Monday, June 17, 2013

A Tiny Sandbox: Revised Geography

I couldn't help myself, I needed to know (desperately!) what the "wider world" around my regional sandbox map looks like. So once again armed with the free version of Hexographer and The Welsh Piper's excellent campaign design tutorial I "zoomed out" into an atlas-scale map where each numbered hex is 25 miles. Here's the result:

The sandbox at 25 miles/hex, 5 miles/hex, and 1 mile/hex.

So from left to right we have an atlas map at 25 miles per hex, a regional map around atlas hex 05.05 at 5 miles per hex, and an area map around region hex 05.05 at 1 mile per hex. Pretty neat.

If you compare this regional map to the one I posted yesterday you'll see that by expanding to atlas-scale I was able to "fix" a few things regarding the terrain. For example the upper-left corner now properly reflects "more water" to the north. I also changed the distribution of "light" and "heavy" forest in the south to fit. On the area map I moved the mountains fully inside the hills instead of having them run up against the plains. All improvements in my book.

Yes, I still have to populate the sandbox. But now I am a lot happier with the overall amount of geographical information available, so hopefully I won't be tempted to redo the geography again. At least not anytime soon.

2 comments:

  1. I really want to do this for one of my proto-campaigns, a "castle in a strange land" setting. I have a 1-mile hex map (though only what's contained within the one whole hex in the middle). I'd like a 5- and 25-mile map someday. Backburner at the moment.

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    1. I did this and fully intended using it, but now I am pretty much set on Blackmarsh instead. Go figure. In any case, the maps will come in handy sooner or later.

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