Simple Hex Stocking Table

+Chris Mata is starting a new campaign that I am participating in and it has given me ideas to eventually run a Labyrinth Lord hex crawl game of my own.

I started thinking on how I would want to run the game, what multitude of house rules I would create, change or edit.  I pondered the elegant backstory I would craft and convoluted plots I would have to write, endless tables within tables and complicated movement schemes.  That thinking got me to nearly decide not to go forward with the idea.  I instead decided to check out if the core rulebook had anything in there and came upon the Labyrinth stocking table on page 124.  With a design goal to keep the hex crawl simple, and to adhere to the RAW as closely as possible, I decided to use those suggestions as the basis of my rules.

I took a look at the table and thought it would all fit nicely into a wilderness table with a few tweaks.  The 'Empty' and 'Monster' results are self explanatory so those remain unchanged.  I will use the monster tables as they are written in the LL rulebook with a flat percentage that those monsters are encountered in their lair if appropriate.  The 'Trap' result had me thinking for a bit but I finally settle that traps in the wilderness will become environment hazards of a non-monster induced variety.  The bulk of the work was writing up these hazards and creating the terrain appropriate tables.

A result of 'Unique' will mean that the hex contains a mini-dungeon, of which I have a near endless supply thanks to OSR resources such as the One Page Dungeon Contest, Dyson's Delves, Iron Tavern Press Pocket-Sized Encounters, as well as pieces of old TSR modules and my own creations.

I used Hexographer to randomly create a map with a few set parameters.  I converted the miles-per-day overland movement rates presented in the LL rulebook to movement points and assigned a MP value to each type of terrain to make travelling through various hexes with different terrain easier to calculate.  That also provides a nice mechanic for the hazards to work against without having to do a lot of math at the table.  Not all obstacles are deadly, some just slow you down...

That's the basics.  I think the campaign could be ready to go right now.  I've got some other priorities this summer, namely getting The Treasure Vaults of Zadabad playtested and ready for sale!

This was all written with Labyrinth Lord in mind but should be usable with B/X, BECMI, 1e, 2e or any of their clones with little to no reworking.  The work I have so far can be downloaded in word here:

Hex Stocking Tables