Welcome to the blog book club. Today’s post is short and sweet. We’re reading the Pointcrawl Series Index, by Chris Kutalik of the Hill Cantons.
Next week, we’ll be back to the Necropraxis blog as Brendan S expands on overloaded encounter die with Hazard System v.02 .
We’ve already covered “Crawling without Hexes: the Pointcrawl” earlier in our blog book club. Kutalik would continue to iterate on point crawls through a variety of new terrains such as overland ruins and underground. I appreciate that these posts highlight some of the struggles of game design but also the persistence of designers.
My favorite entry after the first is “Pointcrawling inside Hexes”. As many before me have noted 6 mile hexes are huge. Its also worth pointing out that Kutalik prefers a much more local focus on adventuring. His regional adventure setting “what ho, Frog demons!” has 2 mile hexes. Within these hexes they can be broken down into several points of interest. The post has a sample hex including 7 locations. While that might seem like a lot, I think sometimes we DMs fall into the trap of thinking that all areas need to be equally detailed instead of changing scale as the location demands.
I’m reminded of Nightmare over Ragged Hollow as a best selling example of how this system might play out in a published module with the standard six mile hexes.
Bonus: While it breaks the timeline a bit I’d also point readers to Hexcrawls vs Pointcrawls which is not part of the index and it isn’t featured in the club list. I just find it to be a good continuation of the subject and helps explore the best times to utilize each mapping technique.