Tuesday, December 3, 2024

HEXEMBER: Stinging-Tree Canyon

In an effort to get out of a rut and force myself to write anything (regardless of quality or relevance), I decided to start Hexember, a series of semi-daily blog posts in which I detail a hex y'all can drop in your hexcrawls. 

Hexember was inspired by Dice Goblin's Adventure Calendar Jam, and if last year's Adventure Calendar is anything to go by, we should be in for a bunch of treats until the 24th!

SIX MILES, BEST MILES

When running or building a hexcrawl, I have a personal preference for 6 mile hexes. They're big enough to support a few points of interest, but not so big that the players will be forced to spend days trying to traverse each hex. With that said, most (if not all) of the hexes presented in Hexember should be scalable to your taste, be it bigger or smaller.

HEXPLORATION

Every hex in the series will have at least two distinct points of interest, so if your system of choice doesn't have a procedure for exploring everything a hex has to offer, you can use the sample one below:
  • When the party enters a new hex, roll 1d4 and consult the list of points of interest in that hex. They'll have to pass through that point of interest in order to successfully cross the hex.
  • When the party explores a hex, ask them how many hours they plan to spend looking for points of interest. They can spend up to six hours scouring a hex per exploration attempt, and they have a X-in-6 chance of finding a new point of interest, with X being determined by the amount of hours spent exploring. If they're successful in their exploration attempt, roll a d4 to determine the point of interest they find; re-roll any results matching known points of interest.
  •  When the party explores a fully-mapped hex, let them know there are no more points of interest to be found. They can still move between known points (spending up to one hour to travel between any two of them), interact with their features and have random encounters, but they've seen all there is to see. Outwardly, that is.
And with that cleared up, let's get to our first hex!
 

STINGING-TREE CANYON

✦ At first glance

Green, rocky and oppressively narrow, Stinging-Tree Canyon is as beautiful as it is treacherous. The trees from which this patch of wilderness takes its name are impossibly tall, with spikes sprouting from their tough barks. Most of the canyon's wildlife is nocturnal, with birds of prey nesting in the treetops and their rodent prey burrowing in the trunks.

1. Hot Springs

A party couldn't ask for a better place to rest and recuperate than this. The canyon's hot springs offer a good view of its surroundings — as the area in which they're situated is slightly higher than the surrounding treeline —, and the waters are to die for. If any PC decides to take a bath in the springs, they have a 4-in-6 chance of getting rid of any maladies currently afflicting them.

2-3. The Boneyard

Craters, broken trees and piles of bones of considerable size litter this stretch of the canyon, with the occasional rusty weapon and ruined armor lying around as well. Whatever happened here wasn't exactly recent, but it wasn't long enough for the trees and the grass to recover from it.

If the party wants to search the bodies, they'll find 3d20 copper coins for every hour spent searching, up to a maximum of 150+d20 copper coins. The weapons and armors in the corpses are far too big and far too damaged to be of any use for a human-sized character, however.

4. The Giant's Mound

The entrance to a colossal cave blocked by an enormous boulder can be spotted from a mile away, but the incessant, deafening pounding can be heard from even further. The tribal markings on the boulder indicate this is the final resting place of a mountain giant, and although such mounds aren't particularly uncommon, they're usually far more quiet, and definitely not as impregnable.

This particular mound wasn't meant to keep grave-robbers from pillaging a mountain giant's precious ivory bones, but to keep a rotting, diseased giant from rampaging freely through the canyons and infecting anyone else with the Black Ichor.

When passing by the Giant's Mounds, the characters will notice that unlike the rest of the canyon, this area seems completely devoid of wildlife; the giant's endless hammering has clearly spooked them away from the vicinity. Once they near the mound's boulder, they'll spot the markings; a sufficiently knowledgeable PC might recognize some of the symbols as "funeral", "warning" and "plague".

Unless the party makes an effort to pass through the mound quietly, they have a 4-in-6 chance of alerting the shambling giant, in which case he will furiously wallop at the entrance's boulder for d4 turns before breaking free.

If the party decides to stay and fight, stat their sickly foe as you would any giant on your system of preference, but decrease his HD by 1. The poor creature is visibly ill, with black sludge pouring out of its festering body, and he will fight with blind, self-destructive rage. He is clearly suffering, and death would be a welcome release. Any attacks involving fire and heat will stun the giant for d4 turns and deal double damage.

Any survivors have a 2-in-6 chance of being infected with the Black Ichor; 3-in-6 if they engaged in melee. The first symptom will manifest in d4 hours as a persistent, mucous cough, followed by vomiting of a dark, thick substance. The infected character will experience violent urges after a day and will have an X-in-6 chance of succumbing to them, with X being determined by the number of days the disease was left untreated. Once they succumb, their wounds will seep with the same pitch-like sludge as the fallen giant's, and will be just as infectious.

The Black Ichor can be cured by any skilled druid, including a fellow party member. A competent druid will quickly identify the disease by its symptoms, applying a simple yet effective treatment: heat. No matter how virulent or cruel it may be, the Black Ichor can't survive the heat. Being covered in furs near a campfire for a full night should be enough to rid an infected character of the disease, after which they'll be immune to it in the future.

INSPIRATIONS

Most (or maybe all) Hexember hexes will be designed after something I like, and in this case, the inspiration was an episode from Primal, an animated series by Genndy Tartakovsky. If you enjoyed this at all, give it a shot! The episode in question is called Plague of Madness, and it's simply phenomenal.

PS: if anyone ends up using this in a game, I'd love to know how it went!

1 comment:

  1. Man, why is this like, the best hexploration rules I've ever read?

    ReplyDelete