Pen, Dice & Paper

HEXROLL3 - Battlemap tools development

Greetings, Brave Adventurers!

Most of my hexroll development attention these days is dedicated to hexroll3. Our latest setup and playtests motivated me to explore tools that will make the new app more referee-friendly and our gaming sessions more fun.

'Dice', who was up until now always an OSR player, has recently decided to take up the DM seat in a new 5E campaign for the first time, and started providing valuable feedback from his perspective.

It is ther...

HEXROLL for 5E is now in beta and other news

Greetings Brave Adventurers,

I'm excited to announce that Hexroll-for-5E is now stable enough to transition from alpha to beta. Thank you for your support and feedback. This first full scale system conversion has been a great learning experience, helping me understand the scope and effort required for any future conversions. This was also a great opportunity to add new content and features to the OSR model.<...

Just added: 13 new monster tokens

Greetings Brave Adventurers,

Quick update: I've just rolled-out 13 new silhouette monster tokens for both hexroll.app and 5e.hexroll.app.

You can learn more on how to use tokens at https://docs.hexroll.app/playing-with-hexroll/vtt-projection. 2025-06-22 22:34:11 +0000 UTC View Post

Archvillains & Spell Components: an updated Hexroll 2E model is now live

Greetings Brave Adventurers,

Following the conversion work done for the fifth-edition model, a few cool additions have now been back-ported to the OSR one:

Archvillains & Legendary Treasure

Some monsters are now tagged as archvillains, and certain magic items are tagged as legendary. If one or more of these were generated in your sandbox, they will be highlighted on the realm page.

These can provide excellent opportunities for overarching epic st...

5E conversion is ready for brave adventurers to test-crawl. Here be dragons.

Greetings Brave Adventurers,

Today, I’m excited to share with you the alpha version of https://5e.hexroll.app, a 5E-compatible version of HEXROLL.

Frequently requested for - and inspired by our talented modding community, this modified version includes 5E (SRD-based) adaptations for:

• Monsters and encounters

• Cleric, Fighter, Rogue, and Wizard NPCs

• Equipment ...

  2025-05-23 18:10:22 +0000 UTC View Post

New! dice-roller links and improved entity renaming

Greetings Brave Adventurers,

Earlier today I rolled out a new HEXROLL 2E update, adding predefined dice roller links as part of the online text content. This cool feature, suggested by our community, makes rolling for attack, damage, or chance easier when using the built-in dice roller, both as a referee or solo player.

Another important fix was made to the title renaming feature when changing the names o...

HEXROLL3 user-experience: experiments update

Greetings Brave Adventurers,

I'm excited to share with you some of the progress I've made experimenting with new technologies for HEXROLL3.

My focus was to explore methods & tools to provide a richer & faster experience for referees & (solo) players.

I'd like HEXROLL3 to work great both as a standalone and a web application, offer versatility, future-proof the app - and most importantly, unshackle you from needing a server, should you choose so.

I experimen...

Source code for the next work-in-progress version of Hexroll is now on GitHub

Greetings Brave Adventurers!

I’m excited to share a big shift in how I build Hexroll from now on. I'm starting to break down the walls around our little code garden here in Pen, Dice & Paper; and opening things up.

From now on, the work-in-progress source code of HEXROLL3 will be on GitHub, so anyone can clone it, tinker with it, or even link it...

Development Poll #2: Which device would you like HEXROLL 3 to run on?

It's time to revisit the devices poll from (almost) two years ago so I can make the best technical decisions for HEXROLL 3 moving forward.

Choose the device you will most likely run the next version of HEXROLL on:

For HEXROLL 3E, how important to you is having it running offline?

Greetings Brave Adventurers,
I'm currently exploring ideas and technologies for HEXROLL 3E, and I'd love to get your input to help guide my decisions. This is the first question I'd like your thoughts on before moving forward.

New! export map as SVG and expanded token options

Greetings Brave Adventurers,

I've just added two new features to HEXROLL 2E this weekend that I hope you'll find useful:

Export map as SVG

You can now use the camera button in the map view to export any visible portion of your map as an SVG file. Maps will be exported using the detailed version of the tiles, regardless to your zoom level. Even if you zoom out to the continent level of a very large map, you'll still get the detailed art in the final image...

Hexroll-Backpack 0.9.15 fixes issues with macOS Sonoma

Greetings Brave Adventurers,

If you are using macOS Sonoma and have experienced hexroll-backpack crashing when opening your HBF file, please try downloading the latest build from https://hexroll.app.

The updated source files are on https://github.com/hexroll/hexroll-backpack.

Enjoy the crawl,

Ithai

HEXROLL 2E - b̶e̶t̶a̶ ̶u̶p̶d̶a̶t̶e̶ ̶#̶1̶1̶ - Released!

Greetings Brave Adventurers

With today's update, HEXROLL 2E is officially out of beta \o/

This basically means I think things are stable enough, and I think I can keep them stable enough moving forward.

In this update I made a minor tweak to map pins, making them work with any map entity, including dungeon areas and settlement locations. This will work well when using map pins as guides in a solo sessions, but not only. The only caveat is that you get only...

HEXROLL 2E - beta update #10 - solo hex crawling, map pins and quick help

Greetings Brave Adventurers,

Today's update introduces the new solo hex-crawling mode, map pins and a quick help window.

The new solo-mode generator (an online-only feature) is now available on hexroll.app. Solo-mode sandboxes have all their hexes hidden by-default. When generating a solo sandbox, you will be presented with a list of settlements or dungeons to start your character/s journey from. You can then begin expl...

HEXROLL 2E - beta update #9 - new features, descriptions and plot hooks

Greetings Brave Adventurers,

Beta update #9 is now live and it is dedicated almost entirely to new content.

Commissioned from Alex Gray (www.adgraywriting.com), one of dscryb.com most creative writers, 2E now features many additional realm plot hooks, hex descriptions and hex features.

Alex's descriptions are beautifully written and evocative. Here's a small taste:

Beneath the baking sun parched grasslands stretch in all directions, the horizon obscu...

2024-06-16 20:15:22 +0000 UTC View Post

HEXROLL 2E - beta update #8 - Smaller dungeons, more labels, and a new subscribers theme

Greetings Brave Adventurers,

Beta update #8 is now live with an option to generate smaller dungeons, some useful map orientation features, and a new flavorful map theme.

Featuring the art of Andrew Sheppard, the new map theme required a pretty strenuous optimization effort to bring out all the wonderful raster art detail in vector format. I'm super happy we're at a point where we can commission art and content, and I plan to do this more and more as we progress.

If you're ...

HEXROLL 2E - beta update #7 - Sandbox mods & editable titles

Greetings Brave Adventurers

Today's update opens up new content possibilities beyond what is and will be available when using the built-in generator model.

You can now optionally use scroll mods when generating new sandboxes to modify or extend the worlds you create in new and unique ways.

You can apply a mod by entering its unique ID (the 8 characters following scroll.hexroll.app) into the Scroll Id field when generating a new realm.

Using mods ext...

HEXROLL 2E - beta build #6 - Wilderness Battlemaps, Settlements in VTT, and a new theme!

Greetings Brave Adventurers,

Beta update #6 is now live with exciting features for everyone, and some unique features for Brave Adventurer subscribers.

Firstly, everyone now gets a battlemap in every hex. Yes, even cities, towns and villages can now be shared over VTT and have tokens placed and used with their maps. Empty wilderness hexes will also feature a 5' grid.

You can now also change the color of your tokens by double-clicking them. This feature wil...

HEXROLL 2E - modding the generator using SCROLL - part 1

Greetings Brave Adventurers

TL;DR - SCROLL beta is now available to experiment with. It will become the 'modding' tool for adding-to or modifying the 2E generator.

One of my goals is to make HEXROLL 2E as extensible as possible for content additions and modifications.

Hexroll's generator is using a specialized declarative language named Scroll. I developed Scroll specifically for the purpose of generating dynamic entities graph a...

Reveal settlement maps to players when using VTT?

This feature is already in-development - but I wanted to double check and see if/what should be the default setting that will work best for you when it's completed.

EDIT: It's 'especially cities' and not 'epsecially cities' in the second option. I apologize to the renowned and honorable epsecially cities for needlessly mentioning them in this poll :)

HEXROLL 2E - beta build #5 - No-spoilers, 3D dice and improved page editing

Greetings Brave Adventurers,

Just in time for your weekend games, here's the 5th beta update with exciting new features covering solo gameplay, VTT and content editing.

The new no-spoilers mode was added specifically for solo gaming, but is also fun around the table. You can turn no-spoilers mode on from the toggles toolbar in the hex map. When it is on, secrets in the content will be masked until you hover your mouse over them for more than a second.

I also added a 3D dic...

HEXROLL 2E - beta build #4 - table of contents, token tags and more

Greetings Brave Adventurers,

Today's beta update brings a mixed bag of new features, changes and bug fixes.

Let's take a closer look at some of them:

First in the list is the new Table of Contents page. This new page provides a convenient way to quickly navigate the entire generated world. You can access the new page from the updated breadcrumbs header in any of the sandbox pages.

For anyone using VTT, there's now an easy way to choose tokens from the list - a list t...

HEXROLL 2E Roadmap - the path ahead

Greetings Brave Adventurers,

It has been over a year since I started working on 2E and today I feel privileged to be a part of our amazing community. You play the game using a variety of systems and in different and interesting ways. This places me in a unique position to learn from everyone, get energized by everyone and continue developing and making HEXROLL better.

2E will likely stay in BETA until mid-June. I will use this time to incrementally introduce additional features,...

HEXROLL 2E - beta build #3 - subtle experience improvements

Greetings Brave Adventurers

Today's beta update brings a few subtle improvements and corrections that I had the chance to work on during this last Holiday weekend.

Keeping it short and to the point - here is the change log:

Changes:

• Hyperlinks appearing in sandbox pages are now more detectable
• Dwellings generation parameters are editable in the generator windo...
  2023-12-28 23:34:32 +0000 UTC View Post

HEXROLL 2E - what would you like to see next?

Greetings Brave Adventurers

17 months ago I asked you to help me plan hexroll next. Three of these projects are now a big part of hexroll.app.

Today I'm asking you to help me again:

What do you want to see added to 2E next?

Solo gameplay

HEXROLL will be have full fog-of-war turned on by-default. Hex crawling and dungeon crawling...

HEXROLL 2E - beta build #2 - stability and correctness

Greetings Brave Adventurers

Firstly, I'd like to welcome those of you who recently joined our adventure. Thank you! for helping make HEXROLL possible  \o/

Today's rollout is dedicated to improving stability and correctness. I'm quite happy with how the generator performs so far. More than 5,600 new sandboxes were rolled since last week, uncovering the few issues that I'm addressing today. What I'm less happy with is the reliability of our WWW hosting provider...

HEXROLL 2E is now in BETA

Greetings Brave Adventurers

I'm happy to announce that from today, HEXROLL 2E is officially in BETA.

To celebrate this, I have maxed-out all of my cheesy video making skills and made this ceremonial teaser :)

Enjoy the crawl!

- Ithai

HEXROLL 2E - alpha build #12 - the beta candidate

Hello Brave Adventurers

I've just rolled out HEXROLL 2E alpha build #12 - and I'm happy to say this is the last alpha build and the candidate to be the first BETA version \o/

Added today are a set of additional VTT tokens with for more iconic monsters. At this point HEXROLL has a very usable set of tokens that should work well for most dungeon and cave encounters.

I also added a new realm type for Islands. This new option will work well for you if you want a...

HEXROLL 2E - alpha build #11 - random weather, syndicates and more

Hello Brave Adventurers,

Today's version includes quite a few content additions and changes that will now be applied to any newly generated sandbox.

One of the things I went back and forth with during the last couple of weeks was the weather generator. I experimented with various strategies until eventually opting for 2d6 tables. I think this will allow referees to control how to apply weather according to their own season tracking strategy.

HEXROLL will now...

HEXROLL 2E - alpha build #10 - rivers direction, hex features and bug fixes

Hello Brave Adventurers,

HEXROLL's 10th alpha build is now live with more incremental fixes and improvements. I've worked on aligning rivers in cities and towns, drawing improvements, fixing a few minor but annoying bugs and revising some of the generator content.

I'm currently using HEXROLL 2E in two campaigns - one is my weekly dining table campaign - a campaign started nearly two years ago using 1E; and the other is a remote VTT campaign started a few months ago. Both campaigns...