Total Improv: Hexcrawling

Or, your way to a hex-free crawl!




Credits to Dungeon World and Detect Magic



The Setup
Follow the procedures outlined in Perilous Wilds of Dungeon World to make a shared world map.

Example:

The party begins at the X. The red areas are the personal places of the five fictious PCs. Brown lines are connectors.

Travelling from A to B
When the PCs are about to travel anywhere using a connector (such as roads, paths, rivers, etc), decide how long the journey will take. This decision can be made by the player that added the connector, or the Game Master. This is assumed to be the distance travelled on foot. There is no difference in travel speed if using mounts; they only allow you to carry more equipment without becoming encumbered.
Write the name of the connector and its travel time on a separate sheet.

There's a 1 in 6 chance of an encounter each Wilderness Turn (usually one day, but can be scaled down on a smaller map), colored to the region the party is travelling through.

Stock the Connectors
Roll 1d6 to determine how many pathed locations along the connector that you can find. Each of them has a type of path called a lead leading to them:

1. Game trail 
2. River 
3. Landmark chain 
4. Road 
5. Naturally occurring clearance(s) 
6. Supernatural guidance 
7. Actually on the path 
8. Visible from the path 
9. Audible from the path 
10. Smellable from the path

Pathed Locations d12

1. Unnatural Feature. (Weirdness)
2-7. Natural Feature. (Waterfalls, cliffs, sinkholes...)
8-12. Infrastructure (Inns, Settlements, Hovels...)

Each pathed location has a 1 in 6 chance of leading to another connector. This second-order connector either:

1-2. Meets up with an extant connector, creating a detour
3-4. Meets up with an extant connector, creating a shortcut
5-6. Leads to another location to be generated

Stepping off the Path
PCs can choose to leave a connector and strike out into the wilderness.
This is rarely recommended, as they run into the risk off encountering more dangerous entities. Of course, the reward is also higher.

Each Wilderness Turn there is an encounter on a 1 in 6, and another 1 in 6 chance of finding a new location. There is a 1 in 12 chance of the PCs finding their way out of the current area/region, based on the compass direction they are moving in and their approximate position on the map.

An unpathed location will continue to be unpathed unless the PCs take action.
If the PCs want to find the location again, they must take some action to leave a path back to the location they’ve discovered, which is then mapped, permanently. Otherwise, give them a 1/6 chance of finding it again for every wilderness exploration turn they expend trying to locate it again.