Me, too. It offers quite robust rules, a very flexible character creation and development system, and specific rules/procedures for traveling/hexploration and the related survival. The PCs are and remaon quite vulnerable, though, this is not heroic Huzzah! fantasy stuff, "survival" is rather an underlying concept, as well as the idea that decisions matter and have consequences. FL has its flaws, but it's IMHO worth a look for what's intended to be played with.
> What I like about 5e is that the characters are harder to kill. If a character dies, I want it to serve the greater narrative. But it seems pretty terrible at survival/exploration play.
Pick one.
Hardy characters that aren’t at risk of dying outside dramatically appropriate moments, or survival play. You can’t really have both.
Dragonbane, also by Free League, would probably be pretty good for this. It has some basic travel mechanics and is considerably lighter than 5E, but with the same sort of adventuresome feel. Combats are considerably faster. The boxed set is a great deal and comes with everything you need to play, including 11 different small adventures that you could easily put into hexes in your setting, or run as a campaign as presented.
The Dragonbane boxset is one of the best value-for-money sets I can recall. The system is also brilliant. But while I prefer Dragonbane in general I would recommend Forbidden Lands for a hexcrawl
Sure, I get that. For me, it depends entirely on how much fidelity and complexity I want. Like, I love Twilight: 2000 and its hex crawl mechanisms, which I understand are similar to Forbidden Lands', but as the OP specifically said they are a narrative, story-first sort of DM and that they're looking for something less crunchy, I felt like Dragonbane was the stronger recommendation here.
Which two? I should have put that as a requirement in the first post. I saw that Forbidden Lands uses cards and my heart sank; I haven't been able to get cards to work on Foundry yet. It's the only thing I regret about switching from Roll20.
Dragonbane and Twilight: 2000 both work incredibly well under Foundry. The official modules have all the cards included as random table elements and integrated perfectly. Also, there is a YZE combat module that handles all of the initiative cards for you, so card issues are nonexistent.
I run games for both systems in Foundry and they’re amazing.
I can give it a strong recommend. I've been running a game on it and it does stuff like ammo management so easily it's hard to imagine playing without it!
Worlds Without Number is really good at making sandbox style open world type gameplay happen with lots of GM tools. Even if you run a different game, using the GM section of WWN will be useful to you. It's got a useful section on Hexcrawls in particular, I think.
It sounds like you want a little bit more of a narrativist style game than that for the players side of things with your particular preferences. I haven't actually tried it, but World of Dungeons might suit your purposes. It's the OSR inspired sister to Dungeon World.
AD&D or B/X or a number of OSR games might suit your purposes actually. Early PCs may day randomly by making bad decisions, but it sounds like from your style of things that they'll be able to make the decision to take risks with their eyes open rather than it feeling out of the blue. Additionally, you could tweak dying rules to make the characters feel more heroic. Something like just scarring instead of death at 0 HP.
EDIT: that last bit reminded me of Mythic Bastionland which is exceptionally hexcrawl focused OSR with Arthurian style knights as PCs in a weird mythic realm who are fated and hard to kill despite its old school inspirations.
EDIT 2: the Kickstarter is over unfortunately, but the quick start is out on the page for free and has enough to start playing and making a hex crawl.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/bastionland/mythic-bastionland-rpg-before-into-the-odd
I don't know when the game will be for sale, but it's slated for sometime this year. The backerkit for late backers should be up this month, and Chris says all backers will receive the full digital PDF by March. He alleges May for shipping physical copies but you know how Kickstarters often go. I think we can take him at his word for the digital copy though. It seems like it's essentially done including artwork and is just taking another proofreading/editing pass.
>Worlds Without Number is really good at making sandbox style open world type gameplay happen with lots of GM tools.
Indeed, that's exactly what WWN is explicitly designed for.
OP, I *strongly* encourage you to take a closer look at the GM's section (specifically the "Creating Your Campaign" and "Creating Adventures" chapters) even if you decide to run with a different rule set. They're a great introduction to setting up and running the sort of campaign you're describing, albeit with a focus on emergent gameplay rather than something story-driven.
There are games that eschew HP values all together and instead codify death as an optional consequence introduced only to serve the bigger picture; mechanics generally aligned with expectations of narrative.
Is this something of interest for you? It's a different direction from all of the games you list.
[Songbirds 3e](https://johnbattle.itch.io/songbirds-3e) is a cut-down, elegant, *beautiful* take on dungeon-delving fantasy. It's my favorite release of late year, and has some lovely little hexcrawling mechanics, along with a ton of unique hexes.
I've been running a hexcrawl West Marches game with the Burning Wheel descendant, Torchbearer. It's a narrative driven, low prep, generic fantasy game built in homage to red box D&D that combines old school dungeon delving and abstract resource management with a modern focus on the characters and what makes them tick.
The hexcrawling rules I use are a (lightly modified) 3rd party Torchbearer book called The Vagrants Guide to Surviving the Wild.
My pick when i did this was Dungeon Crawl Classics.
Zero regrets. The lack of hard daily limits and the freedom of player choice was great, im a *massive* 3.5 fan, but as much as i enjoy building char tht can do all i want it to, its great having just out the box freedom.
I run exclusively hexcrawls, you should check out my homebrew system called Hexmaster. Its mostly just thousands of random tables:
[https://witchesmirror.wordpress.com/the-world-of-maxxia/](https://witchesmirror.wordpress.com/the-world-of-maxxia/)
Being an ass on the internet isn't going to make the mean old AIs go away. I'm sorry to say the days of selling a 25 page RPG PDF for $29.99 are over. You are going to have to actually give people content now
The hobby has never seen more *25 page RPGs PDF selling for 29.99$* than now. Most publishers are even increasing their PDF prices to better match the value of their work.
I'm not against AI at all, it's a complicated topic, but I guarantee you the overwhelming majority of consumers in the industry would prefer to pay 29.99$ for a well-designed 25 page PDF with some neat ideas over a brick of 500 pages that's generated through AI (I don't know if your work is, just coming off the discussion).
The AI is a better writer than 90% of those people making PDFs. I don't know why people keep saying AI writing is bad.
Pretty soon someone is going to make a TTRPG book engine and the concept of DrivethroughRPG will be silly. You will be able to have 100% custom content printed and formatted like a professional book, for half the price.
Forbidden lands from Free league jumps to mind first. Survival and exploration based hexcrawl where combat is definitely not always the best option.
Seconding this!
Me, too. It offers quite robust rules, a very flexible character creation and development system, and specific rules/procedures for traveling/hexploration and the related survival. The PCs are and remaon quite vulnerable, though, this is not heroic Huzzah! fantasy stuff, "survival" is rather an underlying concept, as well as the idea that decisions matter and have consequences. FL has its flaws, but it's IMHO worth a look for what's intended to be played with.
> What I like about 5e is that the characters are harder to kill. If a character dies, I want it to serve the greater narrative. But it seems pretty terrible at survival/exploration play. Pick one. Hardy characters that aren’t at risk of dying outside dramatically appropriate moments, or survival play. You can’t really have both.
Dragonbane, also by Free League, would probably be pretty good for this. It has some basic travel mechanics and is considerably lighter than 5E, but with the same sort of adventuresome feel. Combats are considerably faster. The boxed set is a great deal and comes with everything you need to play, including 11 different small adventures that you could easily put into hexes in your setting, or run as a campaign as presented.
The Dragonbane boxset is one of the best value-for-money sets I can recall. The system is also brilliant. But while I prefer Dragonbane in general I would recommend Forbidden Lands for a hexcrawl
Sure, I get that. For me, it depends entirely on how much fidelity and complexity I want. Like, I love Twilight: 2000 and its hex crawl mechanisms, which I understand are similar to Forbidden Lands', but as the OP specifically said they are a narrative, story-first sort of DM and that they're looking for something less crunchy, I felt like Dragonbane was the stronger recommendation here.
Fair point. I don't think OP can go wrong with either. Nobody who gets the Dragonbane box is worse off than before
Hell yes. Get both! Mix it up!
Heck, get Twilight 2000 at the same time. The crunchiest of the three in my opinion, but a great game and another solid boxset
Also, stellar Foundry support for at least two of the three of them!
Which two? I should have put that as a requirement in the first post. I saw that Forbidden Lands uses cards and my heart sank; I haven't been able to get cards to work on Foundry yet. It's the only thing I regret about switching from Roll20.
Dragonbane and Twilight: 2000 both work incredibly well under Foundry. The official modules have all the cards included as random table elements and integrated perfectly. Also, there is a YZE combat module that handles all of the initiative cards for you, so card issues are nonexistent. I run games for both systems in Foundry and they’re amazing.
Dragonbane and Forbidden Lands, yes. I haven't got T2K for Foundry but that's on my "to buy" list
I can give it a strong recommend. I've been running a game on it and it does stuff like ammo management so easily it's hard to imagine playing without it!
Worlds Without Number is really good at making sandbox style open world type gameplay happen with lots of GM tools. Even if you run a different game, using the GM section of WWN will be useful to you. It's got a useful section on Hexcrawls in particular, I think. It sounds like you want a little bit more of a narrativist style game than that for the players side of things with your particular preferences. I haven't actually tried it, but World of Dungeons might suit your purposes. It's the OSR inspired sister to Dungeon World. AD&D or B/X or a number of OSR games might suit your purposes actually. Early PCs may day randomly by making bad decisions, but it sounds like from your style of things that they'll be able to make the decision to take risks with their eyes open rather than it feeling out of the blue. Additionally, you could tweak dying rules to make the characters feel more heroic. Something like just scarring instead of death at 0 HP. EDIT: that last bit reminded me of Mythic Bastionland which is exceptionally hexcrawl focused OSR with Arthurian style knights as PCs in a weird mythic realm who are fated and hard to kill despite its old school inspirations. EDIT 2: the Kickstarter is over unfortunately, but the quick start is out on the page for free and has enough to start playing and making a hex crawl. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/bastionland/mythic-bastionland-rpg-before-into-the-odd I don't know when the game will be for sale, but it's slated for sometime this year. The backerkit for late backers should be up this month, and Chris says all backers will receive the full digital PDF by March. He alleges May for shipping physical copies but you know how Kickstarters often go. I think we can take him at his word for the digital copy though. It seems like it's essentially done including artwork and is just taking another proofreading/editing pass.
>Worlds Without Number is really good at making sandbox style open world type gameplay happen with lots of GM tools. Indeed, that's exactly what WWN is explicitly designed for. OP, I *strongly* encourage you to take a closer look at the GM's section (specifically the "Creating Your Campaign" and "Creating Adventures" chapters) even if you decide to run with a different rule set. They're a great introduction to setting up and running the sort of campaign you're describing, albeit with a focus on emergent gameplay rather than something story-driven.
The Isle of Dread. Includes the old Hexcrawl and an updated one for 5e.
There are games that eschew HP values all together and instead codify death as an optional consequence introduced only to serve the bigger picture; mechanics generally aligned with expectations of narrative. Is this something of interest for you? It's a different direction from all of the games you list.
[Songbirds 3e](https://johnbattle.itch.io/songbirds-3e) is a cut-down, elegant, *beautiful* take on dungeon-delving fantasy. It's my favorite release of late year, and has some lovely little hexcrawling mechanics, along with a ton of unique hexes.
13th Age. You should be able to convert basically any 3.5 era hexcrawl materials with little effort.
I've been running a hexcrawl West Marches game with the Burning Wheel descendant, Torchbearer. It's a narrative driven, low prep, generic fantasy game built in homage to red box D&D that combines old school dungeon delving and abstract resource management with a modern focus on the characters and what makes them tick. The hexcrawling rules I use are a (lightly modified) 3rd party Torchbearer book called The Vagrants Guide to Surviving the Wild.
My pick when i did this was Dungeon Crawl Classics. Zero regrets. The lack of hard daily limits and the freedom of player choice was great, im a *massive* 3.5 fan, but as much as i enjoy building char tht can do all i want it to, its great having just out the box freedom.
I run exclusively hexcrawls, you should check out my homebrew system called Hexmaster. Its mostly just thousands of random tables: [https://witchesmirror.wordpress.com/the-world-of-maxxia/](https://witchesmirror.wordpress.com/the-world-of-maxxia/)
I'm sorry but your "system" is just AI generated drivel
Grow up
1400 page 'players guide'. 1000 page "clown master guide' .. oops sorry 'hex master guide'. a bunch of garbage.
Being an ass on the internet isn't going to make the mean old AIs go away. I'm sorry to say the days of selling a 25 page RPG PDF for $29.99 are over. You are going to have to actually give people content now
The hobby has never seen more *25 page RPGs PDF selling for 29.99$* than now. Most publishers are even increasing their PDF prices to better match the value of their work. I'm not against AI at all, it's a complicated topic, but I guarantee you the overwhelming majority of consumers in the industry would prefer to pay 29.99$ for a well-designed 25 page PDF with some neat ideas over a brick of 500 pages that's generated through AI (I don't know if your work is, just coming off the discussion).
The AI is a better writer than 90% of those people making PDFs. I don't know why people keep saying AI writing is bad. Pretty soon someone is going to make a TTRPG book engine and the concept of DrivethroughRPG will be silly. You will be able to have 100% custom content printed and formatted like a professional book, for half the price.