hexcuse me

 ...for the title of this post.

Anyway, I'm looking at a lot of hexes to stock and the best hex stocking procedure I have found so far is probably Luke Gearing's Hexfill one, although I also like a lot about Welsh Piper's Hex-based Campaign Design. But, I'm also constitutionally incapable of using something unmodified, so here's my spin on it.

My priorities are to have a procedure that takes into account the geography of the area being keyed, and also produces a more settled map than the procedures linked above.

Begin with a map of atlas (18mi) hexes subdivided into travel (6mi) hexes with terrain and roads marked.

For each travel hex, determine its difficulty (= hours of travel): open country (3), hills or woods (4), wooded hills (5), broken country (6). A road reduces difficulty by 1. Then, roll 1d6:

• If the roll is a 1, there's something weird (see below). 
• If the roll more than 1 and less than the difficulty of the hex, it's empty.
• Roll a d20. If it is less than the d6 roll, there is a ruin of some prior settlement or structure.
  
• If the roll is at least equal to the difficulty of the hex, it contains: (2) a city, (3) a town, (4) 3d2 villages, (5) 2d2 villages, (6) a camp, fastness or inn.
• Camps and inns are abandoned 2-in-6, fastnesses 1-in-6
  

If something weird is indicated, roll 2d6 for its nature. If a Power is indicated, roll 2d6 again for that:

Roll	Nature	Power
2	Old Ones yet dwells here	Nothing remains
3	Holds a vivid memory of the distant past	No more than a hum or a few sparks
4	A student of Power dwells here	Red (energy, heat and strength)
5	Strong medicines may be found here	Orange (industry and motion)
6	A place of attractive Power	Yellow (communication, illusion)
7	Works of the Old Ones, purposes now unknown	Green (growth and healing)
8	A place of repulsive Power	Blue (air and water)
9	Intelligible lore of the Old Ones	Indigo (protection, force)
10	Roll twice	Violet (domination, transformation)
11	Roll twice	Forces poisonous to draw upon
12	Roll twice	A malign intelligence possesses the seeker

Replace 'Old Ones' with whatever fantastical civilization dwelt here before the current peoples if you like.

Now, for each atlas hex, count 1 for every village, 2 for every town and 4 for every city. If a roll of 2d6 plus the number of weird hexes is greater than this sum, a monster lairs somewhere within it.