NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Nytmare" data-source="post: 8118452" data-attributes="member: 55178">I know that people have already made a lot of these same points, but I'm going to just vomit them out stream of consciousness-like so that I don't interrupt the flow.Why are the settlements there in the first place?  Are they on top of a natural resources?  Is the area naturally defendable?  Is it along an important trade route?  Is it the only place around that isn't crawling with dragons?  Have the logical origins been lost to the sands of time? How populated is the world?  The closer, and more closely knit the civilizations, the longer they've probably been around and the friendlier they've probably been.  Sparsely populated worlds will have people living both close enough and far enough away to be safe.  Close enough to call friends for help and to trade goods with.  Far enough away for your neighbors to have not immediately come over when you were first staking your claim and robbing and murdering you in the name of their god/king/differently shaped ears.What are the shared histories between settlements?  Do they get along?  Have they always gotten along?  Were they united against a common enemy?  Is there an unsteady alliance?  Are they embroiled in a magical cold war?    What natural boundaries exist between these places?  Enemies that are stuck on opposite sides of a mile wide canyon makes more sense than ones who share a city wall.  Friendly allies might maintain a hundred miles of patrolled trade route with smaller settlements sprinkled between them. Why do the humans, elves, and gnomes all have their own cities in such close proximity?  Why are they so close to each other?  If they're friends, why haven't they intermingled?  If they're enemies, why haven't they moved away or killed each other?Are there vast, unexplored areas of the world?  Are you on the jagged edge of civilization, or smack dab in the middle of a continent spanning metropolis?      What are the power levels and attitudes of the settlements?  What is their area of influence?  What are their technology levels?  How do people (especially the characters) get around?  Is travel common?  WHY is it common?  Is it unheard of?  Are there roads?  Who maintains the roads?  Is there enough travel that there are bandits on the roads?  If there's no travel, why are there so many inns in this town?   How SAFE is the world?  Are the ruins that are a 5 minute walk from the town gate going to get thoroughly explored and graffitied by the local teenagers?  Is the village in the middle of The Really Scary Haunted Woods?  Can a lonely hermit live on the other side of the mountain without getting eaten by an average roll on a Random Encounter Table?How metropolitan is the world?  Is it populated by a handful of clannish, inbred, dirt farming, kingless peasants slowly getting picked off by a False Hydra?  Or is it a world full of capital cities and globe trotting sky captains where any random sampling of 20 people will include 20 different races, religions, and cultures?There really isn't a rule of thumb that answers all of these questions.As for how big to make the world, that's entirely a question of how far your players can explore and travel, which depends on the math of the system you're using.  Unfortunately I haven't found a hexcrawler in the D&D-ey world that I felt didn't break down somewhere along the line. Personally, after wasting far too much time making my own system, I stumbled on to Mordite Press' Vagrant's Guide to Surviving the Wild which fit perfectly with what I was trying to do.  Prior to that however, I found Justin Alexander's thoughts on hexcrawlers to be incredibly helpful.[URL unfurl="true"]https://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/17308/roleplaying-games/hexcrawl[/URL]</blockquote>

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