



Three Hexes

The idea of that you don't have to start big to run a campaign has been something that I've been saying since the late aughts when I was blogging fast and furiously. ( Feb 2009 It's also something that David Bowman (I miss you, Dave!) and I felt strongly about when we concocted the One Page Dungeon Template that grew into a life of it's own, damn, almost nine years ago. ( Dec 2008 Anyway, the idea that prep and content don't have to be ginormous is something that I've preached since Day 1. I mean, I didn't do so much to really start with my ongoing nine year AD&D campaign. I had a little story I'd written and a concept of what I wanted the world to be. Say, three sentences.Something like this:Then, in the style of West Marches campaign , I created a homebase - let's call that hex Zero. A town is easy to create and is almost a given for starting - which is why I don't include it in the three hexes.Anyway, let's call that town "Enonia." What's a good story for Enonia? Hmm... no more than three sentences. This is what I came up with.That's some good flavoring to set me off on figuring out what is going on within the town and around town.So now I need destinations for the players to go do things. This is where I looked around at what I might have, either as existing dungeons or things I've created, or something that appeals to me. At the time I started my Etinerra (formerly Dark Ages) campaign, the magazine Fight On #1 had just started publishing in Spring 2008 and was/is a great resource. Within issue #1, I found a small adventured calledby James Maliszewski. It's a great start for a little introductory adventure so I put it to the right of Enonia.And three sentences to set the mood of this hex...Now we're cookin'! So, let's put something to the south of that hex. I wanted to make my own dungeon at this point, so I noodled around with some ideas, and also came up with the idea that dwarfs were missing, and had abandoned something here. (*cough*stolenfromElderScrolls*cough*)Now this hex actually contains two features - the abandoned mines AND an innocent bridge. You see, I always liked the concept of having a foe that the players had to grow to defeat. So I put a troll under this bridge... well, not exactly a troll. In a metal/whiskey/cigar infused haze, I came up with a cross between a troll and an ogre mage. A troll mage. And thus, within my campaign, a legend was born...Since I had this idea of a lost city to the east, I also wanted to give the players some reason to go out that way... and I came up with an idea of a ruined inn at the edge of the woods, before the grasslands. So here was my third hex.That's it! That's all I needed to start my campaign world off. A town/homebase and three hexes.From this little map, I ended up constructing this... but that took time. Still, with a landmass the size of Russia, it's cool to know that the players have only explored a teeny bit of this world. So much left to discover! (This is the first cut at a map from about 2010.)So if I were to put this all together, this is what I'd do as a starting campaign, with just three hexes:That's it! That's all I needed to get things started - grab a map or two for the monastery, the dwarven mines and the abandoned Inn and away we go.Let's try another. This will be something that I have not thought about or played within my campaigns, a fresh start from scratch.Purely off the cuff, made only by imagination, some use of various things I've seen in my own readings, gaming and culture. Time it took to write all that? Thirty minutes. Yet, I have at least 3 different places for the players to go, plus some interesting tidbits of other things that I could use if I were to run this as a campaign.You can do this too! Three hexes is not that hard to come up with, and you've given your players a limited set of choices to start with - as versus some huge world where choice-paralysis might set in.byis licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License