Three-sentence Hexes

04 Sep, 2026

Editing the Antarctic Adventure Anthology has precipitated many ideas about how to steer the future of the project.

Earlier this year, I wrote a mild polemic against overly dense hex stocking. I wrote it because I genuinely prefer maps with empty hexes, but the argument matters to me because "completing" the Antarctica map is only really achievable if there are empty hexes. After a year-long jam, we have just shy of 2,500 PoIs, so keying every hex at this rate would take 44 years. Thankfully, most participants were already incorporating unkeyed hexes -- regions of the map designated as "finished" or "playable" cover 10,000 hexes¹ -- only a decade to go!

Blue points are keyed hexes as of 9/4/26.

As jam coordinator/initiator I'm trying to figure out ways to shrink the problem of 110,000 empty hexes into something achievable. Decreased stocking density rapidly reduces the size of the task, but there is a limit to how sparse you can go. (I personally favor 1-in-11 on average, aiming for a nice round 10,000 PoIs with modulated density -- fewer in the big empty tundra, more along the coasts and mountains).²

There's another direction from which to attack the problem: just write faster. To that end, I've been experimenting with an arbitrary limit of three sentences per hex. I've knocked out 162 keyed hexes, because if I'm going to (gently) steer people toward writing shorter hexes it behooves me to demonstrate what that can look like.

You can read them at the links below (note that they're not thoroughly edited, and some formatting stuff on the webmap is WIP -- emojis in the text are usually a cue for Typst to auto-link to an appendix; also, some explanatory NPC captioning is hiding in the alt-text):

• The Msitmar Highlands
• The Greabe
• The Free Cantons
• The Thnab Archipelago
• Emit Jalyugath
• The Bay of Ambivalence
• Joywind (not entirely 3-sentence hexes, but it was where I started playing with the idea).

Gloss

A loose formula works well enough:

1. The first sentence establishes a physical detail and/or concrete facts of the hex. When players arrive at a hex, the first thing they will experience is that detail -- the village consists of cone-shaped huts, the castle commands a barren outcropping, etc. Population and number of monsters in lair should be worked in as well.
2. The second sentence adds something unique or weird about the hex. If using Wolves hexfills, this sentence incorporates modifiers like "boon/ally", "hostile", "relationship to nearby hex", etc. If nothing is specified, it can just be a funny detail about the landscape, architecture, clothing/customs, something unique about a monster, etc.
3. The third sentence either details a unique NPC or treasure cache, or elaborates on the second sentence.

Active voice helps, likewise avoiding "to-be" verbs. Even stationary landmarks should do something other than just exist -- they can loom, protrude, hide, tower, stretch,. lean, crumble, etc. And wherever possible, mention specific names.

A three sentence limit can be very permissive. Commas, semicolons, parentheses, and em-dashes can pack entire worlds into three sentences. Two intentionally obnoxious examples from the links above:

405-367 Blimminth Trees: Rare extrasolarian blimminth trees grow wild here -- the remains of an old orchard, tended for 712 years by a nobly-born proboscidean before he abruptly departed to try his trunk at reciting oral histories in the Zurthine courts (a profession that, despite his efforts, never (pardon the expression) bore fruit; he died penniless outside a house of ill-repute in Hex 41-288). In any case, an industrious visitor could harvest 2d4 bushels of the succulent cerulean fruit per day during the summer (each worth 300gp), but the problem is their transport -- after two days, they melt into half-fermented mush.

42-325 Castle of The Gourmand: An armiger -- clad in pale blue armor and a white shawl thrown carelessly over his helm and shoulders -- is the sole occupant of a splendid castle that boasts many flights of polished marble steps, soaring minarets, sheer battlements, lofty galleries, and arcades decorated with teratoid mosaics. He will beckon mutely, and if followed will invite guests to share a splendid meal of baked gentu stuffed with dates and chestnuts, aged wine from Hex 28-299, braised plantains on a bed of fresh-picked sorrel, mushroom-and-fennel dumplings simmered in a broth of auroch bones and rosemary, and a salad of pickled beets, capers, and candied lemon peel, followed by a course of hot jasmine tea and cold frostrice pudding (laced with nesodon cream and garnished with shaved coconut).

Upon subsequent visits the castle will have vanished, and in its place one of a variety of other buildings will occupy the lot -- a windmill, a theater, a circus tent, a warehouse, a library (shelves bare), a post office, an elementary school, a barber shop, a barracks, a hospital, a prison, etc. -- all utterly deserted.

Are three-sentence hexes playable?

1. Yes
2. sorry that's not my job
3. Even an area keyed this way doesn't meet one's standard for "playable", there's plenty of material on the map that does.

Framed another way, terse hexes are not an abdication of legwork, but a re-prioritization of legwork away from depth and toward breadth. If I'm going to write 10,000 words, I'd rather those words cover 200 hexes than 20. I see this as a worthwhile trade insofar as uniquely vast breadth is the "selling-point" of the Antarctica hexcrawl.

As a final bit of apologia for short hexes, I'll say that on an aesthetic level I love terse, gnomic game writing. A written scenario can convey information, but it can also be a catalyst for bringing forth the worlds within, and to that end less is more. A hex can answer questions, but it can also ask them. There's a very particular type of frisson I get reading things like Carcosa or 1000 Statues that I have never gotten from a more thoroughly articulated scenario.

Important concluding note

None of this is intended to denigrate the hard work of AAJ participants who have written long hexes -- the beauty of a hexcrawl is the ability to zoom in from a landscape-level scope to explore minutiae, then zoom back out. That detailed hexes are wonderful and welcome in the jam is not in question. Though I'm eager to "finish" the map, all I really want is for people to make the kinds of adventures that they find compelling, beautiful, & inspiring.

As in the case of empty hexes, it seems like most writers have a bias against approaches that seem "lazy", so my aim is merely to counteract that tendency.

#aaj #game-design #musings