Don’t prep hexcrawls, prep hexframes

Here’s a pair of questions I have been pondering: why don’t I make keyed hexcrawls for wilderness travel in my home game, and which published hexcrawls have I liked and why (hint: they rhyme with “Black Burn of Blandonsford” and “Irate Worg seecrawls”)? This post is inspired by the Map Blogwagon, a gauntlet thrown down by the Prismatic Wasteland blog that we all come up with something to say about maps in less than 80 days. Well, it only took me 79! Let’s get to it: the reasons I don’t make my own hexcrawls (hint: it’s because I make hexframes, which I like better). Hexcrawls are a classic D&D method of handling travel through the wilderness, but they are not as popular as dungeon crawls, for two main reasons. First, folks often feel the narrative loop of a hexcrawl is not as compelling or satisfying as a dungeon crawl. Dungeons have a clearly defined end-goal (“kill the monsters” or “return to town with treasure”) while hexcrawls lack “a clear, default goal to provide strong…