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Message: <blockquote data-quote="GuardianLurker" data-source="post: 9704897" data-attributes="member: 786">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.</blockquote>

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