that way so I'm meeting it where it's at2. The area's recovering from a massive magical cataclysm (see below) and it's taking everyone a while to get back on their feet. The loophole here is that the players could decide to, for example, explore every area of the map before they actually start tackling the 'problems' and that's... fine? I don't want to start arbitrarily levelling the 'problems' if I feel like the players are taking too long to get around to one of them. If the players want to ignore all the NPCs asking them to please address these issues that are active and interfering in the world I feel like that's on me. I have vague notions of increasing the 'magnitude'3 of the 'problems' depending on how long the players take between handling each one, but I'm going to play that by ear. I trust my players to generally follow the intended direction of the campaign.
Shadow of the Weird Wizard actually provides several mechanical components for a hexcrawl by default. There's slot-based encumbrance, tables for weather, a fairly detailed breakdown of travel speeds (though measured in days spent traveling instead of miles traveled4), and a "Travel Events" table that kind-of acts like an overloaded encounter roll. It'll need tweaking but there's good bones there. Rations are abstracted into a "provisions" item that lasts until the end of a "quest"5 instead of tracked granularly, but that's more palatable to my group anyway and still provides an attack vector so not a problem for my needs. Shadow of the Weird Wizard itself doesn't have an opinion on hex size so I'm sticking with 6-mile hexes because that's about as granular as I want to get with a hexcrawl.
I determined map size (normally a question I'd have to wrestle with for a while) by estimating roughly how far someone up on a mountain could see and limiting the sandbox area to that. The titular mountain is ~14000ft, that makes the horizon ~144 miles away, at 6-mile hexes and with the mountain in the middle of a side that gives us a rectangular play area of 48 x 24 hexes. The far corners and surrounding areas are more than 144 miles away from the mountain so the players aren't going to have any current details on what they contain at first. I'll have those regions detailed on my side so the players can choose to explore them, but the ten main 'problems' necessary to complete the campaign will be in the area visible from the mountain.
To give the PCs incentive to work together from the beginning, they are all fleeing their homeland because of a magical cataclysm called The Enchantment. Where they come from, the Enchantment has caused drought, famine, and worse, leaving them with no choice but to look for somewhere else to live. Unfortunately, nowhere was safe from The Enchantment and the land they find on the other side of the mountains is just as troubled as the one they left. So the PCs have nothing left to do but roll up their sleeves and help out (probably by inflicting violence - this is still a D&D-derived game after all6). When I originally envisioned this campaign the PCs were from the area they'd be exploring, but that would require me to prep "what did your character know about this place before" in addition to the current state of each location and I don't want to take on that much work.
The nature of The Enchantment is not directly relevant to the campaign. The PCs won't need to find out anything about its nature or origin to solve the ten 'problems' and finish the campaign but I will have info on it behind the screen and there will be clues scattered around the map the players can find. If the players are really into it we can do some post-level-10 stuff or a followup campaign or something to address The Enchantment.
Right now I don't think this campaign will take two real-time years like the last one but I could still see it going long depending on how sidetracked the players get. That's something of a win-win situation; either we wrap this one up quickly and can get started on the next one (maybe another Weird Wizard idea I've been hanging on to), or the players get to enjoy being deep in the sandbox.
Terminology immediately becomes tricky: one of the things marked on the map is "The Refugees" and it doesn't feel right to call them a "problem" without caveat. These are people fleeing the same disaster as the PCs, and they need help. Getting the refugees to safety is worth a level, same as slaying The Beast or fixing The Maelstrom. There's the option of not having The Refugees on the map and replacing them with something else, but telling my players there's a bunch of people out there who are going to be preyed on by the other threats is sure to get them moving.↩
This, I think, is also how a more sandbox-style Lancer campaign could work: not a hexcrawl, but the players are aware of a dozen strategic objectives to hit, they have to work towards an opportunity to attack each one, license level increases each time one gets taken off the board, but the opposition can also concentrate defenses around the remainder. The Danse Mechabre: Strike the Mountain coming eventually?↩
Area affected? Resources available as distinct from actual mechanical difficulty? How much the difficulty increases when the players deal with a 'problem'?↩
Peeking into Old School Essentials, I see that a character can travel 24 miles (=4 hexes) in a day, so I will take 24 miles as 1 day of travel and adjust from there based on terrain, pace, etc.↩
"Quest" being Weird Wizard's term for an adventure, so in this case provisions would last about until the party deals with one of the 'problems.'↩
I've seen Shadow of the Demon Lord (and by extension Shadow of the Weird Wizard?) referred to as OSR and I really don't believe it. One of these days I'll have to lay out my personal OSR taxonomy but all that's relevant right now is that DLE games aren't on it.↩