I have a couple of question regarding travelling on the Hex Map. Both my wife and I have dove headlong into Beetle Knight, and decided to have sort of our "maiden voyage" of trying to properly play it at a Game Convention last weekend but ended up getting stuck on some of the rules for hex travel and wanted to come in here to get some clarification. So, if any clarification can come for the questions below, we would both be very grateful. We want to start having some bug-sized adventures! :)
- On the layered Hex Map, the example adventure has you starting on the Forest Floor in space #8 and has Cottonnest located there. Rules for travelling to other hexes have you drawing cards from the red suites of your deck of cards to populate the various hexes, with a chance of drawing either both hearts or diamonds so that there's variety in what you can encounter. My question with this, then, is when you travel locally (leaving from Cottonnest through of one its exits to a grid directly adjacent to it for example) what do you do to populate the hex? We couldn't think of what to do except for drawing from the deck until we hit the appropriate card (in this case a King) and then populate it from there and shuffle the rest back in. This doesn't seem like what we're supposed to be doing, though, and I wanted to inquire as to if there's a correct way to populate hexes that you travel to locally as drawing from the deck is random.
- When you travel up or down a layer (such as going from the forest floor to the underground) I assume that you pop out on the same hex that you were in on the other layer, just in whatever zone you've entered now (such as going from the King hex on the Forest Floor to the King hex in the Underground) but I wasn't able to determine that for certain. If you don't pop out in the equivalent place on the other levels, I'm assuming you just draw a card to see where you go? If, as it seems, you pop out in the equivalent location from one layer to the other when travelling up or down, do you populate it with the same card you drew for the other layer (such as, we drew a King of Diamonds for the King hex on the Forest Floor, so we would then populate the King hex in Underground with that biome's entry for that same card) or is there a protocol for populating the other zone's equivalent decks?
- For generating rumors, it specifies that you are supposed to draw from the deck that you last drew from to generate the entries for the various instigators you'll be encountering. Almost exclusively, though, this ended up being the red cards (as we were travelling around the map and that meant drawing lots of red cards for the locations). That ended up with it taking a *lot* of the cards that otherwise would have generated locations and putting them into a discard pile, as well as seeming to only draw elements for the instigator from two out of the four pools of things they can use. When you draw for the instigator/rumor what do you do if that's using up cards that would be used to spawn information for hexes? When you're travelling a lot is it pretty much just guaranteed that you'll be using the red suites to generate your rumor information then, or was I doing something incorrectly?
Thank you very much for any information or insight you can give us on this. I'm super stoked to be not only dipping my toes into an awesome looking TTRPG setting, but getting to adventure in a world of bugs as I'm very much a bug lover. Having a place like this where I can directly ask questions is a massive godsend, so I thank you both for making such an exciting world to dive into and for any and all help you can give us with getting our travelling procedures squared-away.
Many thanks!
August & Mallory
Thank you for the reply! For the location, the problem I've encountered is that the hex map has each space lined up for what the corresponding card of the suite would be (i.e. 2-10, J, Q, K, A). If I'm travelling to a random space that works for drawing, as it draws the random one, but if I know what space I'm travelling into (i.e I'm moving southeast from the "8" block, so that means I'm going into the "K" block by default) how do I populate the grid without just milling through the deck until I hit the card?
Oh I see! When you travel between hexes you draw a location for each hex you enter. The card doesnt need to match the location card. For example if I move into a king space from and adjacent space, and I draw a 2 from the location deck, I’ll use the location description for the 2 on that space. In this way you generate the map as you play
That's excellent to know! We were following the letters on the hex map exactly and that kept putting us in a dead end where we had to mill the deck over and over. This should make it so that we're able to travel without hitting that issue now. Huzzah!
The last part of the question was related to rumors, as drawing for those could sort of "eat" the card that would be used for a specific grid. With the answer that you provided just now, though, that largely clears that up since hexes use whatever you draw for them. So, with rumors, the only part of the that question that I'm still not 100% on is that it seems that they'll end up getting drawn *far* more from the red suites than the black suites due to being drawn from whatever deck you last drew from, and the red suites are the ones used for travelling. Is that how it's supposed to play out, or have I misinterpreted something?
Thank you very much for your information. The hex travel makes MUCH more sense now, so we should be able to get the ball rolling on adventures now!