Howdy folks,

Some of you may remember my recent review of Hex Kit (and Beyond the Wall). Cecil Howe, the author of Hex Kit, generously volunteered to be interviewed about his unique product. Without further ado, here’s the interview!

Hi Cecil, thank you for taking the time to answer these questions. First, what originally made you want to create Hex Kit and its associated tile sets?

Hey, thanks for the questions! Hex Kit’s start was a sort of perfect storm of situations. In February ’16 I had enough work as an RPG cartographer that I quit my job bartending and focused only on maps. That left me with a little extra free time and I wanted to take on a larger project that would keep me busy and also potentially put a solid floor under my income. Around the same time I found a beehive stamp that just happened to have all the hexagons separate, so I made a few tiles with it, scanned them, and rearranged them in GIMP to make a map. Originally I was going to do something like 500 tiles and put them on Roll20, but what happened is I illustrated well over 1000 tiles over the Summer last year, and in August I released them on DTRPG and Roll20.

They sold really well, I got a lot of positive feedback from them, but most people didn’t want to use them in GIMP or Photoshop, so in December I sent a software proposal to my pal Ross Squires, and he agreed to help me make the Hex Kit software along with his friend Pierre Laferriere and get paid for it later. So we blitzed a strong working demo (I think the first working version of the Hex Kit desktop app was being shown to me maybe two days after the proposal) and in March of this year we Kickstarted the development cost of the software with thousands of new tiles. The full version of the software came out in April, and the first pack of new tiles came out soon after.

What’s the greatest inspiration for your art style? Why not pencil sketches, digital art, ink, oils, or something similar?

When I was deciding what style to do the tiles in I actually thought more about what I didn’t like on existing hex maps than I did about style. I don’t like old school hex maps because they’re boring to look at and there hasn’t been much change in 40 years to how they look. I painted the tiles in a style so they’d be as useful as they were pretty to look at, with lots of options for color combinations. Each tile was illustrated by hand, in traditional mediums like water color paints, gel inks, regular inks, and alcohol based markers and they just kind of came out in the same style I do most of my other maps in. As far as digital art goes, I don’t own anything I can do that with so I have no idea how it even works. Totally magic to me.

If people like your art – which they should – where can we see more of your work?

I can be found on all the social medias, but mostly I am at http://www.swordpeddler.com and http://www.hex-kit.com

How do you use Hex Kit in your games – either as a player or a DM? I already covered my take on it in the review I did, but I’m curious to hear how you typically use it and the advantages it provides you.

Honestly, I’ve never enjoyed running games nearly as much as I enjoy being a player, but I have run a few hex crawls completely through Hex Kit. A user on reddit called it a hex crawl in a box, and I hadn’t really thought of that before but it’s totes true. So I make the map, populate it with random encounters and locations and stuff, then I just show my players the display mode/player facing view with the fog of war and whatnot. I am a sucker for sandboxy, aimless meandering type games. A lot of my friends use it for West Marches style gaming, and I think it’s perfect for it.

What’s something you’re unsatisfied with about Hex Kit?

This is a good question! I am pretty much ecstatic with the whole thing; the original tiles were well received, the Kickstarter was a bigger success than we thought it’d be, the new tiles are lookin’ great. There is a great community of mappers emerging over on our forums, and just a lot of good feels about Hex Kit floating around the RPG internet. My biggest upset so far though is that user created tiles aren’t taking off like I hoped. Artist are welcome to make and distribute or sell their own Hex Kit tilesets but as far as I know there isn’t anything complete out there. We were kinda hoping more artists would see the popularity of the software and start releasing compatible works but it just hasn’t taken off. I don’t know if it’s because no one thinks they compete with the nearly 4,000 released tiles I made, or because the process of preparing the tiles seems more daunting than it is or what, but I hope that by this time next year there is a stable of tiles from lots of artists.

What are your future plans – or at least, the ones you’re comfortable revealing – for Hex Kit?

No secrets haha! Hex Kit has a pretty good lookin’ future. The ‘Spaceland’ tile set and a 1.1 update is coming in late July with some of the most user request features like an eye dropper tool and the ability to open a sketch underneath your hex map to map over. After that we plan to keep adding features to the software and I plan on releasing more and more tiles. We plan on eventually including an API in the desktop app so users can make their own plugins and potentially even turn their hex maps into fully automated maps. Hex Kit sales are still pretty good, and as long as sales keep going we’ll keep supporting the software, tiles, and community. Something I’d like to start doing, time willing, is illustrating a smaller amount of more unique, free tiles, and posting them to my website with accompanied adventures and write ups. No promises on that though, cause I am a scrub and I tend to only update my website when I get an email that the hosting bill is due.

Thanks Cecil, glad to have you! Best of luck in your future endeavors!