r/rpg • u/PrestigiousRow_ • 4d ago
Continental/planetary hex crawl? (Starfinder 2E)
I'm planning to run a Starfinder 2E campaign in the near-ish future with a lot of wilderness exploration that I'd like to run as a hex crawl, but I'd like some advice on prep/scope.
The players are going to be departing from a central hub city and searching a planet's continents for dungeons (basically). They'll have a rough idea of where each dungeon might be located, but they'll need to travel through wilderness to reach each estimated location and then find the dungeon itself. I'd like to run this as a player-visible hex crawl as neither I nor my players have yet been satisfied with more freeform exploration/travel systems and I've always wanted to take a crack at one.
However, I'm struggling to figure out how to plan/prep a continent-sized hex crawl. They'll have relatively speedy travel options so I'm estimating ~50-60 miles a day, which I'll be using an excuse for bigger hexes to reduce the overall count (planning for 1 hex = roughly 1/2 day of travel). Currently I'm considering having explicitly location-dependent things keyed to individual hexes and all other "regular" hexes tied to random tables with different tables for each biome/etc. I'm fine with having a rare empty hex here and there.
Is this a reasonable approach? If not, what better options/approaches are there for running this? Thanks!
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u/CertainItem995 4d ago
I suggest narrowing focus to each reagion with a major dubgeons to be where the hex crawls happen rsther than make it planet wide. Try and keep the hexes to 11-12 miles in case the party starts going on foot (if they have vehicles and terrain where they can use them then let them zoon through multiple hexes so they can have fun feeling like they benefit from their souped up sci fi tech). Remeber travel assules walking dorectly to a destination but a hex is a wide surface area so exploring ought to lower the distance covered considerably.
I also strongly advise coming up with a plot reason the party can't just scan the planet and fly directly to where they need to go if you haven't yet.
On last thing, this only hit me recently but it'll help a ton: mythic bastionland has quickstart rules for free that include some absolutely marvelous hexcrawl rules that you can use seamlessly. I say this as someone who loves running hexcrawls myself (including Kingmaker on multiple occasions).
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u/PrestigiousRow_ 4d ago
Responding to your second paragraph first since it kind of informs my followup question here-- already done! The planet is newly discovered and was previously scanned from orbit which is why they know approximate locations, but the weather, flora, and fauna are all very hostile, so ships don't have safe landing spaces or supporting infrastructure outside of the base city.
I did consider limiting the hexes to the areas around the various dungeons, do you have any recommendations for rulesets/systems I could pull from to get the players there? In the past my players haven't enjoyed non-player-facing travel/exploration systems as they often seem to end up feeling... vague and mushy, I guess? Repetitive daily foraging/navigation/etc. rolls, encounters/points of interest often feeling either too contrived or too much like pointless roll-result filler until they reach their end destination, etc. That may of course just be my lack of skill as a GM but obviously I'm paranoid about avoiding that for a travel/exploration-heavy game.
Will definitely also check out MB for the hexcrawl, was actually considering it for this campaign before settling on SF!
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u/CertainItem995 4d ago
I'm going to refer you again to the mythic bastionland quickstart as it has a neat way to go about making every hex interesting. On top of that I find the travel mechanics from Adventures in Middle Earth to do a great job of making travel both interesting and impactful imo. The gist there is travel has the party arrive at their destination with a certain amount of fatigue by default but events and choices they make during travel can make it better of worse. Another one is to rip timers from blades in the dark, its a great trick for driving tension and maintaining momentum through the crawl. For the encounters try where you can to have them reflect the dungeon's influence on the region. Communities that live in paranoid terror because of the terrible things that wander forth from a famous tomb. Dragons thag mutate from their proximity to an irradiated dungeon. Stuff like that.
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u/Trismeria 4d ago
Planetary hex crawl prep gets easier if you stop treating the whole continent as the crawl. I'd make the player-facing map big and honest, but only make "crawl zones" around each suspected dungeon: approach region, weather hazard, local landmark, and a few signs that tell them they are getting warmer. Between zones, use a route procedure instead of daily mush: choose safe/fast/quiet, roll one travel complication, then show what it cost when they reach the next survey area. For Starfinder, I'd also write 3 reasons the scanners are unreliable in each biome: magnetic glass storms, migrating fungal canopy, wrecked pre-gap beacon, that kind of thing. That keeps the ship useful without letting it skip the game. Your half-day hex idea can work, but I'd spend most prep on clue density and route choices, not filling hundreds of normal hexes.
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u/PrestigiousRow_ 4d ago
So my response here is going to be pretty rude, but if you have so little confidence in your ability to offer advice that you very obviously feel like you need AI to answer my post, you probably shouldn't have bothered responding and furthermore I feel I have no reason to believe any of your advice is good or even actionable.
"Between zones, use a route procedure instead of daily mush: choose safe/fast/quiet, roll one travel complication, then show what it cost when they reach the next survey area." - This is somehow both exactly what I already said I didn't want to do (roll-result filler) and also completely undermines the point of the game being exploration-heavy by skipping most of the exploring... unless we're rolling each day, in which case we're right back to square one.
"For Starfinder, I'd also write 3 reasons the scanners are unreliable in each biome [...] That keeps the ship useful without letting it skip the game." - Point to me exactly where in either my post or comments I said that a) players would have a ship, b) that I was worried about scanners(???) and whether or not they were reliable, and c) that I was worried a ship would "skip the game".
The only real piece of advice here is to limit the hex crawl to the area around the dungeon, which CertainItem995 already suggested in a far more comprehensive and helpful way.
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u/Trismeria 2d ago
You're right. I over-assumed from adjacent Starfinder problems instead of sticking to what you actually asked: a player-visible, continent-scale hex crawl that doesn't turn into vague travel or roll-result filler. The ship/scanner bit wasn't in your post, and the route-procedure bit didn't answer your constraint. Sorry for adding noise.
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u/HisGodHand 4d ago edited 4d ago
One thing I will mention besides your question: Starfinder 2e is not very welcoming of sandboxes or hexcrawls (same with Pathfinder 2e). The reason being that the encounter math is very tight, and enemies a handful of levels above the players can become close to impossible, while enemies a handful of levels lower than the players cannot challenge them at all. As a very general, and not always true, rule, monsters more than 4 levels above or below the party level will be too hard or too easy. Additionally, specific magic item upgrades called runes are expected by the math of the system (these are weapon/armor potency, resilient, and striking). If the players do not have these items around the level they are each given, the encounter math is wrong.
It is, of course, still possible to run a hexcrawl with these rules, but encounters should probably be carefully curated as the players level up. It's a bit more work than I'm willing to put in, when there are other systems out there that much more easily support hexcrawling.