Think Small, Adventure Big
Happy Lazy Sunday, everyone.
Today, I want to talk about a common trap that many Game Masters fall into: trying to build the entire world before the first session even begins. It’s a noble impulse, but it can quickly lead to burnout. Sometimes, the best approach is to think small.
The Power of a Single Hex
When I start a new campaign, I don't draw continents; I draw a single hexagon on a piece of paper. This hex contains the starting location—maybe a small city or a village—and that's it. From there, I only develop the hexes immediately surrounding it. This creates a small, manageable, but detailed starting area for the players.
To put this "start small" approach into perspective, let's think about the scale of some famous video game worlds that felt massive to us as we played them.
- The entire map of Skyrim covers an area of roughly 15 square miles.
- The world of Red Dead Redemption 2 is a bit larger, at around 30 square miles.
If you're using a standard 5-mile hex grid for your campaign map, both of those entire game worlds could fit inside a single hex.
More Than Enough to Explore
Think about that for a moment. Hundreds of hours of content, dozens of locations, and countless memorable adventures from those games all took place in an area smaller than a single D&D hex.
When you start your campaign with a central hex and the six surrounding it, you're creating a play area seven times larger than the world of Skyrim. You would be surprised how much adventure you can pack into such a "small" map, especially for lower-level characters. I know a lot of players like the idea of epic, world-spanning adventures, but the most memorable campaigns often start by exploring a single, well-detailed corner of the world.
So, the next time you feel overwhelmed by world-building, just draw one hex. It’s probably more than enough to get started.
As always,
Michael Garcia a.k.a. TheCrazyGM
I've done this several times, and it definitely works !
The only issue I've found is maintaining scale consistency as the map grows. After a few years, the initial area looks small compared to the whole map, but with a lot going on inside it. But (and maybe it's just my own personal flaw) if I deliberately constrain the initial area by making it in some way completely self-contained (an island, space station, elemental sub-plane or whatever), I soon get frustrated with the inability to introduce new themes and expand the world.
The way I look at it, even if not self-contained (which I've done many times), it does translate to real life in a way. A lot of people will have explored the woods around their hometown growing up, and ventured into the next city. If you look at it from a fantasy lens, of course the person is going to know the area around the beginning really well, but not know much about the next place they go.
It's completely fine to make the start area hyper-detailed and it gets sparse the more they venture out. Once the characters are on the world stage, they care not what happens in the little forest outside the keep if they are worried about two rival kings going at each other's throat.
Good point ! My main homebrew world has definitely moved from the local events stage, and I sometimes find it hard to focus back to the local level when a new low level party starts off.
After more than 40 years of play (on and off), about 50% of the Northern hemisphere has been adventured in. But it's D&D, so if they go off the edge into an unexplored bit that says "Here be dragons", they'd better believe it means what it says 😁
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STOPThat's an iteratively modular GM style I'd say, and yep, I can imagine it being very efficient indeed! 😁 🙏 💚 ✨ 🤙
Another feature suggestion for this tool:
https://thecrazygm.com/hivetools/utility/backlinks
instead of tag, what if we can use word?
if it's too much processing then we can have a limit on a word
or don't show results in one page
or don't show results for common words.
I was searching for my anime blogs, I have more than 10+. For anime tag, it's showing me less than 10 for some reason. Maybe I forgot to use anime tag.
Searching through the body text is too resource intensive to include, at least now (maybe in the future), it does search for words in the title if that helps any.
Understandable!
and sorry for off-topic
I contact u directly on chain.