Hex Maps Need Empty Rooms
When I was first reading The Dark of Hot Springs Island, one of the things that struck me was that the density of points of interest on the island was almost completely uniform across it. As an OSR novitiate at the time, I didn't think too much of it, but nearly a decade of play onward, I've come to realize that there's a popular style of hex map that I don't like very much - the kind that puts a point of interest in every hex.
Exploring a hex map isn't so different from exploring a dungeon, especially if you are (as I think most of those who play hexcrawls are) using abstract hexes rather than representational hexes. Each hex functions as a room in a dungeon, where you can have random encounters or interact with the contents of the hex and move through the hex border just like you would a typical exit to a dungeon room.
One of the earliest bits of advice about dungeon stocking was to leave empty rooms. As many of us have learned over the years, empty rooms don't mean there's absolutely nothing of interest inside, but I do believe that in order for a dungeon to have texture, there needs to be significant variation in how interesting each room is. This helps the dungeon feel more like a real place and it means that moving through the space feels more like how I remember my day when I look back on it — the boring drudgery is compressed and the important bits (good or bad) stand out more. This sort of spatial texture enables moving smoothly between close and distant playstyles, which is one of the things I enjoy about RPGs.
I think that an overland map benefits from the same sort of texture that a dungeon does. My favorite hexcrawls to run or GM involve moving through days in a minimum of playtime until something interesting happens, while when a group stops every few miles to faff about at the next point of interest the game starts to feel like a series of loosely linked vignettes rather than a campaign. The connective tissue begins to fail because there's too much strain on it - it could be weeks of real time cover the few days of travel between setting out on an expedition and finally arriving at the intended destination, by which time the passion that the players had for the objective there may have cooled. A map like Hot Springs Island or Dolmenwood, while packed with great ideas and encounters, is overwhelmingly dense and prone to derail play.
By letting the map breathe and giving things more space, you give more space for random encounters and travel time to give your world texture. You let the players experience the game world more like they do the real world. Leave some empty rooms on your hex map.
This post was written for Prismatic Wasteland's Maps Bandwagon.