#also d6 but them interacting at some point is p much a given i feel like

[freakinator]

if i had it my way i would love a zam/leo/clown/red/mapicc/bacon/minute/mid alliance/team next season

[sstabhmontown]

Creating wilderness hex maps

As we journey to the southern continent, I'm putting in an order to get some custom-printed hex paper that suits my stationery demands. Meanwhile, I've been drawing maps—and I thought it was a good moment to try to record the procedures that I use for making wilderness maps. Ideally a version of these may make it into the rulebooks themselves somewhere, in my continuing quest to make them a complete pick-up-and-play game.

Starting a map

If you are beginning a new campaign, you may want to begin with just a single sheet of paper, at 6 miles per hex (in groups of four, 24 miles to a super-hex). This entire page is likely to fit within one or one-and-a-half of the largest size hexes I use, 96 miles—so you'll have to do a lot less work than what I do making maps for the group to travel on a flying ship!

You'll always begin with some idea of the kind of landscape you want to create. At the beginning of our game in 2011/2012, I knew I wanted an island among many, with rocky shores. For that first island, I just drew a coastline, and to add additional ones later, I used a semi-random method.

Due to the nature of our current adventures—Bill of Bucket asked for the Devil's help when he was blind drunk, and is now obligated to carry out a Quest—we're getting to try some new ways of framing play:

The Goat-faced Killer spent some time in the libraries and dockyard halls of Vardturn, gathering geographies, and in exchange for spending some cash and rolling against Int, drew a not-to-scale map of the continent's shores.

Ferrius Yew used the spell Commune to identify sites that would fall on their journey. This is letting us frame the adventure very differently than a normal sandbox campaign—when a divination tells something outside the borders of what I have already developed, I let the player speak the prophecy of what they will find there, and then use that as I make my maps. Ferrius Yew gave five sites, which I will be placing on the map after the first few stages.

In any case, begin with a coastline. Copying it loosely from the not-to scale maps onto hex paper (at 24 miles a hex, with 96-mile large hexes that will help me with some geography), I created the scale version with some additional details.

Major Geography

I begin by placing islands, disrupting the coastline. For each 96-mile sea hex, I roll a six-sided die, placing an island on a 6. I roll a d8 for the number of hexes the island covers—these are major islands, if we drill down to 6-mile hexes later we are likely to find more tiny rocks.

On land, and on the islands, repeat the d6 roll for Mountains and Forests in each 96-mile hex. These major Forests cover 1d12 hexes. Mountains are more complicated: I start them in a random 24-mile hex within their area, and roll a random direction on the d12. In both that way and the opposite I begin to draw a chain of mountains. At each hex, I roll 2d6, where 7 means the mountains continue in a straight line, and each point above means one point on the hex clockwise, and each roll below means one point anticlockwise. Where the mountains cross themselves, I add a great peak. Where they cross a peak again, they stop. I also stop them at first on a 71.

Once the mountains are in place, create rivers. For each mountain hex (24 mile), roll a d6, and on a 1 mark a spring. Rivers start out whatever way is outward from the mountain range, towards a coast in a straight line, and I use the same 2d6 method to make them meander. When this leads them up into another mountain, it creates a tributary, and I'll select a point midway down the river to begin its path to the coast again. Where they turn back on themselves, I place a lake, and again pick a point to resume their path outward.

Once rivers are in place, draw in hills to seperate them into valleys, and to block them where they've ended up not taking the obvious route to the coast.

Major settlements

Now we're done with the 96-mile hexes, and start iterating on each 24-mile hex. This is a lot of dice!

For each hex, roll 2d6. On a 1, there is a settlement; on the coast or a river also add one on a 2, and on the mouth of a river mark them on 3. If there are two settlements there are two settlements! Mark them as dots.

For each settlement on a coast or river, roll another d6. On a 1, this is a city. For each city, 1-in-6 may be major cities, the largest in the land—although you may wish to keep these in one particular area of the map, as I did.

Then, let's add some other details: depending on the landscape and the tone of the place you are building, make a list of what you might see. Roll for each settlement, twice for cities, and on a 1, see what's there with another roll. I made a quickie chart like this:

Civilized Wild feature 1 Dark castle ■ (wizard or monster) 1 2 Dungeon ▲ 2 3 Demi-humans 3–4 4–5 Castle □ 5 6 Abbey [✚] 6 Cathedral ✝

Civilized hexes are ones within a 96-mile hex of the coast, or directly on a river, and open terrain—hills, mountains, and forests are always wild.

Finally, draw in roads. You'll want every city, and every cathedral, to be on a road. Link up regions where the terrain is open between them, but let mountain routes be rare. Where there are cross-roads, make sure they are on settlements.

Drilling down

These 24-mile hex maps cover a huge area—I filled four pages with the continent at this scale, for the grand voyage we are taking, as I had done with the Northwestern Islands before. When travelling by boat, these are fine—and they can work for unexpected journeys on land too.

But when the party is likely to explore an area—and I know five locations that Ferrius Yew prophecied—you'll definitely want to detail them at the 6-mile level. For those five locations, I've created a one-page dungeon, and at the bottom corner, I've started each one with a map of one to three 24-mile hexes blown up to 6 miles.

Terrain: I more-or-less use the excellent tables from The Welsh Piper to fill in the terrain of each sub-hex, based on that of the 24-mile hex.

Villages: throw the same two dice you used for towns, but instead you'll be placing villages. It may seem like a lot of settlements, but these methods actually leave much more open wild space than the realities of Medieval Europe.

Detail the villages with something that might help. I rolled a 2-in-6 chance of my most recent villages of having churches, to emphasize the divisions that I think are going to become likely given the nature of our adventure—and to give motivation to the many clerical NPCs we'll be interacting with on the way to the Papal Conclave.

Lairs, etc: the dungeons and dark castles on the over-map are only the most major. Feel free to roll for encounters in these hexes to place lairs—or you can keep them improvisational, of course, rolling when travelled-through. But, when the players visit a town and ask about nearby threats, you'll want to roll them up there if you haven't already.

I got to place the prophecied locations, in a way that is quite different than regular sandbox design—because we have foreknowledge of the shape of events to come. Still, these sites have many surprises, as I've thought of the ways that different outcomes of visiting may impact Bill of Bucket's Quest, and I have no doubt that the group will end up doing things that I haven't conceived of yet.

For six-mile hexes I've also previously used parts of the excellent Judges Guild adapatation Wilderness Hexplore from New York Redbox.

But I'm not crazy about this rule and end up leaving it aside for some ranges. I will revisit this procedure next time. ↩︎