The Kraal
by Ramanan Sivaranjan on April 05, 2013
Zak Smith was so happy with how his previous crowd sourced hex crawl went he decided to run another. This time I actually participated, offering up a few hex descriptions of my own. All told we had 66 people writing for the project. All the more interesting, this was all organized and run on Google+, the ghost-town social network.
This project seems perfectly suited for a crowd sourced effort. The little descriptions are quite varied and creative, and producing all of them happened quite quickly. I suspect if you asked a single person to write up 400 odd hex descriptions they’d fall into a certain amount of sameness pretty quickly. This is a common complain with Carcosa, for example. Taking a bunch of junk like this and cleaning up can also be a chore, but a few people offered to help and that made the process go much quicker and probably better than it would have had one person done the editing alone.
People also did a good job expanding on each others descriptions, making the area described feel alive. I mentioned early on that in Hex 0116 a group of spies were making their way to a city just North of that Hex. I mentioned they were from a far off city in a Hex that had yet to be described. Well before we got to point that city was fleshed out other people had written about the city.
The Kraal sounds like an interesting place to run an adventure. You should check it out.
Add me to your circles and we can discuss post on on google+.