Rules and design notes for the Baldur’s Gate I Hexcrawl. Some encounters will be trivial, others deadly. Both are boring if limited to a battle. Make such encounters interesting by transforming them into survival or roleplay moments.

Hot Springs Island Hexcrawling Rules

The Baldur’s Gate I Hexcrawl was designed with the Hot Springs Island hexcrawling rules in mind. Here are the relevant tweaked quotes from the book:

The Southern Sword Coast is made up of forty-one hexes. Each hex contains three points of interest for players to discover and explore. These points are all physical locations that can be revisited, and are not one-time events or encounters. Three locations per hex make the wilderness feel dense. But to keep things abstract, these locations do not have fixed coordinates within the hex. Each one is numbered (A, B, C), and characters will generally encounter point A first, as it is normally an obvious natural feature or settlement. The second and third points are typically less obvious, but remain noteworthy locales. These additional locations are best discovered by parties that have become lost, spend time exploring, or are revealed by an NPC guide or object.

Players should have access to a map of of the Southern Sword Coast as they play, with blanks to fill in as points of interest are discovered. This way, in addition to being destinations, the locations can serve as a sort of collection minigame, showing players that more is out there, just waiting to be found.

In an effort to simplify tracking time for overland travel, hexcrawling uses a unit of time called a watch. A watch is 6 hours long, meaning a day is made up of four watches. Traveling from a point of interest in one hex to a point in a neighboring hex takes one watch, as does exploring a hex to find one of its other points of interest. A watch includes the time spent on location unless the group makes a long rest.

It makes a day easily divisible into Morning, Afternoon, Evening and Night. With this system, if an NPC demands something “in three days time” it becomes very simple to set up three stacks of six poker chips and show the players their deadline. Removing those chips one at a time as they make decisions and discoveries will prove to be an amazing motivator.

Named NPCs and Locations

This hexcrawl is under construction and is pretty high-level at this point. A DM who wants to run it will need to flesh out the locations and characters. Search the Baldur’s Gate Wiki for information on any named NPC. Do not hesitate to replace any named NPC by one the players have already met from time to time! It makes for a better story. If a location is not in the Baldur’s Gate wiki, you will find it in the Forgotten Realms wiki.

Differences with the video game

It is not a 1-1 conversion of the original games. I added lore accurate locations on some hexes when they had little features in the game, and I added a lot of monster diversity in the encounters, especially to offer different challenges impossible in the game engine, such as flying or underwater creature. Each hex has one or two biomes from which monster, factions and npc lists are taken and rolled.

The biomes are:

• Coastal
• Mountainous
• Barren
• Evergreen Forest
• Deciduous Forest
• Old Growth (Cloakwood)
• Village
• Farmland

The factions are:

• Bounty Hunters
• Bandits
• Gnolls and Xvarts
• Bassilus’s Undead Family
• Amn
• Baldur’s Gate
• Cloakwood Druids

Added Creatures

• Swarms of Birds (Raven and Seagull)
• Giant Birds (Pelican, Howl, Stork - use giant eagle stats)
• Elementals (Water and Air)
• Giant Sea Otters (use polar bear stats)
• Galeb Durs
• Specters
• Perytons
• Yetis
• Bulettes
• Werewolves
• Trolls
• Will-o’-Wisps
• Scarecrows
• Demons of Yeenoghu (Maw Demon, Shoosuva)

Have fun :)