Fantastic system. I honestly was building a game setting and was doing it manually. Took me like a week to get progress. Found this book, and did the same in a few hours. It's a lifesaver. It can help with terrain, but if you already have a map, this makes it WAY easier to populate it

I really like this product, there is a LOT of information in it for designing maps used for hex crawls. And I am starting to make use of it. Up front I want to let you know that the tile is slightly misleading. It is multisystem, period. Actually it is system neutral.

This is not a book that you will enjoy reading cover to cover, rather it is designed to be dipped into in for the information you need at a specific time. The problem is, until I had read a good chunk, I hadn't realized that. The book is in desperate need of a solid introduction with practical guidance on how to use it. Oh, it has an introduction with some useful information, but it doesn't tell you how to use the material to put together a hex or a series of hexes. Rather it spends its time describing the table of contents (repeatedly), and overviews the physical layout of each topic.

Using the author's Toolkit metaphor, it is like giving someone a fully stocked tool kit with a page of instructions that essentially say "We're glad you want to build a house, many of these tools will be useful to you. Use those that you need." Followed by a sheet of instructions for each tool in isolation, one for a hammer, one for a toe nailing jig, and one for a jackhammer. Each one includes "Don't use this if you don't want to, don't poke this in your eye, do use this if it sounds interesting, you can change your mind, ..." These repeated statements make it tedious to read, and the lack of an overarching design process makes it hard to know where to start.

I was expecting more along the lines of "These are the seven decisions you need to make up front. Then for each hex you design you need to do this, then that, and then you may want to do a couple of these other things. Repeat." For me, an explicit tree structure would have been better than a flat list of topics.

One minor quibble, what's with all the icons? Every time there is a key word in bold it is accompanied by a tiny, almost illegible, icon. Personally I find them distracting and of zero value. "Keep in Mind" in bold by itself tells me to keep something in mind. The associated tiny thought cloud adds nothing.

In all, I am satisfied with the product now that I'm understanding how it is used and how I need to navigate it. There is a lot of good, useful information in here, just be prepared to spend time understanding how to effectively read it to use it. Personally, I'm pulling out the key tables into my Obsidian Vault so that I can lay them out how they make sense to me.

I love how this author is using all these charts and criteria to help my Hex Crawl experience. For years, I had tried to do similar work as author J. Evans Payne and even though I think I do a good job, Payne does it better than me. Payne uses color codes and symbols which really helps the visual learner (like myself) and that is something I could never do. I also love how just about every chart has a thorough breakdown and explanation of its elements. If I had to be critical at all, I would say it is an overwhelming amount of data and information, but I would rather have more than I need, and not use some of it, than to need something and not have access to it. I thought I was only going to buy this one book from Payne, but I am growing to be a fan of his and now have three books and a handful of his PDF works. This author does a really good job writing books for ALL levels of understanding. He is one of 2 or 3 Solo D&D (and other TTRPG) pioneers out there today and I will endorse any product that makes my game more fun.

Although it is great that this book offers some random tables and mechanics to build a hexcrawl around, I feel that this book adds too much filler, making it hard to find the useful content. And even the useful content may sometimes be subpar.

For example, the book follows a convention where each chapter is preceded by some discussion about where the contents of that chapter can be useful or desirable. However, 99% of the discussion is not helpful because it is obvious: yes, I know that I need time to plan an adventure if I go with the approach where I plan my game.

Another example is the attempt to provide assistance for encounter building, which felt a bit uninspired. For the "environmental encounter" chapter, for example, there are basically 3 "types" of environmental encounters which scarcely even touch the surface of the types of environment encounters one may find. When trying to build such an all-encompassing advice, it is probably best to stick to loose ideas that a DM can fill in with their creativity.

On the other hand, some important questions may require careful digging to find because they are not emphasized. For example, the density of POIs means nothing if we don't know how many hexes a player can cover in a day (or some other similar benchmark), why can't the author state their expectations about the map scale when discussing POI distribution? Why does the author instead dedicate so many words to establish the implications and "when to use" sparse/medium/dense? From a game design perspective, the DM cares a lot about the interplay between replenishing resources (through rest perhaps?) and encountering new POIs (especially hostile), which is not discussed. Beyond that, it is just to evoke some feeling in that particular area of the map.

All in all, I don't think this book is worth the price. It contains a lot of filler that manages to not offer value to both detailistic and non-detailistic DMs alike. If you are patient enough (and if you keep good notes for future reference), you can probably find the actual useful game mechanics that the author is proposing. Perhaps you can even find something in the discussion that you didn't think about before. However, you will probably find it very necessary to supplement this book with content from other sources.

Edit (answering the author; apologies if you cannot reply to this, I have no idea how DriveThru works):

Thanks for taking the time to answer to my review. I know that writing a book is a very daunting endeavour and I know that I personally am very bad at giving feedback. I hope you can find good use for what I am saying in future publications.

I tried to incorporate a lot of handholding and explanation into each topic, mainly due to a lot of helpful feedback from the Solo Adventuring Toolkit asking for that sort of thing explicitly. (...)

I understand the intent, if nothing else my experience is an indication that it is currently a bit overwhelming to find the meat of the content, i.e. I think you ended up taking that feedback too much to heart. It's definitely not easy to balance the feedback of many people.

The environmental encounter chapter is a snippet of the larger Environmental Encounters book, and isn't intended to be all-encompassing. (...)

I definitely missed the section that specifically pointed out to draw from other sources because the title of that section is sort of obvious: yes, I will draw from all the sources, of course. However I still hold that the information could have been presented in a more useful way.

For example, the Questions & Options bit is very skippable, probably the "avoid at higher levels" part is the most important tip. You don't have to say that if the flavor the DM is going for is for more exploration, than exploring the environment should be emphasized because the DMs that specifically took the decision to have more exploration will figure this out. Unless they chose more exploration for the wrong reasons, when they would happily have only combat encounters, which in the end was what they wanted to begin with.

Also this section is supposedly not meant for beginners, so you can just say that in the intro and then be address only the experienced DMs, describing everything else more succintly, e.g. "Here are just a few options, but please look elsewhere for more stuff."

It seems that you became a victim of the organization you planned in the beginning. But I understand it came from a good place.

"if we don't know how many hexes a player can cover in a day" Honestly confused about this point, as there's an entire extensive section in the book that discusses this topic in great detail, offering lots of options and specific metrics, with plenty of visual examples, and addresses the topic in the context of the full variety of the basic terrain types.

I understand that there is a lot of info about that. But my point is exactly that it takes a lot of work to fish for that particular tidbit which is so so important for a noob DM (like I sort-of am too).

What I am saying is this: I want to pace the encounters / POIs in a way that makes sense to how the game mechanics of the system I am playing work. For example, as a D&D 5e DM, I am limited by a XP daily budget, so it doesn't make sense to throw too many medium encounters in a day. So if a player goes in a straight line, they shouldn't find more than 8 medium encounters (at least not if I don't want the players to slow down).

Therefore, I need some guidance as to how to distribute the POIs. (Giving a random table is a good start, but without a notion of the amount of in-world time a hex represent that is not complete, maps will look completely different at different scales following the same random table)

If I am new to hexcrawling (which I am) and I follow the "Required Only" checklist, I will not stumble in any tips regarding map scale. So I could easily make the mistake of creating a map where every hex is traversable in 10 min (again, no indication to the contrary following the "required only" checklist) which is a reasonable time frame if I am clueless and I have heard of 5e's "dungeon turn".

I just need some sane default that works well with my system. Maybe there could be a throwaway line that says that hexes are expected to be such and such size and/or traversable in such time. What I was suggesting was a different perspective that is system independent: describe how many hexes player characters are expected to traverse on foot in a day. And later point out that if you have any custom needs, there is a whole discussion in Chapter X.

I didn't reproduce that section again in the POI discussion because it was already discussed. "not offer value to both detailistic and non-detailistic DMs alike" Each of us is, of course, free to determine what we find valuable or not, and your own perspective is clear. (...)

I am a sucker for realism and game design. I read the book "Magical Medieval Society" by Joseph Browning and Suzi Yee and a lot of other books with random tables and tips for building adventures and encounters.

What I was trying to convey there was that even a detailed-oriented person like me that loves discussion on game design or just more realistic worldbuilding will not find value in some of the discussions in the book because so many of it is skippable.

But after studying dozens of similar resources, books, toolsets, blogs, and other resources, I can say with confidence that there is absolutely nothing that comes close to this book in terms of completeness, detail, options, creativity, or guidance--that nothing exists in this vein already is literally why I was inspired to write this book in the first place.

I respect your intent to fill this gap, of course.

I would be genuinely curious as to what other hexcrawl resources do fit your needs (not intended as snark--literally, please do tell me what other books on the topic you have found more helpful, so I can go buy them!).

I didn't find any so far. But I can improvise something by adapting any system of encounter building that covers combat, environment, social, etc and basically populate the world based on that. My hope with the book was to find something more directed at hexcrawling, which the book has. My complaint is mostly about how it is hard to find that information because there is what I understand as "filler".

Some final feedback: I think that making information more easily skippable would be helpful. I understand that there is conventions in the book to help with that, but even those conventions can work against you sometimes. Maybe there should be a section for just the new DMs, which everyone can skip on a second read (perhaps you can use the current conventions as a checklist to what you should cover in that section). The outline of a chapter should be mostly to help find content after that.

Also please do not expect the reader to remember the extensive list of conventions that are described in the introduction. Aim to make it as obvious as possible to understand what is written without having to rely on the icons because I sure won't remember what they mean.

Another fantastic huge an through publication in the FlexTale line from Infinium Game Studios. Seriously, this is the Holy Grail to executing a unique campaign centered around hex maps & rules. There is literally a table, rule, or tool for almost anything a DM/GM could dream up. The compatibility across multiple rulesets & the options/flexibility of the framework described in this books really opens up the aperture.

As a new DM, I've already employed some of the features of this in my existing campaign with great effect, and that's just a few days after skimming over some sections of interest. One thing that I absolute love is the focus on campaign organization & the tips it provides throughout the text on how to efficiently run a campaign from session to session.

As a busy guy with an even busier group, I really appreciate the minimization of prep time that some of the content here affords.

Overall I look forward to a cover-to-cover readthrough of this book, it's so well organized & easy to follow I can imagine it will make for a quick favorite addition to DM tool kits everywhere.

Another hefty and satisfyning portion of RPG goodness from Infinium. The book has the depth of content you will have come to expect, and like with so many of the flextale offerings, it provides ample inspiration to ponder for your own game, or the games that you will 'definitely get around to fully building out and running one day" ;-)

Great product. Infinium contnues to put out high quality guides. This book really focused on giving different strategies to both first-time and vet hex mappers a way to get started. Particualrly, the Encounters section is comprehensive enough to allow even a new DM to host a complete hex with this book alone. Sure to delight players and DMs alike!

crazy stuff. ive wanted to run hex game forever but base games dont have a lot of rules for it. this is biggie and prolly too much for what i wanna do, but makes it ez to ignore stuff i dont care about or need. i like the stuff on using maps from modules and its huge on adding stuff and making stuff in sesh with no prep. i have the infinite adv and solo book and it all goes together dope. highly recommend