Reading “So You Want To Be a Game Master” by Justin Alexander continues to reap insight. Over lunch today, I ventured into the last main chapter on Pointcrawls and realised that Fellmyr is unwittingly running with this structure. While I aspire to Hexcrawl, the game isn’t playing that way… and that’s ok.

When I started to set-up Fellmyr I was thinking, “This will be an Expert D&D hexcrawl game.” After the first couple of sessions, I had dialled that back to, “This is a Basic D&D dungeoncrawl game.” This was because I needed to get playing quickly and I was introducing new gamers so I kept things simple.

But the aspiration was always, “This will become an Expert D&D hexcrawl game.” Until today.

Reading about Pointcrawls, I realised that although the games (for Fellmyr is not one game but three, all in the same persistent world) have moved up out of the dungeon a little, the reality is that players are focused on the map of the realm and making decisions around known locations.

They haven’t decided to go explore the wilderness yet. Until they choose to do that, it’s not going to play as a Hexcrawl. Instead, as they move between known locations – or even discover clues to currently unknown locations – their journeys will largely be all about finding the common route from A to B. This is Pointcrawling.

I am so grateful for the book and all of Justin’s experience. Even as a GM of 30 years of experience, and as a player of more than 40 years, I find wisdom and useful stuff in this book. It’s saving me a whole load of prep work and a lot of heartache.

Game on!