First Offical Hexcrawl

    Last night I ran my first expedition into hex crawling, and honestly it was one of the better gaming nights we've had.

    The party was lost in the woods due to being chased by some elephant men from a portal that opened behind the party the session before (a current on going plot) and so they dived deeper into the wild in an attempt to get away.

    The Spend the night and I roll for an encounter and using my d100 chart for forests came up with an abandoned cabin. Since they did not search the area before resting for the night they did not notice it through the thick trees until morning. They carefully search it for traps finding nothing but alot of dust until looking inside the old desk finding some old unused parchment and a unknown potion. They collect the potion deciding to get it properly identified when back at the mages guild and explore some more. They don’t find anything of real interest and head back towards the cabin for a slightly safer days rest. I had ended up rolling up another encounter and this time I got 2 black bears, one inside the cabin the other wandering around in the trees not too far off. The barbarian is the first to notice something is off and goes to investigate and comes face to face with the black bear(the barb is only surprised on a 1 out of 6) and so initiative is rolled. Surprisingly the MVP of the battle was the trained war dog who finished off the bear that came in from the woods, and then critical'ed using the Critical hit/fumble chart from dragon 39 page (34) scoring what should have been a decapitation, but I went for him darting past the group and coming underneath the bears neck and tearing out its throat (still instant death).

    After calming down from the fight they start skinning the bears taking a few claws as trophies and cook some of the meat to keep from having to use up their rations and prepare for the next day. They gather up their gear and decide to look for a way back and maybe do some additional hunting along the way breaking up the party sending the more hunter types (barb, rogue, the rogues guard dog, and druid) leaving the cleric, magic user, and the magic users charmed orc body guard to watch over camp.

    The hunting group after a few hours of searching over hear some giggling and splashing around, following the sounds they come across a out cropping of 10 foot rocks in a large circle and just the glint of light reflecting off the water and onto the rocks. The rogue attempts to sneak up and take a peek at the female sounding frolicking in the water and rolls a 1 on his save. He enjoys the sight he sees all for about 5 seconds as he begins to sprout fur and falls onto his hunches as his gear melds into his body and he now understands his guard dog several times better, even if his vision has just went to grey scale.  The rest of the group watched in surprise as their companion changed into a wolf. The druid at this point had a darn good idea what the cause of this was and advised they leave and leave now and don’t they dare take a further look across the water, a nymphs beauty is not for mortals to behold and their friend was lucky to be alive. They head back to camp and decide it would be best to trek back to the kingdom as they had much to discuss with the mage's guild.


    All in all it was a good session, they was told the mages will consult their library for anything useful and in the mean time they heard rumors of a long abandoned castle to explore. It was a nice throw back to how I first ran D&D 16-17 years ago flying by the seat of my pants and just letting things go the way they go. Modules are still there as possible locations but memories are certainly being created just going out into the wilds.