Daniel (@dungeondive) demonstrates how to set up a hex crawl sandbox campaign by walking through town creation step by step. He establishes Seto’s Mill as a hometown — reimagined as a feudal village taken over by eastern heroes who fell through a void gate — with its destruction serving as a lose condition.
The town setup process uses dice rolls to determine size, type, traits, and locations. Neighbouring Wilson’s Lodge emerges as a size-8 mining town on a river with a black market trait, containing a sheriff’s office, general store, mutant quarters, blacksmith, gambling hall, saloon, and street market. Each town gets three jobs from the d100 jobs board and one mission tied to a specific mine.
The real magic comes in the storytelling layer Daniel builds on top. He demonstrates how a simple job — “Dirty Cheats” requires traveling to towns with gambling halls to gather clues — can seed NPC relationships and narrative threads. He shows how the game’s unused orange tokens become story-generating components, drawing random chits (lasso, journal pages, explosives) and improvising quest chains that connect towns, mines, and characters.
Daniel shares how he previously ran a campaign where a blacksmith’s fetch quest led into the Derelict Ship, uncovering books about Belial that became the campaign’s boss-hunt arc — all emerging organically from hex crawl’s framework.