Hex-A-Day 2025 by Third Kingdom Games.

Next year’s ongoing exercise in daily world creation.

Hexaday Sample Page from Third Kingdom Games.

Third Kingdom Games had this really neat little Kickstarter recently. Hex-A-Day 2025 is a worldbuilding exercise similar to Dungeon23 and Dungeon24. Instead of a dungeon rooms we’ll be doing different Hex Crawl spaces. Third Kingdom Games is known for Hexcrawl Basics and a wide variety of hexcrawl products and can be found on DriveThruRPG through my affiliate link.

I really think this product and this concept has a lot of merit. I’m a worldbuilding nut and enjoy putting detail into regions for characters to explore. While some TTRPGs make entire world books and settings, I prefer to build my own.

I might not be documenting my efforts daily on here or YouTube, but my intention is to either randomly determine a hex or intentionally design the features of one and build out at least part of a world map gradually. Depending on time, there may be more than one feature per hex. It’s all going to depend on what I have time for on any given day.

My system of choice for this will be Dragonbane RPG, but I may pop in features for Fabula Ultima, Shadowdark, Old School Essentials, and Dungeon Crawl Classics. I’m not joking when I say I’m positively enamored with Dragonbane. It’s fairly rules lite, easy to digest, simple, fun… everything the Ampersand game used to be only properly modernized and more compact.

My plan is to keep the descriptions simple. There won’t be a ton of art beyond a symbol or two in each hex and a reference. Hexes are tentatively 15 kilometers across, but that may change depending on how that works out on a larger scale. I’m an American and as such not 100% fluent in the metric system yet. 15 kilometers is about 9.3 miles. Most hexcrawl spaces I’m familiar with are about 26 miles across. I might bump it 30 kilometers or about 19 miles across.

Mounted Dragonbane characters move at 30km per shift or double if the Pathfinder (Page 101 of the Dragonbane rulebook.) finds a shortcut. Theoretically a group could cover 4 hexes a full speed with a good pathfinder. Terminology may be subject to change as I am going to be borrowing from other sourcebooks such has Uncharted Journeys for 5E. I’ve also been wanting to create my own overland travel sourcebook.

Solo Saturday Night adventures are on the horizon.

Since Solo Sundays turned into my creation time for the Monday Monster, I’m looking at starting a new series here and/or on YouTube following the adventures of Plucky Pato and his intrepid crew of Dragonbane adventurers. They’ll be stepping out of the Misty Vale from the core rules and into this mysterious, uncharted new land. My Saturdays could potentially be pretty busy depending on the weekend, but I’m going to do some hexcrawl and solo adventuring if I’m not exhausted.

Solo Saturday Night might become a new series here on the blog if I have time to pull it together. What might be a few rolls or even a week’s worth of exploration will be journaled (*if time permits.) Otherwise we might just pick out one particularly interesting hex for the week and explore it together.

We’ll see how all this goes the first week or two. My Dungeon23 idea was fun to start with, but then Wizards of the Coast had the whole Great Dungeons & Dragons Open Gaming License Debacle of 2023 and it became a daily news concern for us here on the blog. If there’s a Dungeon25, I might take a poke at it, too. That’s a lot of writing and planning, though.

My 2024 plans to produce sellable content flopped outright.

I was going to make Shadowdark product for 2024. Unfortunately for me, some very high powered professionals decided to jump on the Shadowdark bandwagon, so I abandoned those plans. Then the BRP Design contest came up and I discovered Dragonbane about halfway through. My slightly autistic ADHD addled brain decided to go all in on (obsessing over) Dragonbane. I just love this game so much, and no, I won’t shut up about it. (LOL!)

Then I got this bright idea to make a 4 panel GM Screen insert for the Dragonbane Open License. Right before I was going to hit publish, someone mentioned the Dragonbane License in a YouTube video. Mom didn’t raise no dummy, so I went back and reread the license for the fourth or fifth time. Somehow it never occurred to me that we can’t copy rules and other material directly from the Dragonbane core rules. I don’t think anyone wants their GM screen to just be page numbers and a few small graphics. The last thing I want to do is cheese off Free League Publishing. (They’ve been super good to us.)

I’ve had a lot of other things that have stymied my creative efforts in terms of content creation. Solo gaming is a great way to blow off some steam. I do solo different than any book I’ve ever read. It relaxes me even if it’s a few simple journal notes. We’ll get back to all of this more on the 19th, but I just wanted to mention Dragonbane content creation is my new focus on top of being entertainment.

Yes, Hex-A-Day 2025 is coming. I’ll talk about it more in the days to come and on all my social media. Let’s make #hexaday2025 a thing. It’s gonna be fun!