I was at my day job grocery shopping about two months ago when, on the back of a store brand Cheerios box, there was a hexcrawl.
Okay, the box says it’s a sudoku puzzle. I don’t know shit about sudoku. It’s a hexcrawl now.
The first thing I did was recreate the hexcrawl in Affinity Publisher. You could do this with any graphic editing software or even by hand on paper, I just used what I’m comfortable with. I counted how many of each number and wrote it on the side; I also created a blank template that you can use.
I left the “region borders” out of mine because I felt like they restricted the creativity too much, but you can add them back in.
The next step is to colour the hexes. I assumed we would need towns, dungeons, forest, hills and mountains, so I grouped them together based on what felt right and how many I had of each. I then split up the blank tiles based on mostly grasslands but went with what was around.
Lastly, I added icons from Hexographer. I named some evocative dungeon locations, some crap 5 minute town names, and boom–we have an adventuring location ready for play. This took about an hour and most of that was graphic design!
The icon packs I used are here:
https://welshpiper.com/packages/classic-hexographer-icons/?sfw=pass1685689538
https://www.hexographer.com/extra-icon-sets/multicolored-classic/
So, fine, I made a local area. But, my wife is also running a Spelljammer campaign, and needed her own local area. To the rescue: The Cereal Hexcrawl.
We named a few areas and generated some interesting locations using the tables found in Stars Over Stormwreck by Mike Shea of Sly Flourish. I can’t believe this kind of stuff wasn’t in any of the books for Spelljammer!
After we had our locations, we just spread them out based on the numbers we had on our hex map. We might have moved a couple around. Then, I opened my hexcrawl up in Affinity Publisher and did the work doing graphic design (including the space background). I’ve got a print copy of the map on 11×17 paper coming from Printkeg right now!
Protip: If you are doing a space hexcrawl or other kind of space map, for personal use, Googling “planet clip art” or other things like that is a GREAT resource. High resolution transparent background graphic representations of planets? Gimme that shit!
So you can see how easy this is to pull off. I made my original hexcrawl in about an hour over my lunch break, and that includes finding all the icons and stuff. It’s so easy to come up with a local area from this and the iterations and changes you could make are seemingly infinite.
Get out there and make your hexcrawl!
