Road Trip Fantasy

Hex-crawling and other journeys to adventure.

Sometime around 1980 my friends and I discovered a map product published by Judges Guild they titled Wilderlands of High Fantasy (a revised POD edition is pictured above). Like many other new vistas we were to encounter as we explored our way through the fledgling hobby circa 1980, the map set and accompanying booklet of very brief descriptions opened many new horizons in gaming for us - at least it did once we figured out how to use it. The product contained two versions of each area map, one detailed and labeled for use by the judge (or referee) and one less detailed and largely blank version of the same map which was labeled for player use and seemingly to be filled in as the players explored. A numbered hex grid was printed on each map to make referencing and measurement easy was a familiar concept to us as we had prior experience with something similar as used in hex-map wargames. We were also familiar with dungeon exploration and the idea of mapping our progress through the tunnels and crypts from our playing at D&D. 

Explore the world - and map it.

Meet new People - and monsters!

Discover lost secrets - including treasures!

To boldly go where none have gone before...

We imagined our "adventurers" in the spirit of Marco Polo, Christopher Columbus, Ferdinand Magellan and Neil Armstrong, all explorers we had read about, or in the case of astronaut Armstrong, watched on television. The desire to know what lay beyond the known world was intense. It was easy to imagine our intrepid adventurers making some "historic" discovery just over the next hex-line. Much like real life, we often found that the next day's travel consisted of "more of the same", but our active imaginations kept us moving forward regardless, ever anticipating what fresh wonders the next day might bring.

The original three little brown books mentions the suggested adaptive use of the boardgame Outdoor Survival as the basis of wilderness adventure. Outdoor Survival was not a game in my collection at the time that I started playing The World's First Role-Playing Game, however. It was a number of years later before I would purchase that game second hand. In the intervening years, my friends and I developed our hex-crawling skills using Wilderlands of High Fantasy - which has the added advantage in being designed specifically for use with adventure games.

The idea of journeying from map hex to map hex seeking adventure is as old as the game itself. by interacting with the setting and any encounters made along the way, the journey itself becomes our adventure. The premise works equally well in an urban environment where density actually means less time spent traveling and more time spent encountering. Whether traveling the wilderness or urban hexes both pre-set and random encounters are possible. And with freedom to move their characters in any direction, the players may experience gameplay in true "sandbox" style.