I just read Cats Have No Lords's post Tyranny of the Crawl (as well as the accompanying topic on The Cauldron), and it got me thinking about the relationship between hexcrawls and pointcrawls.

First, in response to the post linked above, I agree! Not every OSR adventure needs to be a hexcrawl. Not even every open-world, choice-heavy adventure needs to be a hexcrawl. And while my preference is not for linear adventures, I feel like I've read plenty of TSR-era modules that were very much linear. But, for the purpose of this post, I can think of one very good reason to make an adventure a hexcrawl instead of a point crawl—It's easy to turn a hexcrawl into a pointcrawl.

Here is how you do it in just three steps:

1. Identify relevant points of interest on the hex map
2. Draw lines between them that make sense (following roads, trails, rivers, et cetera)
3. Using a given games hexcrawling rules, determine how long it would take and how hazardous it would be to travel along each line, as well as which random encounters are relevant.

See? Easy.

And should you want to go further, transforming it into a linear adventure is even easier: take the points of interest you identified in step one and turn them into a numbered list.

Think of a hexmap as a high-resolution image. In some cases, you might not need so many pixels. Perhaps some cropping and compressing is in order. Or maybe all you need is a tiny thumbnail. In either case, starting from a higher resolution and working your way down is ideal. So when it comes to published adventure modules, it seems best to provide as much resolution as possible.