What is a Hexcrawl?

A Hexcrawl is a game of exploring the unknown.  Often set in a wilderness or borderlands area, characters will move across a hex-gridded map, revealing interesting places, facing random encounters, and trying not to get lost or killed.  Players have complete control of where they go and what they do. 

This campaign is designed to be pretty much the diametric opposite of the normal weekly game:

1) There is no regular time: every session is scheduled by the players.

2) There is no regular party: Each game has potentially different players drawn from a pool of gamers.

3) There is no regular plot: The players decide where to go and what to do. It is a sandbox game in the sense that’s now used to describe video games like Grand Theft Auto. There may be quests or plotlines presented, but players can choose whether or not they wish to pursue them. 

My motivation in setting things up this way is to overcome player apathy and mindless “plot following” by putting the players in charge of both scheduling and what they do in-game.

A secondary goal is to make the schedule adapt to the complex lives of adults. Ad hoc scheduling and a flexible roster mean (ideally) people get to play when they could but don't hold up the game for everyone else if they can't. If you can play once a week, that’s fine. If you can only play once a month, that’s fine too.

Letting the players decide where to go is intended to nip DM procrastination (aka my procrastination) in the bud. Normally a DM just puts off running a game until he’s 100% ready (which is sometimes never), but with this arrangement if some players want to raid the fort od DeepWater this weekend I have to hurry up and finish it. It is gaming on-demand, so the players create deadlines for me.

Players sharing information ia a critical part of The Tuath Expanse design. Because there will be a large pool of players (hopefully), the average person might only be in about a third of the games — or to look it the other way, each player will miss two-thirds of the games. Add in that each player is in a random combination of sessions (not even playing with a consistent subset of players) and pretty quickly each player is seeing a unique fraction of the game. No one is having the same game experience, which sounds philosophically interesting but is bad news if you want everyone to feel like they are in the same game. Sharing info is essential to keeping everyone on the same page and in the same game.

There are two main ways information can be shared: game summaries and the shared map.

Shared Experience: Game Summaries

Players will be strongly encouraged to chat about their adventures between games. Players will be Authors on this Blog and will be able to create posts and pages.  This discussion will theoretically mirror chatter between characters who had made it safely back to the town. Did you stumble into the barrow mounds in the Tangled Forest and barely escape with your life? Warn other adventurers so they can steer clear. Did you slay wolves on the moors until the snow was red with blood? Brag about it so everyone else knows how tough you are.
What may start off as humble anecdotes evolve into elaborate game summaries, detailed stories written by the players recounting each adventure (or misadventure). Instead of just sharing information and documenting discoveries (“we found ancient standing stones north of the Golden Hills”), game summaries turn into tributes to really great (and some really tragic) game sessions, and eventually become a creative outlet in their own right. Players can enjoy writing them and players can enjoy reading them, which keep players thinking about the game even when they aren't playing.

Shared World: the Map

The other major way information can be shared is a map.  The players will need to draw this themselves!  Will it be accurate?  Probably not.  Characters will definately need to use landmarks to get their bearings. 

An intentional side effect of both game summaries and the shared map is to whett people’s appetite to play. When people hear about other players finding the Abbots’ study in a hidden room of the ruined monastery, or see on the map that someone else had explored beyond Centaur Grove, it will make them want to get out there and play too.  It is a careful allowance of competitiveness and even jealously to encourage more gaming.