Creative Project: Hexcrawl25

[lilfluff]

So those plugged into the ttrpg scene may remember Dungeon23 in which participating people built up a megadungeon over 2023 by adding a room a day to a map, along with details about what was in the room, etc, and posted about it with Dungeon23 as a hashtag. Others modifying it to make City23 where you would do much the same but building up a city map over 2023 instead. And last year apparently Lore24 was a thing in which people participating in the project would write up one bit of lore (a bit of history, an item, prominent figures, whatever) each day for their game world, with Lore24 as a hashtag. Well, this year the thing would look to be any of the above with the number incremented to 25 or #Hexcrawl25 in which you take a hexflower* of 25 regional hexes on a hex map, which are each subdivided into smaller sub-hexes so you have 319 total zoomed in hexes, and over the course of 2025 go from blank map to a reasonably decent sized area one could explore. If you go with the recommended 24 mile wide regional hexes then you end up with a sort-of-circular (kinda sorta hex shaped) region 120 miles across. Or if you want something you can compare that too, a little bit smaller than the square miles of Maryland. Or for folks in Europe an area larger than Albania but smaller then Belgium (* a hex flower is what you call the collection of one or more rings of hexes around a central hexagon, presumably because it looks a bit like flower petals around the center of a flower. In this case a central hexagon surrounded by two rings of hexagons)

Anyway, even though the year is almost 15% of the way along, I've decided to start in on this, although because reasons (oh look! Over there! Is that a convenient distraction!) instead of simply printing a blank map or making use of any of a number of preexisting hex mapping programs I spent a chunk of last week working out how to make a hex map in Inkscape, with large and small sized hexes meshed together. Anyway... Not a whole world, just a nice sized region.


So, even if I'm not doing a whole world this still will have some worldbuilding. I've decided to tap into a fantasy idea that's been in my head since at least the early 00s if not the late 90s. A not-grim-dark post-post apocalyptic fantasy world. But, note, two posts. It's not fantasy Mad Max in the years just after, it's a few centuries later, long after the panic and tears and scramble to survive. Or occurred to me over the weekend, "What if the old FASA Earthdawn game, but with the old civilization doing itself in rather than an invasion of cosmic horrors requiring a retreat into fantasy fallout shelters." So it's an unspecified but single digit number of centuries later and a community has decided it's been long enough and is sending people out to look for other surviving communities.

I already made a fediverse post with some bullet point world building truths for the project, with a few additions here:
* Post-post apocalypse, but not grimdark
* The feel I want is an era of exploration, rebuilding, and reconnecting not paranoia or a looming threat.
* Good and evil are choices, there won't be any designated "totally evil, so slaughter without guilt" peoples. Doesn't mean no villains, just no villains by birth.
* To borrow a phrase I ran across checking on a number of blogs and videos after running across Hexcrawl25: Combat is a failure state. The canon starting community isn't sending out legionnaires to conquer the world. There are likely bad folks out there but where possible any adventuring parties heading out from the community are expected by the elders to be looking to find friends and allies and not to start a war.
* The presumed starting point on the map is probably the largest community within the 120ish mile diameter map.
* The starting community is up in some mountains. Both in that it's up in the mountains as opposed to down on the plains but also includes quite a bit dug into the mountain it's on. If I include traditional western fantasy folk then the survivors that started the community likely included a fair number of dwarfs.
* I may bring in some influence from the old Gamma World post-post apocalypse game that TSR made, probably not quite so gonzo but when the old world fell it was more than just the old empire going away. Magic at a scale unimaginable to any alive in the world today were unleashed (inverse Clarke's Law: Any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from science: nuclear weapon scale magic attacks were in play right on up to and beyond magic Tsar Bombas).
* Records of the Old Empire are scarce, especially the final days, with even scarcer rumors as to what triggered the fall. The main lesson held is that too much power was given to too few people with far too little responsibility. Because no one who survived could think of anything that would have even begun to justify what happened.
* Old stories say that there is an ocean to the southwest, and that before the fall their was a large city on the shores (though surely claims of a hundred thousand living in one place must be exaggeration!).

Anyway, I now have accounts on Mastodon.Art and Dice.Camp, both also with the name LilFluff. I posted a bit on the first and I'll likely soon post something for this on the second. I expect most updates will be posted to Dice.Camp with some maps to Mastodon.Art and occasional updates here as well.

Comments

[rowyn]

Oh, sounds fun! I missed the post on Fedi. I like the non-grimdark and post-post-apocalypse, and the "it's not all about fighting" aspects. ♥