D&D General Eberron Hexcrawl Help

[WBruce]

Hi,
Iv'e been trying to integrate Hexcrawl to my campaign for a while, with some degree of success. I've read everything I could on the subject, including everything Alexandrian has on the theme. I then created a small map from a region around a small town to test it, and the adventure was very well received.

Now I have a bigger challenge. I am DMing in Eberron with the map linked. What I like about Eberron is that the means of transportation change the game. When you struggle to move hex by hex and suddenly take the lightning rail, that make the economy comes alive, because suddenly pay for the passage brings a real benefit to the party. That said, it will be a monumental task to key every hex to an encounter/event.

I keep reading hexes should be 3, 6, 12 miles, but I am using 25 miles hexes. According to rules a person can travel 25 miles/day at normal pace, so I rounded up to 25, to best fit the scale of the map I am using. A 60 miles hex would be great, less work to key everything, it is the recommended scale for continent maps, but it makes harder to move. With 25 mile hexes I can move 1 hex per day which I think makes the game better for players that are not used to imperial system or hexcrawls. It is simple, one hex/day, instead of 2,5 days to move through a 60 miles Hex.

My question to fellow Hexcrawlers and Eberron entusiasts is what hex size would you use to a map this big and why? How would you cope with that many hexes to key everything?

One last note, I don't see a necessity to key terrains like forest, mountains and deserts. The map already give me all that, so I would only need to key interesting locations, scenery, encounters and such, but that is still a lot. I am using Fantasy grounds, so I can overlay the hexes, reason why the map is without any hexes on it.

Thanks for any insight.

 

[Desdichado]

Hexcrawls aren't really meant to be an entire continent. I'd eliminate the hexcrawl aspect of the whole game, and just do hexcrawls around lightning rail stations. There's only a relative few of them, so when they get to where they're going, that's where they hexcrawl the surrounding countryside.

 

[JConstantine]

Hexcrawls are typically about exploration and as you can see from that map, most of Khorvaire has been explored, settled and documented. For Eberron, the obvious place for a hexcrawl is Xen'drik, but if I was to do one in Khorvaire, I'd probably start with a premise like House Sivis or Morgrave University wanting to document a poorly understood location - say, the Demon Wastes, or finding out how the Mournland has changed compared to when it was Cyre - and limiting the Hexcrawl to that area.

 

[UngainlyTitan]

At a continent or world scale, the short answer, is I would not. Just too much work and very poor granularity. With Ebberon they have magi-tech at about late nineteenth century and just ended a world war. There are probably good maps and gazetteers for most places.
Get your players to tell you where they are going, then prepare ahead of them, if a hexcrawl is appropriate.
One more thing, airship travel is also a thing, and I do not think hexcrawl is appropriate here either as they do not interact with the ground unless the players want to interact.

 

[GuardianLurker]

I'm running a (semi) hex-crawl right now with a similar setup - large scale known map, small scale exploration.

1. The best bet on how to integrate Lightning Rail, Airships, and other fast-but-not-instant travel is to limit the actual hexcrawl to wherever the PCs disembark, as has been mentioned.
2. You might want to put together a random encounter list for the fast travel methods, focusing on the vehicle & passengers itself. It should be mostly boring, honestly, as one of the attractions is to these methods is that they are safer than strict overland foot travel. A quick websearch should pop up something like "101 Mini-adventures on the Oriental Express" or somesuch that you can crib from.
3. I use significantly smaller hexes - I treated the listed travel rate as a maximum, headed-straight-there, rate. With exploration, mapping, etc. slowing that down.
4. After playing with PF2e's hexcrawl system (and doing a deep dive into hexcrawls like you did), I wasn't very satisfied, and it wasn't very engaging for my players. I realized that was because in the rules, travel was (in a sense) something that happened to the PCs, not really something they they had control over. "Roll to see if you get lost. Roll to see what the weather is like. Roll for the random encounter, if any. Roll for any investigation. Roll....". So I inverted that, and while weather and encounters are still purely random, now they earn "travel points" based on the ranger's Survival/Orientation/Sense Direction check, and can spend them on movement and/or scouting. Scout a lot, move slow; scout little, move fast. That's gotten them a lot more engaged.

It does mean that I frequently have to invent little minor "special sites" for their scouting but I've already placed all the major ones, so these are often just things like "You find an overgrown, abandoned, farm" or "you see a dwarven clan-hold carved into the mountainside in the distance". Mostly just flavor/world description & exposition. But occasionally really minor encounters and rewards. As an example, one of their explorations found a ruined hammermill. They fought a pack of dire rats (at level 6), about 1/3 of which managed to flee when they realized the PCs were more than they could handle, and found fragments of an old book containing the bardic lore background for the adventure. Another was an old ruined keep that served as their campsite - and gave all of the PCs nightmares.
Again, if you have trouble improvising, there are plenty of "N ideas for X" lists around. Frequently, all you'll want to just not flesh out the idea and use it as is. Like the nightmare-giving keep. That could have been a hook to a haunting, or a faux-haunting, or a full-on adventure. But it was literally just a ruined keep that gave them nightmares about the ancient battle that lead to its fall.