Sometimes best laid plans have to be changed.

After initial development of my ideas into the hexcrawl, I had to change some bits around. They didn't quite fit the environment that I wanted to create.

Luckily the changes were quite small. Instead of having a cemetery I split the crumbled tower and the witch's hovel into their own hexes. The cemetery didn't make much sense environmentally. Who created it? Who really is buried there? There was no clear purpose of having it. Especially since there was a secret passage to the fortress. Doesn't really make sense.

Of course with that an opportunity for the players to get some loot has vanished with it as well. But it provides more of a "situtation" to solve.

Create Situations not Plots

When it comes to adventure design for OSR or old-school roleplaying in general, it is better to create a situation the players have to use their own imagination and problem solving to get out of. This is in contrast to, as mentioned before, modern design, where there is one specific answer and the players either have to come to that conclusion, or do a die-roll to see if they can solve it.

The tower provides such an opportune moment for a situation, or at least I want to make it one. It is in the middle of a lake, half submerged. But there might be secret stuff under there - actually a secret passage to the fortress. So they have to come up with ways to get to the tower. Put in some other obstacles, like I don't know, crocodiles and presto you have a situation.

We can even add some environmental clues as well, to answer the question (or maybe raise more), on why the tower is there in the first place. I choose to add the remains of some soldiers of a rival faction.

I guess a good comparison would be to look on how Hidetaka Miyazaki does storytelling in FromSoftware games. There's a somewhat encompassing story, that is told at the very beginning. But most of the rest you have to guess from some cryptic messages and cutscenes, or even item descriptions, throughout the games. That's somehow akin to old-school adventures isn't it?

Spreading Clues

So I took some inspiration from that and spread some additional clues around, that also try to create a more cohesive picture of the land.

Putting a ring into the hand of the hanged man, with "Mira" inscribed on it, is just the first step of the equation. Let's make him also part of the rival faction. And suddenly there's a Romeo and Juliet scenario born. We can tie her as well to this hook, by letting her wheep for her long lost lover. Maybe the player's can use that somehow (give her the ring)?

Speaking of rivals, we can use this to give more context to a lot of the things they might see. I already mentioned the tower. Are they guarding it? Or something else? Did they know about the secret passage?

We can emphasize the conflict even, that we can seed some more stuff, by letting the armies that battled be of different size. And the smaller one was winning. Why? Probably because of some very bad magic.

So you see, there's more cohesion between the different locations the players can visit. They tie together and tell some sort of story. But some of the bits and pieces they have to guess. Makes also sense: There's only some parts of the story told and over the years the details become more and more unclear.

I also plan to add some more stuff into the dungeon. Like parts of diaries that contain single sentence clues on what might have happened. Straight out of Miyazakis playbook.

Hexcrawl Framework

Also some words around my framework. In some ways it did "perform" in what I wanted it to do. In fact, it showed me the issues I had with the cemetery, that was not clearly on theme. I also could very simply fill my rumor and encounter tables as I had expected.

What did not work so well is to have a clear distinction between the different types of hexes. I mentioned that the 5-room dungeon is my inspiration for it. There are different room types, that help to create different experiences. Encountering always the same type of room becomes a bit annoying for the players. Imagine a dungeon only with puzzle rooms.

I don't have the feeling that I achieved that and I could see it in the encounter table, that is mostly more roleplaying opportunities and less combat. But maybe that's a good thing or just part of my style. I keep an eye on it when I try it out for more adventures in the future.

Form and Structure

Speaking of style. I also had to write down the actual keys for all the hexes. There's different ways to do so, and there's a handy analysis of such different styles you can write an adventure.

Modern D&D 5e adventures have a lot of text and somewhat hold hands with the GM, by writing a lot of text to describe things and provide solutions to all the problems the players could face. On the other hand you have the more old-school style, where there are just bullet points and you have to "think" a bit more.

I like this style here, because I have to write less and since I'm on a time schedule that's the way to go. It also limits the amount of text I have in the end so I might be able to fit everything onto two pages.

Plans

The next big thing is to design the dungeon, which is the Fortress. Here I can use the more "traditional" way, with the 5-room dungeon framework.

My plan is to have two layers. The upper layer is just a few walls and the main house, were there are some more hints about the history of the place. This then leads to the underground, where all the good loot is. Well, that and the big endboss.

I hope to get through this the next week. So I will have one week left to layout everything, which will leave me with the last week as sort of proof-reading and minor corrections.