The Culture: The Bros Deliver A Go-To Article On Making Exploration Easy And Fast

RDubs published a fantastic article on Twitter, "Exploring the Wilderness with Judges Guild".

Original Dungeons and Dragons (OD&D), released in 1974, laid the foundation for modern tabletop role-playing games, emphasizing exploration, combat, and storytelling in fantasy worlds. A key aspect of OD&D was wilderness exploration, often represented through hex maps; gridded maps where each hex represents a specific area, typically 5 miles across, filled with terrain, encounters, and secrets. These maps allow Dungeon Masters (or Referees) to create immersive worlds for players to explore beyond dungeon walls.

The process began with the Judges Guild Hexagon Campaign System, a 1977 supplement for OD&D that provided gamemasters with blank hex grids and random generation tables for creating wilderness terrain. Each hex in the system represents a 5-mile area; broken down into .2 mile subhexes, with tables for determining features like rivers (Hydrographic Terrain), movement obstacles, flora (e.g., trees), and fauna (e.g., monsters). This system was part of Judges Guild’s broader effort to expand OD&D with detailed campaign settings, such as the Wilderlands of High Fantasy Campaign Hexagon System - Wikipedia.

Read that. Use that. Applicable to AD&D1e directly, to other D&D editions less so as you get closer to Current Edition (and that goes for the knockoffs also). Other games will have more difficulty in applying this, but it can be applied. This is another example of how hobby culture should be: expert instruction--not opinion, instruction--given away because the hobby is better off by doing so.