Did you have a 5 mi / hex (old JG scale) map and utilize a lot of “random” encounters w/in the hex to determine exactly “where” the characters were on the map?

No hexes, no squares — just an open terrain map where I drew vectors to keep track of where the party was.

When you use hexes you create the illusion that once the explorers see that a hex contains “forest” you have explored the whole hex. Convenient in games that want to speed up exploration, but the opposite of what you want in a West Marches game.

OR did the players give you more “direction” than that? Something akin to: We head to this point on the map and walk north west for two hours…or until we hit a definitive terrain feature and then we turn due west for three hours… So on and so forth. Which would seem to necessitate a fairly granular DM’s map.

They never knew exactly where they were unless they hit a landmark, but they got very good at figuring their general location based on the marching decisions they made. The map was constantly being refined and corrected as each group passed through areas again.

If they said “we head to this point on the map” I would say “that doesn’t mean anything to me, here’s what you see right now, describe where you are going” and they would say “march southwest into the woods for three miles, looking for a big tree” and then we’d check Wilderness Lore to see if they went anywhere close to where they intended. If I described a ridge they saw and they would point at their map and say “hey, we must be here” I would shrug and neither confirm nor deny.

I answered questions about what they could see but not meta information about where they were (unless it was exceedingly obvious).

Quick question, when your players were adventuring, at what scale did you run your (DM’s) map? In other words, how detailed did you get? Did you have a 5 mi / hex (old JG scale) map and utilize a lot of “random” encounters w/in the hex to determine exactly “where” the characters were on the map? I’m imagining (possibly incorrectly here) that you ran at a pretty fine scale…so that players were able to make sense of their own map.

Example: “After coming off a gentle ridge in the Welkin Woods you stumble across the remains of an ancient, crumbling well…”

If the hex is larger (5 mi) then how do you determine if they actually have stumbled across a specific feature?

Oh and also, if you’ve got the energy or the time would it be possible to get a small excerpt of how you managed the “adventuring” through the wilderness portions? Was it as simple as:
Players: We head due west, into the Welkin Woods…
DM: (rolls some dice for random determination) You walk over the gently undulating terrain, under the canopy of the ancient pines of the Welkin Woods for roughly two days and stumble across an obviously very old stone bridge…in the middle of nowhere.

All this could be pulled off w/ that 5 mi. hex I would think.

OR did the players give you more “direction” than that? Something akin to: We head to this point on the map and walk north west for two hours…or until we hit a definitive terrain feature and then we turn due west for three hours… So on and so forth. Which would seem to necessitate a fairly granular DM’s map.

Hope I’m making at least a little sense here.

This is some of the coolest gaming stuff I’ve ever seen Ben. I just wish that I had the time and players to run such a thing. I’m planning on running a bastardized version though…So any information I can get on the “how” is always illuminating.

Kudos

You mean the Frankenstein player table-map? Of course!

But like I said in another comment, the surface details of the game is not what makes it interesting. I could go on all day about the topography of the Goblin’s Teeth / Cradle Wood / Battle Moors zone, but it wouldn’t sound any different than anyone else’s game.

The procedure was the thing: the process in-play and the dynamic between the players and GM.