Frugal GM Review: Hexbox

After reviewing the Hexed Places: Crescent Lake a couple weeks ago, DriveThruRPG evidently thinks I need to see more hexcrawl "stuff" and suggested Hexbox.

At first I was a little "meh" on even looking at Hexbox, mostly because there was little to no useful information in the product's previews......but the PDF was free, so why not?

Hexbox is a little over 1 MB in size and consists of 59 unsecured pages that are 6" x 9" in size. The PDF is also bookmarked, which is a must for a product like this.

While Hexbox is clearly written for D&D 5th Edition, I could easily see modding this to work with other systems without too much difficulty. There are a couple of worksheets included and there is a helpful link to downloading separate log sheets from the writer's website.

Hex crawls are relatively new to me and Hexbox did a lot to educate me on possibly running a hex crawl campaign, not that I'm planning to, but with this guidance I think I could. The only real problem I had with this product was some sort of nagging in the back of my mind that this could easily have been written system-neutral, which would allow the writer to shave off three pages of Open Game License.

Of course, I could be quite wrong on this front...wouldn't be the 1st time.

There are only two color pages in this PDF, the front cover and a small hex map on page 40. I think I'd rather have seen the page 40 map in black & white to match the rest of the book and at 59 pages I think a nice back cover could have been included, bringing up the page count to an even (and US Letter booklet printing appropriate) 60 pages.

Because this material is not only new, but a bit foreign (5th Edition) to me, I suspect I'm going to have to re-read this a few more times and figure out how to include some of my other hex crawl resources. After, or if, I get to mark up my copy of Hexbox to make it work for generic OSR games I may have to come back and revise my rating...