Building a New Campaign, Part 4: The Drowned Lands

Parts 1, 2, and 3

This is my fourth post in a series that will form part of my next project: an open-table West Marches campaign for Old-School Essentials. I’ve covered the town of Greyhold and the Drowned Labyrinth. Today, I’m focusing on the town’s immediate environs and how I can turn a loose sense of place—northern frontier with fortified outpost—into a concrete, usable hexcrawl.

As ever, this is draft material and open to revision. Do share your thoughts and feedback in the comments below.

Time to start hexcrawling!

The Drowned Lands

Of the lands around Greyhold, I’ve already said this:

Beyond Greyhold’s walls, the ground quickly becomes uneven. Wooded hills give way to moors, bogs, and rocky crags, and further north and west those hills rise into low mountains.

The climate is on the cool end of temperate, edging toward subarctic. Winters are long and dark; summers are brief and wet. Travel is difficult for much of the year, and attempts to push permanent settlement beyond the immediate environs have essentially failed. That’s not to say the land has never been settled. Scattered ruins along old roads—collapsed watchtowers, abandoned forts, half-buried foundations—point to an older kingdom that once held this region, and lost it.

Beyond the town’s immediate environs, civilization thins out quickly. The hills are marked by cave mouths, ancient barrows, collapsed shafts, gullies cut by fast streams, and high ground overlooking the deeper wilds. In the woods, signs of dangerous wildlife mingle with goblin camps, paths trodden by outlaws, forgotten shrines, cult sites, and ruins tangled among roots and undergrowth.

Going further, I would say the ‘continent’ (or rather ‘landmass’) is probably somewhere around the size of Great Britain with windswept coasts, northern highlands, and a climate that feels cold, wet, rugged, and bleak. Travel is difficult for much of the year, and sustained settlement beyond the town’s immediate environs has largely failed. Think Solstheim in The Elder Scrolls, the Skellige Isles of The Witcher 3 (featured at the top of the article), the Iron Islands of Westeros, or the northern parts of the British Isles (eg, the isle of Skye, pictured above). For practical play, I’m thinking of the map in terms of distance bands radiating out from Greyhold:

• Immediate environs: one or two six-mile hexes. Well known to locals, regularly patrolled, suitable for repeated forays.
• Short expeditions: three to six hexes. Two to four days out. Locals still know plenty of rumours about this area, but fewer and fewer adventurers make it out this far, and Greyhold’s patrols disappear quite quickly. This is where the wilderness really starts to feel wild and untamed.
• Serious expeditions: seven hexes or more. Poorly mapped, rarely travelled, a serious trip: the sort of journey you need to plan for and accept you might not come back from.

This gives me a clear sense of risk escalation without needing a larger-scale map yet.

Making a key

My main inspirations for the map itself are probably the overland maps from Forbidden Lands and Gods of the Forbidden North. The terrain tiles I’m using are:

• Sea
• Heath
• Mire
• Woods
• Hills
• Mountains

I’m deliberately avoiding terms like ‘plains’ or ‘swamp’, which feel too American for the geography I’m trying to evoke, and I’m placing terrain based on broad plausibility, not exact geological accuracy.

Here’s what I’ve got so far:

What, then, am I going to stock my hexes with?

Stocking the hexes

There was a useful discussion about this on BlueSky, and first and foremost, I think it’s fair to say that a published product should have something in more or less every hex. I would expect that if I were paying for it, so it seems fair to me that I should strive to provide it in my own work. I don’t think any hex should be considered ‘empty.’ This also fits with the material I’m drawing on for inspiration: Skyrim and Might and Magic VI are positively festooned with adventure hooks as you roam around the game world.

I have 36 hexes here. 0506 is Greyhold. I’ve said the Drowned Labyrinth is one or two hexes west of the town, and it makes sense to me that it is near the coast, so 0306 seems like a good fit. (Those hills in 0305 are maybe in the wrong place? Perhaps I will move them later.) 34 hexes to go.

I am not going to give the full details of every hex right now, and as always, everything in these articles is subject to change at a later date anyway. It’s a draft. But I can at least give a sense of what’s to come.

My first step was to make a list of all my favourite ideas for stocking fillers: lairs, ruins, landmarks, hazards . . . I’m being careful to focus on locations, not encounters, and situations, not plots, as the ‘story’ can then emerge organically based on player choices. If you’re interested in seeing this list, I might share it later on Patreon.

Then, I tried to decide what worked best in which hex. And this is what I ended up with:

The Drowned Lands are starting to take shape. Parties can choose short, relatively safe expeditions or push outward into territory that quickly becomes uncertain and dangerous. None of these hexes is completely mapped out yet, but there’s enough structure here to support weeks of play.

Next time, I’ll either look at weather, travel, and random encounters, or go back to the megadungeon and start mapping the Drowned Labyrinth in detail. Let me know what you’d like to see in the comments below.

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