Let’s Make a Hexcrawl Setting

[Daztur]

I had to teach on Christmas Eve so I showed my corporate classes movies and for the kids 11-12 year-olds I ran D&D (more or less Holmes Basic through more or less In Search of the Unknown). They took right to dungeon crawling tactics amazingly well. I put on their equipment lists on their pregen character sheets "and two more things, whatever you want, as long as they aren't too expensive" and the very first idea was "hunting dog." The rest went on like that, was very pleased, especially with one quiet 6th grade girl who ended up being the sneakiest and most effective of the lot (as a cleric), she even drew an anime-style sketch of her character on her sheet . Now I've added "make a Retroclone with the DM functioning a black box so that if the players are kids or newbies they don't have to learn any rules at all to play" to my queue of "stuff I'd really like to do some day if I have too much spare time." I might add in a few bits of what the kids did to the Shrouded Lands in a bit, especially face grabbing war cats, and work in the PC names somewhere.

Here's one he for now, it started from me forgetting that Sosaria was (the elephant wall city) and thinking that it was just a throwaway name and brainstorming based on that...

The Falling Walls of Monatheron
Hex 43.12

Greater than the Holt of the Bloodied King (29.07), higher than towers of the Shuttered City and vaster by far than the Bastion of Rhegard (05.20) is the cyclopean bulk of the castle of Monatheron. It is the last remnant of the drowned kingdom of Andara (47.11) that spread ecstasy and terror throughout these lands in the days before the Tarrasque was brought in chains to doomed Bergolast (32.28).

The old line of Andaran kings has long since dried up but a half dozen cyclops lords, each more inbred and sickly than the last, vie for power as the castle crumbles around them. This can be quite dangerous as the city was built with blocks of stone many spans tall and when they fall they easily crush anyone that they happen to land on.

It seems that each year more stones fall and one by one the engines of wonder slow. These days the wind hisses through the rotted canvas of the thousand windmills that crown every tower of the castle. As the towers crumble, more and of the human servants of Monatheron move into improvised bivouacs under the various fallen stones while serving the one-eyed lords of the city, each in precisely the same way that their mother or father did before them.

Among the most important of these duties is caring for the six sacred breeds of Andaran cattle. These beasts are unlike those seen elsewhere and any who crossbreeds them or removes them from Monatheron are thrown into the cat pits that lie in the lower levels of the castle. However, Monatheron does export a great deal of beef, much of it being sent to the City of Shuttered Windows as "gifts," for Monatheron's strength is far too withered to resist the power of the City's Doge.

These days one of the primary concerns of the lords of Monatheron is outdoing each other in fashion. It is forbidden for any of their race to wear dead things and, as the fashion changes from year to year cloaks of mewling cats, tunics of caged birds (often birds of paradise, a fashion which the Sosarian cattle barons have adopted in a crude form, see 50.11) and much more can be seen in the castle's halls.

The current fashion is for the cyclopses of the city to smear their hair with nutritive unguents that attract luminescent beetles that crawl over their bodies in dazzling ever-moving patterns (sometimes beetle-eating snakes are added to keep things more lively). This fashion has some admirers in Shuttered and one can tell much about the courtesans of that city by what beetles cling to their hair. However, the from that this has taken in the grimier brothels of the Undercity can be a bit disconcerting.

Connections:
-Drogo the Baldfaced (29.01) was able to rustle some moon-horned cattle under cover of night, only to find that all of the cows he had stolen were female or steers. His attempts to get his hands on a bull or crossbreed them with other cattle have not gone well.
-Thorek Ironhide is served by an exiled cyclops who has assassinated several elder members of the council that stood in the Winterjarl's way, thanks to his knowledge of secrets forgotten by the younger races (14.00).

Hooks:
-Is there anything to tell about old Andara that now lies under the waves of the Keening Sea? How did it spread "ecstasy and terror?"
-What are the engines of wonder?
-What sort of people serve the cyclopses? What sort of jobs do they have? If each has exactly the same job as his/her parent there must be some strange or obsolete jobs.
-What are the six sacred breeds of cattle? What's so special about them?
-Cat pits?
-Any other bizarre living fashions?
-I'm not sure I want to hear what the Undercity brothels have been up to with the beetles...
-What secrets does Thorke's cyclops assassin know?

 

[Sanglorian]

Okay, I've updated the appendices with all the new hexes.

We've created a terrific resource here, and I love the detail and depth to the setting. However, it's getting so large I worry that it's unwieldy in its current form. What I'd like to do is go through the hexes and cut the parts that are general rather than hex-specific. We could then put those general parts in separate sections. So we'd end up with a chapter on Gods, with a section on Chimalia, rather than having details about Chimalia scattered all over the place.

Of course, that's way too big a job for me to commit to - but if we divided the setting into chunks and shared them out, I reckon we could get it done.

What do you think?

(BTW, I loved the Komodo dragons and the cyclopses)

 

[Daztur]

It's indeed a great resource. I'm shocked at how large it's gotten. As I said a few pages back, I want to start spamming this around a few places once we hit the one year anniversary (not in an annoying way, I don't want to do rude things like register on a forum and have my first post be "hey, check out the Shrouded Land!").

You're right, it's unwieldy as all hell. It's a mess organizationally for the same reason that spaghetti code is annoying in computer programming (built piece by piece from the ground up with no organized plan). One thing I'm doing as a stop-gap is putting in regional hex listings (like what I've already done for the various subhexes of places like Shuttered).

Then what I'll do over the course of the next year is, like you said, move a lot of general stuff into the appendixes and have hexes reference that instead of other hexes. For example it's a bit bizarre that whenever I want to place a connection in the compilation to the sun god I have to refer to an obscure inn because the previous owner worshiped that god and that was the first time the god was mentioned. That'll mean both fleshing out the appendixes that you already have with a lot of text and moving stuff out of hexes and to there. That'll take a while but any long job isn't bad if you do it bit by bit. Hell, we've just passed Watership Down in word count and if we can do that in under a year with two lulls in activity that shouldn't be too hard if I stretch it out over a bunch of months.

But even if we do that, the Shrouded Lands write-up is a pretty crappy in-play reference. We're just way too wordy, some hexes open with a story from a thousand years ago that goes on for hundreds of words before getting into any detail about what's in the hex now. That's radically different that any other hexcrawl setting out there (or any other published setting period). They're usually quick laconic entries that you can refer to quickly in play while, for me at least, the point of the Shrouded Lands is that whenever I come across something in a blog, book or my own thoughts and think "that would be fun to use in a D&D campaign one day" I can just slot it in somewhere in this setting and it'll always be there waiting for me and any D&D campaign I ever run in the Shrouded Lands will have that idea ready and waiting for the PCs to stumble over. Other hexcrawl settings tend to be practical tools, while the Shrouded Lands is more like this:

A vast storehouse of ideas there to satisfy my mental packrat impulses.

Probably the best way for other people to use the Shrouded Lands isn't so much to run a campaign in it but to skim around looking for ideas to steal, which I think it's great for.

However, as a final step after fleshing out the appendixes and moving stuff there I'll take a stab at rewriting the whole thing from the ground up in the format that's use by more normal hexcrawl setting books with a lot of practical play tools like stat lines, encounter tables, population figures, etc. that we've mostly been ignoring. It'll be far more concise and probably look a lot like this:

But for right now, the Shrouded Lands in all of its sprawling, rambling, bizarre, spaghetti-organization glory is pretty damn cool.

 

[Daztur]

Ceralin the Healer
Additional information about Hex 17.05

Ceralin is a half-elven priestess of Telanar the White (33.08) and travels these lands with a small band of devoted disciples. She has a kind motherly appearance and freely heals everyone that she comes across, asking for nothing in return but small gifts of food. However, those that are healed by her are made completely infertile.

Ceralin views this as a mercy as it prevents more children being born to live mortal lives of grief and suffering. Ceralin grew up among the elves of the Kingswood and was shocked to see her skin grow loose and white creep into her hair at the young age of one hundred. She took this rather badly and had dedicated herself to sparing others from such horrors.

Hooks:
-Who knows about the infertility that Ceralin is spreading? How many are so afflicted? Is anyone willing to pay to get it reversed? Is that even possible?
-Does Ceralin have any other plans about sparing people from old age aside from making people unable to have children?
-Do elves age? This seems to imply that they don’t but Amelar (36.04.01) is ancient and grey-haired. What’s up?

 

[Electric Wizard]

Dungeons of the Iron Count
Additional information about Hex 21.06

The infamous Count Ota Verlime, known as the Iron Count, ordered construction of this doomed beacon not just to watch the Kingswood. He also chose it as the site of his secret prison. He made frequent trips to his beacon for news of the Kingswood and to interrogate prisoners. His suspicious nature was so strong that, after suspecting his half-orc torturer of passing secrets to the orcs of the Gray Mountains, he insisted on interviewing every prisoner personally. He extracted information from men, women, elves, dwarves and orcs about affairs within and without the realm. Over years, he developed a theory involving a spy network of crystal balls controlled by elf sorcerers and factions within Shuttered. He became obsessed with proving his theory. He spent so much time in the prison, wracking his miserable captives with questions they could not answer, that his popular brother usurped him by doing little more than walking into his vacant throne room. Ota spent the rest of his life locked in his own dungeon.

The suffering of innocent prisoners created a psychic wound on the tower, which could be the reason its defenders lost heart at the sight of the elves. A coven of necromancers led by Hastra the Shunned uses a room deep in the ruin as a salon. They hold seances in which they burn essence of agony, an extract refined from suffering itself. The essence aids in drawing out tortured souls, and many sadomasochists find it quite soothing. Hastra leads the seances, seeking answers to lost secrets she may use to blackmail her way back into Shuttered. After dozens of seances, the coven has burned enough of the oil to darken the chamber's walls. The necromancers are careful to keep the door closed and sealed tight because they fear that the fumes will leak into the dungeon and animate the piles of bones strewn across the dungeon's passageways. However, everyone in the coven is an outlaw somewhere. If they are discovered, they may take drastic measures to not get caught.

Hooks
-Are there any shades of truth in Count Ota's crystal ball theory? Which crystal balls did he suspect to be part of the conspiracy network?
-How does one refine suffering?
-Why was Hastra exiled from Shuttered, and why does she want back in?
-Are any necromancers in the coven associated with the Necromantic Office or Yaegha Six-Kidneys?
-Why are piles of bones strewn across the passageways?

 

[Daztur]

The Stairs of the Sun
Hex 22.00

When the light of the sun on Lion's Day falls on this remote valley a strange thing happens. The rays of light form steps and ladders that are easy to climb on and that rise directly from the ground towards the sun. The heavens are far too to reach before the sun hits the western peaks, but these ladders of sunlight are the only known way to reach the summit of the great peak that lies to the west of this valley.

However, there are dangers here in this Vale of Tirandelle (besides clouds passing between climbers and the sun). Chief among them is a great hearth beast, a squat golden-scaled lizard that likes to sun itself on rocks in the valley and can leap with surprising agility at intruders. It has eaten more than a few of those who have wished to climb the stairway to heaven.

Connections:
-Carvings can be seen all around the Vale of Tirandelle that are unlike those seen anywhere else in these lands, except in the Old City (29.14.25). They seem to be spell formulae written in an ancient script. (eek, just noticed that some of the hex numbers aren't entered correctly in the Shuttered subhex listing, will have to fix that in the next update)
-Dwarf monks from the west (03.04) have begun systematically vandalizing these carvings but there are many that are still intact.

Hooks:
-Why do the rays of light form ladders that can be climbed on?
-What's on the summit of the great peak to the west that makes it worth climbing to on sunbeams to get to? Why can't you just climb it or fly up?
-Why is the valley called the Vale of Tirandelle?
-What's a hearth beast exactly?
-What are the ancient carvings? Who made them? Are they really spells? Why are the dwarves defacing them?

I like the idea of a spellbook that is actually massive rock carvings that are difficult/impossible to copy down into a normal spell book, so that anyone can go and memorize them, but only in that one spot.

New map: http://img706.imageshack.us/img706/1594/dec27map.png

 

[Electric Wizard]

The Nameless Mountain (13.24)
Connected to Hex 17.21, 18.28, 15.24

When Sir Huw failed his initiation into the Brotherhood of the Lions (17.31), he was forced to join a lion pride that wandered the Devil's Fingers and the Singing Waste. But after eloping with Grandfather Cactus's nymph (18.28), the nymph began insisting they settle somewhere. He chose this place, a spring-fed pool at the foot of a nameless mountain. Huw spends his days hunting mountain goats and antelope with stone-tipped spears while his lover tends a pomegranate orchard. She enchants the pomegranates to grant various boons, including healing wounds and improving the body and mind.

But the threat that lurks within the Nameless Mountain may soon put an end to their idyllic life. Uriza the Solemn (15.24) knows of Old Black, the dragon that slumbers in the roots of the mountain. Although Old Black has not stirred in twenty years, during his last rampage, he laid waste to the twin towns of Olgam and Oskill in the west. Old Black's claws and teeth are obsidian daggers, and his breath is said to corrode flesh, wood and even stone.

There have been troubling signs lately, and the couple suspects something is awry. The pomegranate trees on the mountain's slopes are withering, and even her magic cannot revive them. Foul air drifts from caves near the peak. Huw has been caught hooded, black-scaled kobolds snooping around their pool and orchard. They seem to be fleeing something...

Hooks
-Tell me more about the enchanted pomegranates.
-Why is Old Black stirring? Does he simply not like his new neighbors, or is there a significance to his twenty years of slumber?
-What remains of Olgam and Oskill, the twin towns to the west?
-What role do the Nameless Mountain kobolds have in this? Are they the dragon's faithful servants, or do they fear him as much as everyone else?
-What did Uriza the Solemn do during Old Black's last flight?

 

[Electric Wizard]

The Trunk
Additional information about Hex 48.18

The Palace of All Time will probably always be the highest building in Sosaria, but it is dwarfed in sheer size by its neighbor, the Trunk. The Trunk is Sosaria's vast slaughterhouse. It is terrible to behold - a winding, sprawling earthen mound that leaks offal, blood and viscera into the Sweet Bay. The city's cattle barons are joint shareholders in the Trunk's operation. Each employs an army of butchers, jerky makers, tanners, cleaners and plague doctors to keep the city's industry rolling.

There are two major factions among the cattle barons - the Blood and Soil faction led by Cessine the Fair and the White Hope faction by Horvath Pignose, a wayward scion of Newhill's clan (17.07). Cessine's Blood and Soil faction ruthlessly favors local ranchers, while Horvath's White Sun faction wants to open the Trunk to foreign livestock, especially the Night Cattle. Horvath asserts that his jerky makers can transform Night Cattle precious meat into a convenient and delicious holy sacrament that all faiths can appreciate. A covert war boils between the two factions. Butchers and plague doctors are wielded as assassins, demagogues and agitators. Human bones are turning up in the refuse piles. Imorcar the Many's sycophants are sitting out the conflict for now, but someone may convince them to lend their spells to one side or the other.

Hooks
-Is the Sweet Bay an ironic name, or is it somehow clean in spite of the city's filth?
-Tell me about some other cattle barons.
-What methods to Sosaria's plague doctors use to prevent, contain or spread illness?
-Is anyone offended by the idea of mass-marketing Night Cattle jerky?
-What would it take for Imorcar's sycophants to pick a side? They're a selfish, paranoid, covetous lot who rarely concern themselves with the city's affairs.

 

[Daztur]

The Tomb of Sir Thaenor
Hex 11.16

Inspired by one of my students and her sneaky cat-owning cleric.

The tomb of Sir Thaenor is an unofficial border marker between Thring and Gore. It is a popular place for knights to fight duels, stage meetings or to simply wander about spoiling for a fight. Of Sir Thaenor himself there is little to say, he died a pathetic death at the hands of a Lord Sanguine who set his cat on the poor Thringish knight. The creature climbed about Sir Thaenor's face so that he could not even see the sword that killed him.

The name of that Lord Sanguine has been forgotten but the cat is another matter entirely. Perudien is said to be the ancestor of the entire breed of Gorean Greys. They are highly prized as war cats for their ferocity and agility and, like Perudien, are skilled at clinging to the faces of their victims.

Connection: the druid of Mirror Lake (37.01) owns a Gorean Grey.

Hooks:
-Any other stories about Perudien?
-What are the other breeds of war cats?
-Who has fought a duel near Sir Thaenor's tomb?
-Who owns a Gorean Grey?

For the Gorean Greys I'm imagine a cat that looks like a cross between a Russian Blue and a Maine Coon Cat.

 

[Daztur]

The March of the Clay Golem
Hex 14.09

Inspired by the rpg.net discussion of the D&D Next golem article.

A large one-armed clay golem can be found in his hex marching due west towards Fernsbank (01.09), where the clay that the first humans were formed out of is said to be found. It smashes aside anything that it comes across (such as, say, the Bolger Freehold (11.08) which it is headed right for) but is otherwise non-violent.

Fighting this clay golem will not be an easy task as it can simply smooth away most forms of damage and even reattach severed body parts. Perhaps the best way of combating it is to heat it with fire to make it less flexible and more brittle or perhaps softening it with water to make it more plastic and then twisting its arm out of position.

It is not clear what the purpose of the clay golem is, but it is emblazoned across the chest with the coat of arms of House Olmsted (31.04): a silver phoenix, its beak ripping a bloody wound in its own chest.

Hooks:
-What's the clay golem up to?
-Why does House Olmsted have a self-wounding phoenix as its sigil?