Recently I published a post about doing a simple, step-by-step approach to building a hex map that could last you for most of a campaign. I called this "cheating", as it disregards building your whole continent or even world from the ground up, instead focusing on just what you need right now.
It's not like I'm the only one who prefers "shortcuts" to fantastic hyperrealism. Just recently, the always great Rise Up Comus blog published its Copy & Paste Manifesto, which recommends just grabbing some maps for both countryside and dungeons, and getting to work with it.
So, let's do that. As the kernel of inspiration for this, I'm going to use another recent blog post: The Village of Hommlet is too much from the Blog of Forlorn Encystment. Our contrarian starting point: It isn't.
Establishing a Hommlet-base
For those not in the know, T1 The Village of Hommlet is the first part of the Temple of Elemental Evil series. It doesn't contain any part of this titular temple, and the second part that does took quite a while until it came out, back in the day. This lead to it becoming the starting point of many an adventure, some of them probably not ending up with a fight against elemental evils or evil elementals…
The issues that the Forlorn blog has are clear to see here: The village's every location are described in a way that only an insurance clerk could love. Every hidden copper farthing of the villagers is tracked, but names are a rare find. If you just stay here for a short while, especially if you're traveling further almost instantly, that's way too much detail, no argument from my side.
So let's stick around instead.
We're building a campaign setup where the players don't travel the world and then become lordly usurpers of their domains, but instead they're thrown into stewardship from the very start. To do that, we're going to retire the current care-takers. Rufus the fighter and Burne, the "most worshipful mage" get their just rewards and retire to a hidden cabana, by taking the place of Rogahn the Fearless and Zelligar the Unknown as the owners of Quasqueton, the main location of B1 In Search of the Unknown, the adventure stuck in the first D&D basic set. There the players encounter the location a few years after the owners vanished and are plundering the remains, which probably doesn't bode well for our poor retirees…
A Game of Thorps
As we already got two early official TSR locations in the mix, we're going to continue this. Our PCs are now heads of Hommlet. Maybe the cleric is taking over the temple, someone might open up a shop, but otherwise they're probably manning the guard tower, trying to protect the village from outside danger. And danger there will be…
Let's stick two "rival" villages into our yet-to-be-drawn map:
Orlane from N1 Against the Cult of the Reptile God, and
Garrotten from L2 The Assassin's Knot
One is being taken over by an evil reptile cult, the other is a herd of nefarious assassins, but also a few powerful temples. While we're at it, change Garrotten to something less nefarious, I'm going with Vurgen.
This looks a bit one-sided, so let's add a less mundane opponent:
The Cult of Zargon, from B4 The Lost City
This ties in well with the cult of the reptile god. Both Zargon and the naga are not really divine beings, but try to establish a local base. The naga has the heads up, but there's probably a bigger power base and more mystery in the Lost City (it's easy enough to scale up a bit, level-wise).
This makes Hommlet stand out a bit, by being a mostly normal village. During the first part of the campaign, the increasing influence of the cult in Orlane will be felt, and if the PCs make a name for them, they might encounter some action from Garr…, erm, Vurgen's assassins.
Travel to the villages and running their respective adventures almost as-is would be a possibility, but you can always just use them for "color", and to give the hexcrawl locations elsewhere a bit of a theme.
First question you need to determine for your starting setup: What's in the Moathouse? In the original T1, this lead to the Temple of Elemental Evil. It could be totally unrelated, it could lead to one of the other locations or even be a mix of that (e.g. people who didn't quite make the assassin's guild under a naga-controlled leader).
Mapping this out
I just took my trusty Hex Kit and threw something together, going with the premises of the three main villages:
- Hommlet is somewhat boring
- Orlane is swampy
- Vurgen is near a lake
This isn't done yet, because…
Missing Pieces
You could start right here. We did mention that Hommlet isn't too much, but maybe the definition of the surrounding pieces is. Is this part of a greater empire? A few of them? Then there would be bigger roads crossing this rather small area. But maybe that's in the distant past?
You could also fill in some of the missing bits right from the start. Maybe you already got some other central thematic items itching to be added to the brewing pot?
- Is there a Big Bad Boss? The Lost City might be cleared out soon, does Zargon have some horrible, slightly more divine great-uncle? Does Vurgen have that many assassins because their Grandfather resides nearby?
- What is beyond the borders of this map? Does it continue in a similar, "temperate" manner for miles and miles, or is a grand steppe or monster-filled jungle nearby?
- Why are there so many non-divine cults here? Are the gods dead?
- Does the Lost city lead to something even stranger? Will the PCs try to go there immediately, or will they go back to Hommlet and a gold rush of exploration will change the whole area?
Let's get cooking!