On Wilderness Crawling

Exploration will be a central feature of Yaqqothl – the players will explore their characters, discover new spells, find new monsters, handle new magic items and artifacts and, of course, explore the setting hex by hex. When I key the wilderness map I will do it with the following in mind:

• Start anywhere: I would like to make it possible to start the campaign by placing my finger randomly on the map and say "You are here, and there is X" or something similar. Then leave the characters free to go wherever they want because there is something interesting in each and every direction they take. Unlike a dungeon, there will be something in every hex, be it a haunted tower, a cave, a village or a black ziggurat. Entries will look pretty similar to the Carcosa format, but a bit more detailed. I plan to set the scale of the map to "1 Hex = 1 hour of hard walking".
• Sandbox interaction: The PCs will of course have some interaction with the sandbox, but it will not be DM-driven. I won't tell them "A dude killed your father", but rather something more along the lines of "You fired up the Black Wizard, now his Armies of Doom are about to kick your ass".
• Episodic play: Yaqqothl must be good for episodic play. I want to be able to use it not only for a regular campaign, but also to set up games on the fly. Something like "Buddy I don't want to go out, what can we do?" "Yo man, maybe we can rock some dice!" "You're such a loser..." and so on.

Got it? I will get to work on the regions and try to come up with a short (5 to 10 sentence) description of each one, as well as wandering monsters tables. Then I will create new monsters and start filling the hexes one by one until I'm done. And I have to create the character kits in the meantime, and new spells too.