Over the last few months I've played around occasionally with solo adventuring as a fun exercise in between prepping for sessions in my current pathfinder game. I rolled up some characters using Swords and Wizardry, slapped down the hex map I had been using for my pathfinder game, and picked some spots as sites of small dungeon-crawling adventures that I could largely use the procedures in B/X, OD&D, or other OSR games to run solo. Having the procedures for dungeon crawling and exploration made the process relatively simple and meant I didn't have to use other more complex tools like Mythic or some other GM emulator (which I am not against but personally I find too obtuse for my uses). I bounced around the world and had quite a bit of fun journaling from the character's perspective, using tools like ChatGPT for random prompts, or getting to actually use the enormous pile of printed materials I've collected over the last few years. That's why I was excited to learn about hexplore24, a yearly challenge to run a hexploration game every day of 2024.
After mulling over some ideas, I decided to play through a similar scenario to one of the earliest campaigns I ran: the search for an ancient city deep in the wilderness. The original game I ran in college had my players moving through a pointcrawl style system deeper and deeper into an unexplored wilderness in pursuit of a legend of a metropolis from another age (an El Dorado of sorts). While that game had many memorable moments (including when they finally reached the place and found it not quite so abandoned...), due to some shenanigans the players essentially wished (as in used the spell) the events of the game never took place. So this completely unexplored place is still out there somewhere, a perfect motivation for a solo hexploration game!
I'll be making use of a variety of tools for the challenge including the fantastic Wilderness Hexplore Revised by Jed McClure, some of the procedures from Swords and Wizardry, OSE, and this neat weather table from the Wandering Gamist. Monsters and Mazes (who I first saw the idea from) has put together some other great resources as well as a summary of the hexplore24 idea. My goal is to really stick with this every day, so I need a straightforward and simple ruleset that I can reasonably expect to be able to keep up with which is where I fell apart with dungeon23. Tying each day to a "in world" day appeals to me and gives a sense of checking in with my party which is neat. I'll be using hex kit to make the actual map itself although I may keep a pen and paper map and update the hex kit map occasionally if it turns out that's my only digital resource. I'll also be keeping a journal of sorts which I can update each day with the events the party encounters. The hope is as we run into various terrain features we can organically create the same sorts of narrative story as in my previous game. The end goal is still going to be to locate the titular lost city which I will eventually place into the roll tables for the features or maybe triangulate it after finding various clues scattered around the hex map. I haven't decided yet but that is a later problem to resolve. Plenty of hexes to explore in the meantime! I'll update progress as we go along, maybe every week or so unless something really interesting happens.
I rolled up a random town on the western coast, pulled my group of characters from my solo game and set off. Despite the ominous storm that blew through on the first day, the journey was quiet. I can already see some interesting terrain popping out of the random tables. No features yet (its only a 1/8 chance after all) and luckily no monsters. We'll see how long that holds.
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