That makes a lot of sense, and I had considered it (though of course I didn’t mention that in this post). I’m still struggling with how to make this work without designing things that will never see play, and I worry that by building different ‘tracks’ there will come a point where a door closes on one of those tracks and the rest of that content will go unused. At the moment I’m playing around with different modular structures for it, though results haven’t been great so far.

I’m definitely keeping your last point in mind though. At the moment I don’t have a solution, but once I start actually building small test maps and playtesting ideas it will get a lot easier to see what does and doesn’t work.

I probably will end up with some random encounter tables. At the moment I’m thinking that rather than a standard table of ‘wandering monsters’ I’ll make small encounter tables designed to work with each PoI, so once a hex is ‘uncovered’ there will be a specific encounter table for that hex. It’s still an early thought, though, and could well change the second I realise exactly how much work that will be!

I haven’t, but I will. Thanks for the tip.

I can imagine running into scenarios where the players are exploring a part of the map and the nearby elements make it unlikely or unbelievable that they find something. Being able to shift between tracks can give the GM some encounter flexibility.

Railroading only comes in if the players decide that they want to ignore your big plot and go explore off to the north and suddenly, everything they were told was in the south is right in front of their noses.

I think you should have some random encounter tables as well, although they don’t have to be as complete as ToA’s. Just a d12 worth of things they might encounter in each biome gives the DM one more tool to make this pseudo hex crawl work.