A shift in design has been running through the *Cotsward Hundred* adventures, and it’s worth opening up the thinking behind it. These scenarios began as adaptations of material already run at the table, but something kept surfacing in play: even flexible systems tend to settle back into familiar shapes. Quest hooks become lines. Exploration becomes traversal. Encounters become endpoints. The fiction changes, but the underlying structure often doesn’t. The response here has been to step away from that expectation entirely and work towards something more system-neutral and agnostic. Not tied to any one ruleset’s assumptions, and not dependent on mechanical framing to carry meaning. At the centre of that experiment is a move away from geography as the organising principle. Instead, each adventure is built around encounter situations—dense, reactive moments that hold tension, information, and consequence. The Hex Flower structure, with its seven encounter locations, supports this by allowing situations to evolve rather than resolve cleanly. Movement is not progression through space so much as movement through shifting states of understanding. This also changes what “adventure” means in practice. The familiar loop—quest, travel, combat, reward—is intentionally loosened. Conflict is distributed. Resolution is partial. Information becomes the primary driver of play, rather than objectives or loot. What matters is not what is collected, but what is understood, ignored, or misinterpreted along the way. Designing this way also places more weight on non-combat interaction. Investigation, persuasion, intuition, restraint, misdirection—these become primary tools rather than secondary options. Encounters are structured so that characters reveal themselves through how they engage with situations, not just how they overcome obstacles. System neutrality sits at the core of this approach. The intention is not to remove mechanics, but to avoid embedding assumptions that only function within a single framework. These adventures are designed to be translated—interpreted into whatever system sits at the table—without losing their shape or intent. That flexibility is deliberate, though it raises questions about clarity, structure, and how much guidance is enough. There is an ongoing tension between openness and usability. Too much structure risks reintroducing the same linearity this approach tries to avoid. Too little risks leaving GMs without enough to anchor play. Finding that balance is part of the design process itself. The *Cotsward Hundred* is therefore less a fixed setting and more a set of pressures: social, environmental, and narrative. It is built to respond rather than direct, and to let meaning emerge from interaction rather than instruction. The exploration of that space continues.