Magic Hexcrawls

Magic: the Gathering is fertile ground for hexcrawl generation.

Grab a Commander deck. If you know what MtG is, you either have one or you have strong opinions on why you don’t. The 100-card deck should have approximately 35-40 land cards, with the rest as various types of spell. Shuffle the deck, including the commander card.

Reveal cards from the top of the deck until you reveal a land card. Stack all those cards underneath the land.

Then, repeat this process to create another pile beneath that land card. Continue until you’ve completed a column of several piles, then start another column staggered half a card-length lower.

Make the next column start at the height of the first column, and continue making columns in this way until you’ve run out of cards in the deck.

In front of you there should now be nearly 40 land cards, each covering between zero and many spell cards. Each land card is a hex, and each other card beneath it represents a feature of the area — perhaps a roving creature, a band of NPCs, a strange weather effect, a structure, or a piece of loot.

Take the pile of Plumb the Forbidden, Fiend Hunter, and Sun Titan beneath the land card Command Tower -- a daemon-hunter seeks the forbidden secrets of a tower from which a giant rules the surrounding hexes with an iron fist. The Access Tunnel hex to its northeast has, among other things, a secret entrance to the lowest levels of the tower, while the Battlefield Forge to the north is a titan-scale armory where the Sun Titan smiths its great weapons. Local soldiers make pilgrimages to worship its martial prowess at the Temple of Triumph (though as no other cards were revealed beneath the Temple, it's the off-season and no one's yet in town), while the Bloodstained Mire to the south lies unquiet as a memorial to those who once attempted to resist. The two mountain hexes to the southeast make up part of a long mountain range, and the Caves of Koilos to their north/northeast delve deep within their hearts.

Legendary cards like your commander are fertile ground for quests, faction leaders, rivals, or villains. Instant and sorcery spells are well-represented as events — a Murder is a recent murder, a Lightning Bolt a recurring storm, a Wrath of God an ongoing inquisition.

If there’s a pile of 4 or more cards in the land, put a settlement there. Lands with names that mention settlements aren’t necessarily populated; a Nomad Outpost with no other spells might be abandoned.

Land art can also inform the contents of a hex. If it’s one of the Ravnican lands that depicts a swathe of the plane’s ecumenopolis (such as the Boros Garrison or Rakdos Carnarium in the sample map above), perhaps place it within the ruins of an ancient city. The Clifftop Retreat has a massive statue, so it's the petrified body of another titan that the Sun Titan knew, loved, and lost to powerful magics.

Think about the material relationships between the places that have developed this way. Where do the numerous denizens go for their needs? Most commander decks play at most three of the five colors in Magic, so what’s missing from this landscape? What’s scarce, and therefore valuable?

Use creature cards in the deck (and any tokens they may make) to inform random encounter tables. You could even shuffle them up and draw from an impromptu deck in lieu of a conventional table.

Most commander decks play the card Sol Ring. That means it’ll show up in a disproportionate number of these hexcrawls. Here’s some GLOG rules for it.

Sol Ring
Ancient starlight woven into a silver torus too large for any mortal’s hand. It hums with the music of the hemispheres.
This ring provides +1 Magic Die. It emits starlight that glows through any layers of clothing or magical concealment, as well as an unmistakable static hum that cannot be silenced.