A cancelled playtest leading to new ideas

Due to an unforeseen medical emergency with a friend tonight's play test involved the party moving five squares further into the mines of Razor Hill... And that's OK, real life comes first. But after having driven my wife to said friend's house to babysit while she went off to hospital, I had a sudden burst of creative energy, and plowed an hour or so of planning into Nectar, the sandbox module I have planned for Solum... And here is some more info, in the absence of a play test report.



So Nectar is outlined here. But a short recap: It's a sandbox hexcrawl with a mega dungeon (or at least a very large dungeon with many connections to the surrounding wilderness) in the middle.

My original though was for rather a large wilderness area, maybe 10 by 10 hexes. But that's 100 locations to key and describe... I'd rather find some means of limiting it to 20ish, and do them really well.

So I've decided to make the wilderness area into 19 hexes, arranged in a larger hex like this:

		1
	2		3
4		5		6
	7		8
9		10		11
	12		13
14		15		16
	17		18
		19

19 is the starting point (the town of Honeytop), 10 and 8 is the mountain Twotop (whereunder lies the dungeon complex), and the rest is wilderness areas. Each hex is roughly one day's travel (exact dimensions to follow).

Each hex will have a short geographical, cultural and POI description, a keyed encounter (which in some cases can be whole adventures in themselves) connected to one of the factions or locations or plots in the area and a unique random encounter table. Some of them (such as Honeytop and the two mountain hexes) will also secondary keyed encounters either tied to plot progression, player investigation or just time. Some of these can be entire new trees of encounters.

I don't want to go into too much detail or give examples this early on in my development, but my goal is to make locations reusable, and to promote investigation, scouting and planning by gradually unlocking new events due to player actions.

So, that's the plan, I am going to make an outline of the entire thing quite speedily, because once we are done with Razor Hills I want to start play testing of wilderness adventures and civilized areas with my trusty group. I hope they aren't afraid of bees...