Westmarches hexcrawl: a dangerous world with only one-shot games?
I'm starting a big open-table/Westmarches game, where we will primarily play one-shot sessions. At the end of each session, player characters return to the "home base" so that a new group can be formed for the next session.
Exploration is a big focus of the world, and we want to do that via a hexcrawl.
I want the world to feel dangerous and unsafe. Just visiting a location (hex) once should not immediately "clear" it and make it safe. Travelling through unsafe locations should come with some danger. This way, there is incentive for players to spend sessions making the territory safer by "clearing" hexes.
Instinctively, I would convey this danger with (possibly random) combat encounters. Bandits, goblins, wolves, wandering monsters, whatever. The trouble is that if I do that in a one-shot, most of my session is taken up by the first random encounter. This then leaves little time for the actual location the players were headed for. And then they also need to return home by the end of the session - again through dangerous terrain.
Any ideas for how to make the world feel dangerous without bogging down already-short one-shot sessions with unnecessary combat encounters? How do you handle this in your open-table/Westmarches games?