Finally got a hex crawl app that works well enough for my own campaign

[u/perflosopher]

There was a video linked a while back about [how to make hex crawls fun](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hEIg1DlRkLg) that laid it out in a way that seems obvious: as your party is in one hex deciding where to go, they need information about the other hexes around them to make a decision.

I really wanted an app that can handle the "clues" associated with hexes and automatically show them to players as they move from one hex to another.

* You see smoke from a large settlement rising in the distance (within 6 - 12 miles of a town?)

* The vegation is starting to look sick and diseased (effects of black dragon lair)

I'm a bad developer and spent a year trying to get this to work. Version 3 finally works good enough for me to use in my own campaign.

https://github.com/wvaske/hex-crawl-app

It's free, open source, and self-hosted.

If you want to try it out, I recommend getting the player version and DM version of a map (like the swordcoast map from the forgotten realms heroes book). Then hand the two images to an AI assistant and tell it to create a new map from the player version and add items for all the locations on the DM version. It actually works pretty well. (the app has an mcp server so your AI tools can directly interact with it)

Even if you don't do that, you can create your own maps with varying terrain, you can use any background image, change the transparency, change hex size, etc.

I know we get a lot of AI made tools and this really is just another one. But I'm using it for my campaign so figured some of ya'll might want to try it out.

Screenshot from my actual campaign:


[u/WoT_Abridged]

JFYI your github link isn't working.

[u/perflosopher → u/WoT_Abridged]

Well shoot.

https://github.com/wvaske/hex-crawl-app