Starting a Hex Crawl Campaign

I've been reading a lot about hex crawls, specifically how to generate terrain, special features, random encounters, and how to handle time and distance. It's made me want to try a solo hex crawl and see what emerges. I also wanted to start something simpler than my homebrew Twilight 2000 game, because playing that takes a lot of mental prep for some reason.  

So, I printed out a hex map, a bunch of random tables, and bought some dry erase pens. I came up with a simple "West Marches" style campaign where different PCs could emerge. Some of them would die and some would survive and maybe become legends. The general premise is that the world is recovering from a dark age. The campaign starts at a frontier keep called Fenro, at the edge what is considered civilization. There are unexplored wilds to the south, east, and west. Alongside the Keep, sits the town of Windcross with a population of about 200 people. 

Windcross is where I'll pull my PCs. Problems will occur and they'll go out exploring. Again, some of them will die and other return to try again.

Tools:

• I'm using Cairn as my main system supplemented with the travel system from Lavender Hack.
• Wilderness Hexploration to generate terrain
• Weird & Wild: A Travel Generator by Academic Kobold to generate random features and encounters
• Barrow Delver by ManaRampMatt for solo rules
• And d30 Sandbox Companion for a bunch of random tables, specifically for NPC generation

A Note about Cairn

Cairn, I think, is a very elegant system: three ability scores, armor reduces damage from hits, inventory is slot based, things like that. It's very to-the-point and has a dark, dreary vibe. Your PC starts out very weak and the spells take up inventory slots. It's a system that makes me feel how brittle my PCs are. I haven't done any combat yet, but both starting PCs have 2 hit points each. Yikes. And there's no level system. If I'm understanding it correctly, your PCs become more "powerful" through gear. Cool. 

I rolled up two characters, Ethex the alchemist and Borrid the gravedigger, and sent them out to explore. I hope they find some adventure and live to tell about it!