Solo Review - FIRST IMPRESSIONS: Trying Out HexRoll for Solo OSR Hex Crawls and Adventures
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| Generated by HexRoll on December 17, 2024. |
I heard about HexRoll on the r/Solo_Roleplaying and it sounded interesting to me even if I do not tend to run old school style hex crawls. Part of the reason I do not run them is because I am not exactly great at making them up on the fly. I figured why not make up some level one characters, try to generate a small area to explore, and then just run it for an hour or two to see what I think. If nothing else, it could be good practice for me to make my own more analog entries into the genre.
Make note that I was going in fairly uninitiated to what this even was. There is documentation and notes and some of those are pretty obvious but occasionally an hour of utter mistake-making is worth three hours of reading a manual first so I dove in like a newborn calf and, Space Pilgrims, let me tell you I did get a bit confused. I'll explain as we go.
Initial Playthrough and Impression
My First Playthrough
I had originally planned on generating 6ish characters using the Rules Cyclopedia and using those but since that's the kind of activity that can take about as long I had initially planned to play for, I decided instead to use the "Quickstart" Pre-made Level 1s from the Shadowdark Kickstarter. To introduce a slight degree of randomness I picked six human characters without really looking at their stats or starting equipment. Let's not worry about names for now and just call them Male Fighter, Female Fighter, Female Priest, Male Priest, Male Thief, and Female Mage.
For the hex map, I chose "Island" and left the settings on default except I increased the number of regions, increased the number of settlements, and increased the number of dungeons. I wanted it to be somewhat thick so there were things to do.
This generated the Island of Nesila [note, I am not linking to it because I am not sure if others can edit it or not just yet, I have since become a Patreon subscribe so it is no longer ephemeral and will not expire in a month]. I was in a scorching hot desert for some reason called the Iceborn Wastes, standing near the town of Town of Ecrean. The PCs entered and I started clicking around.
The interface is not bad but there were a few actions that caught me off guard. For instancing, I played with the scroll wheel and this zoomed out on the map and then hid the text descriptions until I eventually figured out I had to click on a specific spot on the hex to "re-enter" it. I think.
At this point, I was not really sure exactly what I was meant to do. If that sounds silly to you, I ask you to have patience. I was going into the product purposefully "blind" and it took me around ten-to-twenty-minutes to get into the proper mode. I was treating the product incorrectly as a virtual GM.
I had not yet grokked that this was instead was a thirty-two-page module (heck, maybe even thirty-six pages) with a few towns, a few dungeons, and a few pre-gen NPCs with the overall expectation that you would do whatever you wanted with the kit. If you want to attack an NPC, go for it. Roll the dice. If you want to give a backstory/quest to an NPC, sure. Add in some more details? Yes! I eventually cottoned on to this but to start I was kind of expecting it to more hand-feed me the sort of quests where I bash the heads of rats in tavern basements and eventually, just maybe, end up slaying a god. You know, the Bioware special.
I was looking for the kind of action prompts that might say something like "turn in quest" or "open door".
I got better. Just bear with me. I'm an old man but I do sometimes learn a few new tricks.
In this intial mode, I went into the tavern, rolled to pick up three rumors (including the "truth" of a missing wife from the below job). Rumors seem to be mostly true based on my short experience so less rumors and more "here are some world facts."
There was a job to take something from one person in town to another person. And a job about the missing wife.
I made the delivery in a single click and got 700gp (!?) but the missing wife was basically, "She's gone!" The rumor explained "where" but not where that "where" was. There were also bits of spoiler text I was not sure what to do with.*
I went out after here. First I went a bit north-west, found an ancient monument next to a "forgotten keep" with some giant snakes inside who were avoiding the sun and I definitely did not "go in" or explore the keep (poison = bad time in the OSR days). There did not seem to be any interior anyhow unless I made one. Then I went south and there was an old woman who did not want company and was convinced someone was sneaking around. A pair of hobgoblins show up, attack, and get trounced. My characters snag 30sp and try and sweet talk the woman into letting us stay the night and get told to leave. So we do...
* Turns out, that's where YOU (meaning ME) come in. Come up with a prompt or interaction to get that information. Interrogate the poor bastard. WHERE IS SHE!? I was still around 5-minutes behind the obviousness of it.
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| This absolute banger of "not a trap" was Generated by HexRoll on December 17, 2024. |
First, the game is tossing a tiny nugget of High-Fantasy + High-Concept notes around all of the hexes (later I found out the dungeons have a similar, "And there's also a..." style to add 1+ details to each place). Ecrean is on a rise next to a pyramid. The old lady lives in a house in the shadow of another pyramid. The ruins with the giant danger noodles was in a place where large dust devils constantly turn and swirl. Each hex is composed in a relatively epic scale with just a couple of points of interest and hex-to-hex these points can vary greatly or even slightly clash. Keep this in mind.
Second, we get by sheer chance to the hex where the missing wife is being held in some caves. We know about the Caverns of the Betraying Blades but not that they are a) behind a waterfall or b) found in the basement of an abandoned inn. I rule my folks would not search in those spots since they are looking for, you know, caves. I was still sort of looking for a kind of "you see the missing wife's scarf near a waterfall" type of prompt. If I was already in the second- or third-mode, coming shortly, I probably would have actually did a quick point-crawl type dungeon for the inn and actually explored it. I was still sort of expecting there to be some in-game hint. The description clearly states it (see below) but it also lets it be known this is not something obvious where inside this 6-mile hex such a thing might be.
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| Generated by HexRoll on December 17, 2024. |
I realize I do not have much in the way of the gear I might need to camp out or eat if I am going to be spending days wandering a desert. I head back to Ecrean and click on the shops. I am starting to become aware that shop contents are a bit...random. A lot random. Basic adventuring gear is pretty much left up to the imagination. I toss a couple of SoloDark roll to see if there are torches I can buy here and rations I can buy here. Torches, yes. Rations, no. I get enough torches for around three to four days of travel and plan to figure out hunting.
Here I find another quest to deliver a potion to someone called Evangeline Thatcher and rather than enter into an ever wander I click her name and get a broad preview of where she is, a few hexes to the east. I head that way and first have to go through some mountains.
This absolute unit of a set dressing shows up: Waterfalls of lava flow from caves in a cliff, melting pieces of rock as they fall and form a river of inferno in the deep canyon. 34 Kobolds are sleeping across a seemingly bottomless chasm, where a rope bridge meets an overhang. Holy crap. Lava is exploding down some cliffs, filling a deep canyon and somehow that same canyon has a seemingly bottomless chasm and there are 34 (!?) kobolds sleeping across it?
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| Generated by HexRoll on December 17, 2024 |
This is where my brain started to wake up. Trying to mentally envision "waterfalls of lava" and 34 sleeping kobolds and some of them being in an old copper mine and a rope bridge is where I went, "ohhhh." I am not being fed a campaign, per se, I am being fed a toolbox. I realized I was over-expecting internal logic and threads to be baked into the system. Instead, the game is giving me a space to make my own threads and logic.
From this point on I started adding in a lot more oracle rolls, figuring out side information, tweaking descriptions to make a kind of internal (while style High-Fantasy, High-Concept) sense.
It is snowing. My characters can hear strange voices down in a chasm below the rope bridge they are on (not specified in the Shadowdark rulebook but I assume kobolds speak goblinoid, which none of my characters do). Down in the chasm, lava flows while on ledges above it, the signs of some humanoid habitation are present (though no people are out to see). Not wanting to risk a fight with a whole tribe of something, the characters use the snow and lava sounds to sneak across the bridge and cross the mountain.
On the other side, they go down into a jungle filled valley. One of the first things they see is a spot with some abandoned wagons and odd glowing mushrooms. They try and hunt there and find no game but do gather enough firewood to last for a couple of days and stow it in their packs.
How I handled this was a pair of SoloDark oracle tests. First, is there game to hunt here? Second, is there enough wood/supplies that would be fit for making a camp here? Let's be real. This is a jungle and it is a 6-mile hex. Yes. The answer is YES. I was just trying to play in the way Wilderness Survival might approve. The forthcoming guide to more official hex crawling in Shadowdark is not yet out but will be Kickstart-ed this March.
The type of "yes" I got determined the next step. Hunt/scrounge against a DC9 on "exceptional yes", DC12 on "yes", and DC15 on "yes, but...".
Another day of hex crawling with no encounters, we went up into the mountains to find Evangeline Thatcher. She is another old woman living in an estate who does not want company and she also thinks someone is stalking her, only this time it was 12 goblins and they attack. My characters are cocky after beating the hobgoblins and sneaking past the kobolds so they go out to fight and...things go rough.
Two goblins are killed right off and my mage is good at Charm Person (and also has a +3 to her CHA rolls which starts coming up shortly) so a third is charmed and told to maybe wander off to the north and not worry about this fighting stuff. The thief thinks it might be good to sneak around and do some backstabbing...
In my many hours of playing Shadowdark, getting double 1s on a check with Advantage has only happened once. It happened again, here. The thief double-Nat-1s. He trips and falls and the goblins are well aware of where he is so he'll be at Disadvantage next round of combat and people targeting him will be Advantage.
And then some curse IRL showed up because these goblins are +0 to attack and have an AC of 11 while several of my characters have +5s or +3s to attack, etc. I think around 7 of the remaining 9 goblins get a hit on my front line (and the thief). The thief is knocked to 0hp. The female fighter is at 0hp. Everyone still standing (except the mage, who is back) is down to 1hp or 2hp.
The next few rounds are basically the priests trying to heal people, including each other, while goblins score hit after hit and characters score miss after miss.
Spells were fine. Cure Wounds hits every time. Charm Person hits every time. But melee is clearly favoring the goblins despite all the math saying otherwise.
We eventually get down to one goblin (who has passed every Morale check with flying colors) and finally the mage points out that several of his friends went on walkabout and the rest are dead and she offers him a promise that if he leaves now, he can take care of those friends and the barely standing party will make sure the others get a good burial and that works.
Then the party asks Evangeline if they can please stay the night and we get a twist on the oracle roll: Dismiss weakness. She is so upset that they had such a time fighting the goblins and then actually played "nice" at the end that she wants the PCs to leave immediately. They would easily take on one old woman (well, maybe) but they agree and go down the mountain and limp their way back up the valley.
By this point I am wide awake. I knew what was happening. I was being given prompts and hooks. I was being given paint. This was an entire stack of oracle rolls just ripe for interpretation, waiting for solo player to grab all these keywords and start jamming them into locks.
You know what I am good at? Good enough that I have blog with probably around 200-300 pages across 80+ solo sessions? Taking a bunch of random words and ideas and turning them into pages and pages of solo play and having a good time doing it.
I was ready to apply the full weight of my solo play experience and have some fun on this silly island. Well, sort of. I have been at it for the better part of an hour, give or take, and was thinking I was at a stopping point. Still, I pushed for just one more "round".
Ok, speeding this up considerably, the trip back over the chasm has the PCs "caught" by the kobolds but the mage talks to them and they are not only semi-friendly but actually quite civilized kobolds (exceptional yes on whether the kobolds can and will speak common). I decide to make a whole story to explain why they are in such a terrible place. The PCs camp with them for the night and learn the reason the kobolds are in this chasm with lava flowing nearby is because of their village being wrecked by a plague. This is baked into the island's description, and I did an oracle prompt and got Flee Pain which I opted to be related to the plague rather than a boss encounter. The random roll identified the hex with the abandoned carts and mushrooms as where their village was which helped to add in some backstory (they had to leave the carts to get into the mountains, maybe the mushrooms are a side-effect of the plague. While the kobolds on are friendly terms with the town at the base of the mountain (exceptional no on whether Encrea folk's have any problems with these kobolds). Only the town is not the source of the cure (oracle checks and revealed that there a cure to the southeast, a hex below Evangeline) and the kobolds don't have enough money to pay for the cure.
Back to town. No additional clues about the missing wife but a rough location for the place the cure can be purchased.
No encounters as they track back through hexes with descriptions like "a large green dragon skeleton is here" and finally up another mountain where it is snowing and an entire gaggle of caravans have decided to set up shop, for some reason.
PCs are carrying more gold than I know what to do with (more than I have handed out in my months of The Bleak + The Pearl) and so spend 200gp of it to get enough cure for the kobolds (rolled 1d6x100 with imploding/exploding dice being possible) and then buy better armor, some long bows (the shops sell no arrows but I ain't fooling with that level of RNG madness), and some good rations finally.
What's more, someone in the caravan of caravans (the meta-van) actually knows the secret to find the Cavern and knew enough details (after finally getting yes on the very much asked (essentially, every NPC I talked to) "Does anyone know where the Caverns are?" test, I rolled a 1d6 with 1 being "broad idea" and 6 being "precise directions" and got a 6) that the PCs now know to look in the basement of the old inn.
They went to bed near the caravan, well-fed and fairly pleased with themselves.
Beyond the First Impression and Review
Once I stopped thinking this is something that it was not—namely a kind of online GM even if one driven by an unraveling mind—and starting appreciating it for what it was—a massive collection of oracles and prompts pre-collected with a rough semblance of continuity; I started to enjoy myself quite a bit. There are a lot of hooks that you could hang entire sessions worth of content upon. In the same way you could build a decent campaign using Mythmere's Tome of Adventure Design combined with The Sandbox Toolkit to give you a decent start only with many rolls automated.
A Perfect Example: The implausibly named, "glowing black eyes" having, Sinister Gaudiosus will pay me to 700gp to take a "mysterious chest" to Ortgar's smokehouse.
I know what you are thinking. Old Sinister GuadioSUSSY paying way too much for a quest that could be solved in around 10 minutes of in-game and at-table time? That seems safe and not the opening story in a months long campaign where the plot twist is we met the final big bad in the opening session!
There is no prompt with the mysterious chest besides its existence in text. Nothing I can click on. We can see the two are on opposite sides of a not large town. In this screenshot, it's the green dot at the bottom to the "Smokehouse" at the top:
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| Generated by HexRoll on December 17, 2024. |
This is a perfect example in the solo play sphere to ask why? Is the box trapped? Cursed? Stolen? Is Sinister somehow trapped inside his bunkhouse and unable to leave until that box is returned? Why have other people in town not picked up what has to be a half-year's salary doing this already? Is Sinister tricking people to hand over the box for him because of some monkey's paw type wish? Take it and run with it! Explore those prompts, ideas, and Dicegeeks' Random Book of Quests!
Take an NPC and make up a new quest for them even just add a few lines of backstory while chatting them up at the bar. "Elspethria of Ecrean, a level 1 Halfling. She has tired red-looking eyes, ample hips and big red cheeks (Drained)." Ample-hipped and big red cheeks? BEHAVE! Again, though, maybe she catches your attention (watch it), and you roll a few prompts. Tie that into other aspects of the story. Or not. This is your toolkit.
I am a big fan of the kind of mad-god | dumb-oracle variety of solo play. Where seemingly silly, meaningless prompts are just tiny fingers reaching out to find some explanation to open up a three volume doorstopper amount of fiction with some gentle message and fortune-teller style readings of the fate. "The beheaded corpse of a gargoyle card means you can find an old tower to the north of the hex," and, "When you say there is a red stain on the floor what you really mean is candle wax from a sealed letter."
If you are as well, then this could be a great product for you.
Alternately, if you are the kind of solo-player that can ignore some of the rough patches and just go, "Look, mom! I delivered a BOX for 700GP, no questions asked!," then it might also be for you.
Some Things to Keep in Mind
That mad-god | dumb-oracle comment was not just a quick barb. There is a lot of potential content here and a lot of flavor but also things are prone to resurface very quickly like when you queue up random on your favorite music playlist and it plays Aqua's "Barbie Girl" a half dozen times in an afternoon.
I was just randomly spawning some hexes for this "Beyond the First Impression" and I generated a dungeon that had three different entrances found in the basements of presumably different abandoned inns. It's like walking down some abandoned interstate strip only all those motels and hotels shut down due to COVID and all of them have basements with secret doors into a sprawling complex. Hey man, what happens in southern Birmingham stays in southern Birmingham.
Take the warning, though. I got two old women hiding out and not wanting to talk to folks while low level humanoid invaders show up to fight the PCs. In six hexes.
Details from one hex will absolutely no impact on a next. You can for sure bring in details (and should) but each is a kind of unique bubble outside of a few themes.
Other times, you get some weird balance things. I was unsure if the game handled threads to the point that I would ever specifically find the missing wife in the dungeon or if I was just supposed to just go "this is the room! thanks!" I clicked on the opening room of what turns out to be a fairly sprawling and decent sized dungeon and there are four orcs digging through rubble, most having few hit points, and beating them nets me 4k GP and a torn quiver.
Also, yes, at least for some quests there are triggers because clicking randomly for a few minutes found the wife guarded by two gorram rhagodessa that will 100% slaughter my poor level ones.
Also, shops are crazy. One shop might only sell ink for 2sp while another will sell some old ornaments and a good spear. If there is one thing the power of editing will fix, it is shops. Go ahead, give the old man's market stall a Flaming Sword +2 for 5gp. I won't judge (I might judge). Speaking of editing...
That Being Said: A Couple of Important Features and One Less So
There are at least two major mitigators of all of those problems. The first is essentially ask the mad | dumb | oracle | god for another go. You can click an unlock button and then reroll a whole hex, pieces of a hex, or (sometimes) even specific entities. I turned the giant rattles snakes into a wight. Good for me!
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| Generated by HexRoll on December 17, 2024. |
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| Generated by HexRoll on December 17, 2024. |
The second feature is potentially more apt for a lot of the "glitches" you will see. You can edit any page. Presumably even the quest hooks if you know the coding. This means you can take 12 Goblins and make it 5. Sinister "GLOWING BLACK EYED" Gaudiosus can, with a couple of letters, become gentle blue eyed Minister Gaudiosus who is going to you pay you 7gp to carry a box that Ortgar left behind at the bunkhouse. An intro quest that you can hang others on.
The best part of this is that you can enjoy adding in quests, hooks, ideas, concepts, and tweaks and edit them directly into the hex descriptions so that over time your hex map becomes not a maddumboraclegod but instead a relic of a campaign.
Here is what the hex with the poor kobolds reads now (complete with Doug-makes-Typos! Holy crap you can tell I was typing this in a hurry and not editing what I was doing as I tried out the feature. Next time I play, I'll fix it in post).
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| Generated by HexRoll on December 17, 2024. |
You can build up links and other things as you go, which means I can take the ample-hipped, red-cheeked halfling above and say she lost her wedding ring and now is unable to return and face her spouse. She has spent days looking for it but to no avail. She lost it in the mountains. Etc etc. Then, I later find another halfling, maybe I tie those together. If I find any sort of random ring loot, I edit to say that was her ring with text that links out to other text.
There are also a few clicks where you can swap between two color schemes (muted or normal), three different overall themes, and whether or not labels show up. Labels are pretty big and chunky for my island, so I went with no but on a larger map they probably look nice.
Is It Worth a Patreon Sub?
That is up to you. I am going to yes for myself just so I can take some time and sculpt the Island of Nesila into a kind of Dougish place. Dial down some oddness. Increase other bits of oddness. Ample-hipped halfings are out while ample-hipped, glowing-black-eyed Sinisters are in! Why not both!?
In more seriousness, I am going to go back to the hex crawl and start out retconning the encounter with the box (which was not needed for the money to solve the other quest, etc). I'll run some tables from Knave or Random Realities and make it interesting and then edit it right into the little description box like a HexRoll champion.
The price is free if you just want to try it out. That I would 100% recommend. If for nothing else just the potential of finding five hexes with lonely old women who do not want to be bothered next to abandoned inns with hidden cults hiding out in the basement.
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