The OSR is trapped in Hexes it is addicted to Jaquaysing
So you wanna build a hexcrawl kid?
In the online spaces I travel the hex crawl has become one of the most common formats suggested for structuring a campaign. There's a lot of merit to the format: it makes it easy to measure the time it takes to move between different positions, it can be used to help resolve "war games" on the overworld, it can clarify geopolitics in domain play. My issue is that a lot of the advice seems confused between how to use a hexcrawl to run a campaign vs. how to use a hexcrawl for a product. Lots of people are concerned with, for example, laying out all the hexes ahead of time, filling every single hex with "gameable" content, much text has been typed about how to write individual hexes (bullet points vs. prose, for instance)—valuable conversations, but majoring in the minors when it comes to playing the game.
The problem is that so much of that advice is, accidentally, caught between what you actually need to play and what would be expected in a product. This is in part because many of the hobbyists I game with exist between those two spaces—they both make products and run games; those don't make products either are aspirational creators or are exposed to "product best practices" that don't apply for the home campaign. More clarity in our language is needed; are we talking about a product (I.e, in this case a complete hexcrawl) or a campaign?
Because a complete hexcrawl (Wolves Upon the Coast) is not a campaign—it is a roadmap. The referee needs to use a separate set of skills to elaborate on that roadmap and bring it to life in play. A good hexcrawl provides the legwork to help facilitate refereeing, but it does not supplant those skills. When hobbyists trying to get a game off the ground think they need a complete hexcrawl ahead of time or begin to follow best practices for a product they can get lost in the sauce. Instead of starting with a hexcrawl, ask: what are we actually doing here?
Chris Kutalik does an excellent job exploring the "whys" of different formats. Hexcrawls, pointcrawls, world maps: all are valuable tools. The map is not the territory. In my own experience starting from a hex map can ossify the campaign in an unsatisfactory way; starting from a broad, hand drawn world map then needling down into a local map of a given adventure area provides a lot more sauce for the dish; likewise I've had more success starting with very big, vague hex maps and defining them as I go. When I use a hand drawn map I don't think in terms of "distinct game units" but in terms of possible adventures, and the imagined space—it works better for me. The point is that everyone will have a different process, and there is a need to know why a given tool is being used over another one. Some people don't really know there are other tools—if you came into the OSR during peak hexcrawl, you may know about the point crawl, or other methods of representing the game world, but it may never seriously occur to you to use them, or to interleave different formats into the campaign as needed. Nothing is promised; still past wisdom is forgotten.
The way hexcrawls have been thought about has also shifted overtime. The original Expert book provides guidelines that are very different than ones I often read on blogs or in discussions now. The book suggests providing a broad swathe of geography, noting major cities and dungeons, and filling the rest as you go; monster lairs are left up to the "lair %" chance in their statblock, unless the ref wants to hand place something otherwise. It's left a canvas, and focuses on concepts over details—the advice is geared toward a living world rather than a world immediately communicable to others. Beyond the Wall is similar but different: the players come up with minor and major locations in general cardinal directions that the referee hand places; then once major locations are done the referee brainstorms and comes up with more locations and fills in the contents of the world as desired—almost nothing is generated randomly.
Likewise, the advice to begin with just three hexes is classic: how much game can be contained within three hexes? How many fractals? Not geography alone, nor just villages, but whole Mandogs—then individual homes, each an adventure; mouseholes that contains dreams, dreams that have shapes of their own, and more little love stories than stars.
I also take issue with the hexcrawl as a default recommendation because they can be frustrating to access. You need hex patterned paper or software, and the software sucks and the hex patterned paper may be difficult to find at local stores. Using pen and paper is, for most, preferable to using a program because it is less limited; if you've never laid out campaign or planned your sessions using maps drawn and keyed on paper I highly recommend it. It creates an artifact of the game, and is necessarily more flexible in practice because you can hold it in your hands.
Dogma is less useful than shit.
Topic number 2 now begins: why do you think Jennell Jaquaysed her dungeons? Because she read a blogpost, or was told it "increases player agency?" No—she applied critical thinking and put real consideration into making interesting and evocative spaces to explore. Many, many zungeons thrown together for cynical GameJams hosted just to make unpaid content for new ItO clones violate the basic precepts needed to make a space interesting to explore by taking a small space (8-10 rooms) and connecting them all in loops—the problem is that if everything in such a small space is connected there is no actual choice here, players may as well pick a direction with a dice roll. Compare this to, for instance, the first level of The Caverns of Thracia: it is laid out in three or so paths which connect at certain junctures; while some of these paths have a degree of internal "Jaquaysing" they are by and large linear and funnel the player deeper into the dungeon.
There are problems in the online culture of OSR play because it includes the kind of people who use "X" and "Bluesky" and love to xweet takes—so much of the conversations are basically performative, many participants (even major ones) do not really play the game. Others selling products have a vested interest in promoting "their school" of design, which is inevitably a bunch of horseshit. Amidst all these circling xweets people who really do want to play are misled: they think in circles about how to start an RPG campaign, even though it is really a very simple thing that children constantly do to better success than adults.
Run your own campaign, use the faculties of your own mind to put together something wonderful for you and your players, and if someone with a Patreon gives you any advice do exactly the opposite.