It depends on the game as well.

I don't think it is particularly LibraryLass's thing, but many SFRPGs use hex maps for their stellar mapping. Traveller started this tradition and it caught on, but stellar mapping allows you to drill down easily. A system in a hex only has a finite number of planets, smaller objects can exist as well and depending on your detection equipment and the signature it has - those smaller objects may be nearly impossible to find.

You could have BDOs for Players to explore literally hidden in plain sight because at distance, an unpowered and cold spaceship wreck looks like a metal rich asteroid at a distance.

At one point, I referred to this scale of wilderness travel as "subhexcrawl". I figured 120-yard hexes would be appropriate: travel 5 hexes per hour, including ten minutes of rest. I started doing some random tools for generating subhex terrain on the fly, but I'll probably re-do them (started incorporating them into my general random sketchbox tools, actually.)

The Judges Guild also had some terrain generation tables aimed at a sub-mile wilderness scale.

I think a combination "landmark and path" approach would work:

 - Think about major landmarks that travelers could see from far away: hills, unusually tall trees, mostly-intact towers, stand of woods, etc.
 - Think about settlements next: where you start, any nearby hamlets or homesteads/farms.
 - Place roads connecting settlements and other man-made structures, perhaps including bends and kinks.
 - Place minor landmarks, like smaller mounds, burnt-out trees, cairns, notable boulders, royal milemarkers, or signposts, at most if not all of the bends and kinks in the roads.
 - Scatter a few other landmarks/points of interest off the beaten path. There may or may not be marked trails to these points of interest.

Place any of these manually or randomly, as desired.

I never thought to look back in your blog, Talysman. Good advice from you as I've come to expect.

Quote from: jeff37923;684152It depends on the game as well.

I don't think it is particularly LibraryLass's thing, but many SFRPGs use hex maps for their stellar mapping. Traveller started this tradition and it caught on, but stellar mapping allows you to drill down easily. A system in a hex only has a finite number of planets, smaller objects can exist as well and depending on your detection equipment and the signature it has - those smaller objects may be nearly impossible to find.

You could have BDOs for Players to explore literally hidden in plain sight because at distance, an unpowered and cold spaceship wreck looks like a metal rich asteroid at a distance.

I prefer fantasy generally, but I do like making space maps.

Another bit of inspiration for you, if you can find it, would be Jacquays' "The Enchanted Wood" for Dragonquest. Its a moderately weird 'outdoor dungeon' type of adventure with quite a few alternate paths/adventure hooks & entry points.

Quote from: LibraryLass;684263I never thought to look back in your blog, Talysman. Good advice from you as I've come to expect.

I decided to follow up today with an actual post:

SubHexCrawl Re-visited

Mostly, it's just a re-statement of what I posted earlier in the thread, with a little more thought about the steps to accomplish this. I do, however, suggest rolling for whether there's a landmark at any given twist or turn along a path, sort of like a dungeon stocking roll.

I'll have another post about getting lost or stumbling across other landmarks while traveling off the beaten path tomorrow.

Experience has taught me that my gaming groups tend not to be very interested in crawling through the minutia of wilderness movement.

RPGPundit

I prefer small hexes and small worlds. A 10x10 mile island could easily be an amazing campaign setting as much as a massive world. Remember that without roads and a place full of monsters, travel is going to be slow and paranoid.

I tend to map the areas around and to-and-from my adventure areas quite heavily.  My Steel Isle Campaign, which was online, had a very fluid and changing wilderness, with many prime sects and organizations.

I have recently heard The One Ring RPG has some interesting ideas to run wilderness adventures. So, tell me about them. Good, bad, indifferent, swinish?

Quote from: Melan;686842I have recently heard The One Ring RPG has some interesting ideas to run wilderness adventures. So, tell me about them. Good, bad, indifferent, swinish?

I have it and read it, but not played it.  There's two maps of the same area- one is the player's map and the other the GM's.  The difference between the two is that the gm's map has a hex overlay and is color coded by terrain type.  The player's plot their travel on their map and the gm is able to determine what terrain they are going through and what rolls the player's need to make.  My memory is a bit foggy on it at the moment.

Quote from: RunningLaser;686844I have it and read it, but not played it.  There's two maps of the same area- one is the player's map and the other the GM's.  The difference between the two is that the gm's map has a hex overlay and is color coded by terrain type.  The player's plot their travel on their map and the gm is able to determine what terrain they are going through and what rolls the player's need to make.  My memory is a bit foggy on it at the moment.

That's not a particularly new idea.

Thanks for the info!

So it is basically the Judges Guild campaign hexagon system, except the players don't get a hex overlay. Makes an amount of sense, since the game is set in the Wilderland -- that is, the original one from Middle Earth.

Whenever I use hex maps, I take a map and overlay hexes onto it. That way, I get the ease of using hexes for travel and the flexibility of having different features within hexes.

Hexes do not have to be "All plains" or "All forest", they can be a mix of terrain types, can have towns, ruins, towers, caves or whatever as well as the terrain beneath it.

Yeah; this is one of the downsides of the popularity of Hexographer and the BXCM "Known World". Even Darlene's Greyhawk map, as good as it is, has too homogenous terrain, when things are rarely so clear-cut.

Quote from: LibraryLass;684039It's not that hexcrawling isn't great, because hexcrawling is pretty great, but it's a pretty broad scale. I think we can say with certainty that a five or six mile hex is getting a cursory-at-best examination and only the most notable landmarks are going to factor into navigating its wilderness.

Good hexcrawl structures can be scaled to virtually any distance.

A common problem, however, is that people try to embrace a "one true size" for hexcrawls and they end up scaling their maps incorrectly: If a lot of your hexes have multiple points of interest in them, then your hexes are too big. If a lot of your hexes are empty and devoid of interest, on the other hand, your hexes are too small.

(For example, if your hexes are thirty miles across then what you're saying is that you're only interested in features which generally only occur once in 780 square miles -- i.e., bigger and rarer stuff. At that scale, you're not going to be keying individual farm houses or a cave containing two brown bears. OTOH, if you're using hexes that are only one mile across, then you're saying that you ARE interested in things like a cave with a couple of bears in it.)

The big challenge with smaller hexes is handling sight lines. (At least that's true for me as a GM.)

It should also be noted that the hexcrawl structure is really only useful for wilderness exploration. The "Pointcrawl" post you indicated makes the very good point that most travel is usually done along established trails or roads: Using a hexcrawl structure to handle travel along a linear path is generally awkward and inconvenient.

Quote from: Melan;687289Yeah; this is one of the downsides of the popularity of Hexographer and the BXCM "Known World". Even Darlene's Greyhawk map, as good as it is, has too homogenous terrain, when things are rarely so clear-cut.

This comes back to using hexes of the wrong size: The whole point of using a hex is, in fact, to homogenize or average out the features within the hex into a more manageable unit that can be handled as a mechanical whole. When you find yourself trying to figure out exactly where things are within an individual hex it's a huge warning sign that your map is at the wrong scale.