I recently attended a small event from a local club. Each month we gather to play various TTRPG games. There's always a variety of players, from newcomers to veterans. I decided to run something and I wanted to see, how little prep I needed to run an adventure.

I bought the Hexcrawl Toolkit some time ago on sale, and I thought it was the right time to dust it off. The box comes with four adventures on postcards so I picked one of them and ran it - Desert Tomb Raiders.

Adventure overview

The hook of the adventure is short and to the point - Find the MacGuffin within 10 days before the world ends in an apocalypse. This is ideal for a random group. Directly into the action with a clear goal.

The adventure presents itself as a little hexcrawl, using the tiles from the Toolkit. Kind of like a showcase.

The crawl consists of 19 hexes of which 11 are keyed. Normally I don't like empty hexes, but being in the middle of the desert, there might actually be just nothing at all. So it fits. There is a good mixture of different things to do as well.

There are a total of 7 spots that contain a "treasure". Each of these spots has the chance of being THE treasure (a.k.a. the MacGuffin). Whenever you pick up one of these treasures you roll a die and then there's a chance that you get the MacGuffin or not.

The crawl also contains two dungeons. They are not fleshed out but rather reference the booklet that comes in the box on how to generate one. Or you can use your own dungeon. I choose a different method for the dungeons, more on that later.

The adventure is fairly system independent. Monsters are given as short description and have a "difficulty" rating such as low-level etc. Mostly you can just find an appropriate monster in the manual for your system and plug it in. Special monsters are also given some special flavour. For example the Glass Worm has spews sharp glass-shards.

The session

I ran the adventure for four players. As game system I used Cairn 2nd edition, sprinkling in the Tension Pool and other house rules I mentioned before. I wanted to get to play very quickly and Cairn offered quick character creation and little rules. In addition the fights should be quick as well.

I used the original hexcrawling rules from Cairn instead of my own. A day was 3 watches and going from one hex to another took a watch. They way it played out, the players mostly spend the day moving from one hex to another and then exploring it. So in the end it ended up being one hex per day anyway.

Which was a good pacing as well. The day wasn't over to quick, so that the time constraint was not too restricting. Players were still able to make meaningful choices where they wanted to go, but they were aware they couldn't visit everything. Be aware of that, when you choose the system for the hexcrawl. Being able to visit more hexes, means that the time limit can be ignored.

The group managed to find the MacGuffin within the three hours we played. But just because they rolled really well.

Which is my first critique on the adventure. Getting the right treasure is a die roll. You could be very unlucky and have to visit all 7 spots to get it (the probability increases with each treasure found so far, but still there's a possibility). Which is something I do not like. Especially when I have limited time running the adventure in the first place. I don't want to finish too early, but I want to bring the adventure to conclusion in one session.

I suggest that, if you play this as a one-shot, to hand out the treasure at an opportune time and let the roll be.

Which also brings me to a second point of critique.

The hexcrawl was designed under the assumption that players will spend 10 minutes per hex. That would make for 19 hexes just about three hours. In my three hour session I was only able to maybe visit 6 hexes. So something is not adding up. Patchwork Paladin came to the exact same conclusion and had about the same experience.

There were two fights and they visited both dungeons. How this should fit into one hour is beyond me. Even though Cairn is pretty quick in combat, it still takes 20-30 minutes (setting the scene, etc.).

On the other hand, if you imagine you can get to a hex containing a treasure within 2 moves. So according to that time calculation you could finish the whole adventure in maybe 30 minutes or so.

Visiting 6 hexes brings it in line with a 5-room dungeon. And these run about a session of three hours. That is a way better estimation. Hexcrawling is very similar to dungeoncrawling. So having a different assumption about time spent is beyond me.

Maybe somebody out there is rushing their players for these 10 minute sprints. I personally do not like to rush players - a point that I criticize about the torch timer in Shadowdark as well. Do not go into this adventure under the assumption the players will visit all hexes. Thus rolling for the treasure doesn't make sense at all in the first place.

Procedural dungeons

Another thing I tried was using Stinky Dragon's Deck of Dungeons. I did some modifications to make it work for Cairn (maybe it will be a future post).

The idea is, that you have a deck of cards with monsters, obstacles and loot cards in it. Every round you put three cards face down in front of the players. This represents the path through the dungeon. Then the active player is flipping a card over and an effect based on the type of card happens. There are special actions players can take to manipulate the deck and thus give more favourable outcomes.

The only thing you need to prepare is some random tables for encounters and obstacles to give the dungeon some flavour. Otherwise it just plays itself. You don't have to draw any map and it is a little mini-game for the players.

My players enjoyed it. I still have to tweak the rules a little bit more. They were originally written for DnD 5e, so certain aspects don't fit directly into Cairn.

These kind of dungeons work really well, if you need to go into a dungeon to fetch an item and then leave again. Which fit perfectly here. The deck is reusable and you can change the composition of the cards as you see fit, making the dungeons easier or harder. A nice little tool to have in the GM binder.

Conclusion

I didn't go into detail about the contents of the Hexcrawl Toolbox. You can check out other reviews and unboxings for that. I wanted to give an impression on one of the adventures that come with the box.

They are not the reason why you should buy the box. A nice additions but not great. They do the job of being an example what you can do with the Toolbox. You need to tweak them, but that might be expected of such very minimalistic adventures. It is also a bit of a shame, that you can't acquire the adventures separately from the box, although I would not pay too much for them.

What I definitely can recommend is the Dungeon Deck. It is a nice tool to have in your arsenal, whenever you need an impromptu dungeon.