Creators often live in the shadow of their own previous work, the big thing they’re known for. Danial Radcliffe isn’t called the guy from Guns Akimbo or Swiss Army Man– he’s Harry Potter to the average person on the street. Steamtunnel at the Hydra’s Grotto can be counted among these shaded creators by their well known 2009 blog post “In Praise of the Six Mile Hex”. In it they laud the 6 mile hex scale as the most convenient for computing distances at the table.
This post has become one of several classic and seminal OSR posts with the blog getting linked in blogs and social media threads everytime someone is discussing how to build and scale a hex crawl. Open any RPG hex crawl product that’s come out since and it seems like there’s at least a 75% chance the module uses a 6 mile hex. (This blog post isn’t the only reason for the scale’s popularity as a 6 miles is the suggested small hex size for detailed wilderness areas in B/X D&D, though older D&D adventure modules use a large variety of hex sizes- still it’s definitely helped popularize the scale.)
There’s just one problem- its conclusions are complete bunk for many styles of hex crawl and the author agrees.
Their second post that revisited the topic of hex scale nearly a decade later has been far less widely shared and spread. In The Ergonomic 3 Mile Hex, Steamtunnel noted that the three stated benefits of their first post are tied to a certain view which views hexes as rulers to measure specific distances instead of as discrete units themselves. Different styles of hexcrawl run hexes as discrete boxes while some use hexes as rulers of specific distance which allows for fractional hex travel. My preferences find the specific measurement method as simultaneously more work and less immersive. To quote the post:
“Human beings generally don’t think about travel in a continuous Cartesian way. We think of it in a discrete linear way. That is as lines between origins and destinations. The rivers, roads, passes, trails, and other linear routes that we use to navigate about our day are really just lines connecting origins and destinations with sequences of landmarks we are familiar with. This is why the point crawl is such a powerful and familiar idea. The most important thing we ask ourselves about these lines is not the question “How far?” but rather “How long?” And this question should drive how we determine hex size.”
One discrete hex can be the same as one wilderness turn or watch. The size of the hex determines the length of a turn, the frequency of random encounters, and the density of wilderness points of interest. I agree with Steamtunnel’s take on the alternative merits of the 3 mile hex for tables that prefer using hexes as discrete units of time and specific game content as opposed to markings to aid exact distance measurements.
“These factors indicate a 3-mile hex is the superior measurement and here is why:
Travel from the middle of one hex to that of the next takes 1 hour over open terrain. This makes counting time easier.
Time to cross can be adjusted to allow for various terrain features.
The center of the next hex can be viewed from the current hex rather than the edge as is the case in the 6 mile hex.
This allows for all movement to be discrete and informed – we no longer need measurements.
A smaller size (approximate to 1/4 of the 6 mile hex) allows for a better focus for what is in the hex and thus a better discrete location.”
Being able to see 3 miles to the horizon allows the PC’s to always see the general terrain contents of all surrounding hexes allowing for informed decision making instead of randomly selecting a direction to be locked into for six miles even if there’s no access to a tree or hill to climb to see to the next hex. Terrain can be more detailed in chunks that measure allowing a “small” region of even 21 miles across to be revealed as a content rich, diverse and adventurous area that a whole campaign could be based in. This makes the world feel bigger and more discrete.
This 3 mile hex scale also helps provide a faux medieval feel if you care about that as it matches the 2-3 miles average minimum distance between villages in much of Medieval Europe if that era is an inspiration for your setting.
3 mile, one hour hexes can also be a great diegetic hex measurement as they are the same distance as one league and it sounds cool and old timey fantastic to have NPCs say “The bandits are camped 4 leagues up the road” instead of miles or hexes. I’m a proponent of a gradually filled PC hex map being a player facing tool and in game artifact. Burn some holes in it with a lighter if the party map carrier gets fireballed. Difficult terrain? Just increase the number of hours it takes to cross the 3 mile hex. A party can travel for a total of 8 hours.
If you are stuck being used to silly imperial units like me, the 3 mile hex also converts well to close enough to 5 km if someone in the metric majority of the world wants to use your hex crawl.
Coins and Scrolls blog has noted that all of medieval and modern Siena, Italy including the surrounding countryside, hills, farms, and over 17 castles fit in a single 6 mile hex. I think it’s a sparse fantasy setting that only has 1 or 2 points of interest in 6 miles. A 3 mile hex is still a large space but at least it’s ¼ of the area of a 6 mile hex resulting in a denser and more discrete region, defined in less abstracted terrain and content detail.
Outdoor Survival, the wilderness board game that OD&D used for overland exploration also used 3 mile hexes to break down travel across terrain into discrete chunks. This experience tracks better with my experience hiking in the wilderness than chunking the day into huge 6 mile blocks.
Okay Joel, so when do you think larger hexes are good?
If instead of a location designed for exploration like a dungeon is, the wilderness is just connective tissue or purely an obstacle to be traversed between sites of interest where the real meat of your sandbox content is then larger hexes work well. Also if you’re moving rapidly over great distances, such as in a sailboat or airship, then a hex scale of 18 or 24 miles could be better as the world whips by you and you don’t need to be concerned with more granular terrain for navigation at all. A point crawl between these detailed hexcrawl regions of deeper interest could fill this region space as well and simplify your prep.
(On the topic of point crawls I’m currently mulling over new stuff I’ve been reading including Ava Islam’s response to my post on the topic.)
Example Comparison Region
Below on the left is the 6 mile hex map from Kevin Crawford’s excellent Wolves of God historical fiction setting. It shows all the cities and regions of that era’s Britain after the fall of the Roman Empire and invasion by the English and is a land split into petty sparsely populated kingdoms where even the lords are poor and most of the population lives in tiny hamlets. This is a setting where societies are small and diffuse and dangerous wilderness covers much of the terrain. But I think that the larger scale and smaller density of this version of the map makes this area feel smaller and less imposing and wild than the setting implies due to it’s sparseness. In a setting like this, two days journey should provide a large serving of adventure and danger.
The larger the hex scale the less keyed stuff there is to encounter in the world through exploration gameplay and the smaller and less wild the world is. On the right is a fan made map of the same region done in 3 mile hexes.
I think the 3 mile version provides a more interesting wilderness navigation experience due to the increased specificity of the terrain and contents. It makes a geographically smaller area feel imposing and dense.
It also might be too large of a region now due to the huge increase in the total amount of wilderness hexes over the same area.
For a more manageable scope a campaign could zoom into just the kingdom of Dyfed and environs and have plenty of content.
This smaller area is still 138 miles wide.
If you’re using hexes as discrete boxes of content then the grander your unit of hex measurement is, the smaller the world feels.
While the characters may travel further distances but the players experience of wilderness adventure is more diffuse because the content engaging with it is more spread out and sparse.
The advice on wilderness journey’s in Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG follows this principle as well. “In a game that accurately attempts to capture the medieval adventuring experience—or, phrased differently, in a game that retains the spirit of Appendix N—you do not need a vast space for adventuring. An area of land only 100 miles square should provide years of adventure.”
I think many GM’s including myself tend to inflate the size of our sandboxes using larger scale hexes due to our modern understanding of distance. This is influenced by our access to cars and trains and accurate maps of the entire globe to the nearest mile in our pockets. Enormous tracts of land feel instinctually more epic and large, but I think by making a smaller setting dense with content and wild we better inspire a feeling of scope and fantastical awe.
P.S If you’re researching how to build a great hexcrawl sandbox this recent post by Prismatic Wasteland is one of the better summaries and synthesis of good advice I’ve seen.
