I've begun wanting to run a hexcrawl game, specifically one where the party is on a ship of some kind. My question is which would you rather play: A hexcrawl set on an ocean with a normal boat; one set in the sky with floating islands and airships; one set in a blazing desert with a landship; or one set in a frozen wasteland with either an icebreaker type of ship or one on skates along the ice? Typing this out it I realize it kind of a reads like a pick a color type of choice where there aren't any real differences but I think making tables for setting specific things could really change things around. One of my players suggested running the desert one but with trains but I feel like trains take away from the appeal of a hexcrawl where you can just decide to go in a different direction or stop traveling and investigate something. I've never run a hexcrawl but I've been wanting to do something sandboxy and I figure why not so any advice you have would be appreciate. Post ships and talk about hexcrawls I guess.
>>97955407So basically you're either Deserts of Kharak or the Antarctic Land Cruiser. Antarctica at least has life. Deserts are empty unless you like strange rock formations or have desert raiders to fight.
>>97955421>Deserts are empty unless you like strange rock formations or have desert raiders to fight.I guess it would just depend on what you fill the desert with. Could be full of ruins and sandworms.
>>97955407>Typing this out it I realize it kind of a reads like a pick a color type of choice where there aren't any real differences but I think making tables for setting specific things could really change things aroundNot entirely. I think the key distinction is in terms of how easily hidden things are.For example, a sky or sea based hexcrawl is basically just a matter of looking out for islands. So long as there isn't some major hinderance to visibility, you can just sort of look around and tell whether a hex has anything major in it. Contrast that with a desert or a tundra, where the dunes/ice floes and any mountains/glaciers can obstruct visibility and make it so you need a pretty thorough search to ensure there isn't some ancient ruin or village just past the next hillPart of the fun of hexcrawls is that there could be a discovery in every hex, and a land-based crawl does a better job of obfuscating that
>>97955449Yeah but what do sandworms eat?
>>97955407Sky with floating islands gives you the most flexibility with different biomes and terrain, still feels nautical but you can just run with that theme rather than having to know anything about how ocean travel works, which is not just decide to go in a different direction. Lets you do sky island of the hats.
>>97955407Yeah
>>97955459Unless the island is very small you can't tell what's going on there without exploring it.
>>97955464Mana DepositsMicroscopic Organisms living in the sand just below the hot surfaceRocksThe Sand itself (slowly terraforming the sand sea into a rocky, barren waste where not even Sandworms can live)Someone goes out there and sprinkles pellets every once in a whileSmaller Sandworms (ouroboros style predatism)Bigger Sandworms (ouroboros style parasitism)Nothing, who cares nerdPoorly made threads (they do it for free)The boats that sail the sand seas, otherwise they lie dormantThe Sandworms are shifting leylines of magic that animate the sand, not living creaturesThey don't eat, they absorb energy from the sun and the boats just piss them off for whatever reason (too loud?)Volcanoes (giant tubeworms but they move to find new sources of geothermal energy after they eat it all)Every 100 years they wake up and eat every single piece of organic material and then they go back to sleep (Tarasque method)maybe you should try thinking of some ideas once in a while, it's fun
>>97955651I'm already operating under the assumption that you wouldn't know exactly what an island has, but you can still very distinctly tell the island is there, because there's nothing between you and it except miles of open sea/sky. If you're in the desert, you might see a mesa from far away, but there's no indication that it's any more important than any of the rest of the surrounding desert.
>>97955407In regards to that player's suggestion, you could run trains/trolleys in some kinda trainyard wasteland/desert, the hex-crawl being through ruins of some civilized world. Encounters being bandits living in the ruins, dangerous feral animals, dangerous spec-evo monsters, and things living out in the more untouched stretches of wilderness. The concern with trains is mostly irrelevant, most of the interesting stuff is presumably happening off the base-vehicle, so forcing the party off to go stretch their legs is a good thing. As long as they have enough rails to get within a day's march from a location, the rail-bound nature of their transport shouldn't matter much.It'd be similar with most of the other vehicles listed, assuming you have spaces where the vehicles can't possibly fit.It also encourages the development of tools/abilities to traverse quickly, and not just relying on the base vehicle to go quickly.
>>97955407Hack SWN and call it a day
>>97955407>a landshipThose are called cars.
>>97955449>>97955421What about oasis to oasis? Fossilised forrests? Sugar des(s)erts from a former cane sugar forrest?
Airship over land with occasional floating islands.Fuck having massive amounts of blank space and annoying amounts of travel where nothing happens. Airship over land means you can skip the boring parts and have things on land, sea, and air to find and engage with to keep things constantly interesting. Also repelling down into the thick of trouble like a dynamic entry team is cool as fuck.
>>97955421>Deserts are emptyAre you drunk or just retarded? Deserts are full of desert-adapted life.And, notably, Antarctica is a desert.
>>97955711So you can't tell what's going on with an island until you explore it unless it is very small.
>>97956913This anon solved it.
>>97956913This, but the airship can also turn into a regular ship. Adding verticality with floating islands, air currents and storm systems is important and often overlooked.
>great grass sea
>>97955407a frozen wasteland
