Twilight Sword does things a little differently.

Legend of Zelda back in the OG Nintendo days was on a grid for everything. Final Fantasy was likewise grid based. This carried over into the TTJRPG Twilight Sword. None of those pesky six-sided hexes for us. Nope. We’re exploring squares now.

Even the map of Radia is laid out in one-inch squares. It’s convenient for mapmaking because if you’ve spent any serious amount of time as a Game Master, you’ve probably got some blank one-inch grid lying around somewhere for minis-based combat. All Twilight Sword did was zoom out by quite a bit.

Radia is going to be a cool map to explore solo.

Once players establish a firm base of operations, somewhere they’ve raised the Hope level a couple of notches, they can start exploring the rest of the map. I don’t recommend just running willy-nilly right at Vardas in the center of the map, because even if you made it, he’s the final boss and he has a ton of magic, monsters, etc. Twilight Sword also puts a ton of emphasis on exploration and really makes it worth your while to lower the Despair of any given region.

Radia is built around a concept somewhat akin to Final Fantasy. Exploration, grinding mobs, working your way around the map, and grinding dungeons until you have enough levels and loot to take on the big bad is how it goes in the video game. Out in the fantasy TTJRPG world, it’s all heroics and looking cool in what would undoubtedly been worthy of manga and maybe an anime series. Well, minus all the grinding endless amounts of regular mobs for XP. I think Radia is rounded out in much the same way. No matter where you enter, the goal is to bring the overall Hope levels up to fight Vardas who happens to be in the middle of the map.

Applying this same concept to other games, worlds,

It’s pretty easy to take almost any map and slap a basic grid down over the top of it. I love hex maps, but there are a lot of times a hex grid is not as practical. I can draw a grid over almost anything with just a pencil and a ruler.

Grid mapping can be handy for indoor structures such as dungeons especially, but it does lead to linear thinking on the part of the designer. In the real world, square, flush, and level are harder to come by. As one of my players used to point out regularly, most medieval builders probably didn’t spend too much time trying to get square corners on things, especially underground.

Then something occurred to me last night.

What happened in the old Final Fantasy or Legend of Zelda when you got all the way to the edge or the corner of the map? It either rolled over to the other side or just plain stopped. I always wondered what would happen if I could keep going. Admittedly it could have been endless squares of ocean, but what if there was another continent, completely unexplored out there? Obviously an 8 Bit game wasn’t built to handle an expansive open world. Most of our modern PC games still can’t do that.

But what if? After we conquer all the baddies in the known map of Radia we decide to go outside of the zones provided to explore new territory? In anime/manga terms there would have to be something. Life doesn’t stop at the end of the page, right? Without introducing new mechanics, there still have to be new areas where heroes are needed. Maybe raising the Despair or gaining Hope looks different once Vardas has been defeated. Maybe there are other, lesser threats out there or an all-new big bad to fight. That intrigues me to keep going both in a solo journey and on paper.

Or what if once the center square of the current map is freed from Despair a portal to another realm open deep in the last dungeon somewhere? Or the sky opens up with a portal to another dimension and something else falls out of it. Or there could be dragors, or a fleet of airships from a distant land. There could be a single square pathway that opens on the edge of the map the players could now travel through to get to a new continent in terms of old school video game mapping. The possibilities are endless.

I think a random solo square crawl might be in the future.

Much in the style of Twilight Sword’s original rules, each new square would have an instance, a mini boss, some interesting features, a Despair Level possibly generated at random, and possibly a place for the Champions to rest and more as Hope rises. Really it’s not that much different than a hex crawl to be honest, just a bit more cartoony and a little less deadly serious perhaps.

There could also be an expansion to Twilight Sword where we do new forms of transportation, mounts, etc. Once new lands are discovered we could be talking about an entirely new setting or even a new game in terms of ground that was never covered in Radia. We’ve not gotten to vast tracts of desert or oceans yet. Or expanses of arctic wilderness much for that matter. There is so much potential here.

I say it every year, but I think 2026 bears repeating it. This year I intend to write more, read more, and discuss cool TTRPGs as well as supplements. Most of all, let’s just have more fun. Let’s explore. Let’s save the kingdom from the evil warlord. Let’s discuss all the fun stuff in gaming that we love.

With the world in the state it finds itself in today, please be kind. Please be considerate to one another even if we don’t agree. Lastly, please pursue the thing that brings you the most joy without harm to others. Thank you!