Evolution of the Previous Campaign's Hex Map

Note: This entire post was an old draft I've had sitting around since early 2020. I went ahead and took a few minutes to finish it and post it. At the time I wrote it, I was still running the game and used the map below. Even though I'm doing a (sort of) different thing now, I thought this would still make a fun postmortem, so I've gone ahead and edited it a little and posted it.

 

Current Version of Regional Map

It has taken me almost three years of tinkering, remixing, and revising in Hexographer to get the map pictured above. Even now, I make monthly tweaks to the map, and large swaths of it are still a work in progress. This is the map that I used as of the most recent session of my campaign, but the story of how I got here is a long one.

Atlas created in donjon.bin.sh

My original goal was to have the hexes randomly generated using the World Generator on donjon. I liked the idea of a world that was randomly generated because it took some control away from the DM and left it to chance. It wasn't out of laziness or apathy that I wanted to have as little control as possible in the creation of the world, but rather a desire to embrace the concept of the DM as arbiter, as a neutral observer and referee rather than authorial storyteller. What better way than to begin the creation of the world itself than with the cast of a die? After generating dozens of maps and scrutinizing them for hours, I finally settled on the image above as a basis for making a Hexographer map:

Region Map 1.0

Not only was this map the first I made for the campaign, but it was also among the first maps I made in Hexographer. As such, this map is not very pretty. I do like the idea of a Cyclades style island chain dotting a vast sea, with narrow landbridges connecting holdfasts. Unfortunately, I decided to go in a different direction, but not before learning a few lessons.

It was clear around this point that randomly generating a hex map was maybe not the way to go. As much as I enjoy procedurally generated content, it just wasn't really working out in the way I was hoping for, and so I was forced to create a map by hand. This led to the first major series of maps I created, which eventually even saw some play. An early one can be seen here:

Region Map 2.0

At this point I was still learning some of the basic tenets of map-making -- don't split your rivers, rivers go from the mountains and flow to the ocean, stuff like that. My biomes were also very large in the early stages as I wanted them to be rather simulationist and at least close to the size of real biomes on earth. At the very least, I'd try to avoid placing scalding deserts a few days travel from a frozen tundra.

This was also the first map that I used the Welsh Piper templates with. At this point, I don't know what I would do without them. Probably switch to the inferior sequel Worldographer or some other terrible idea. At any rate, after a few minor changes to this map, I was ready to place some icons in those hexes, which is where things really start to take off:

Region Map 2.1

Here we see an updated version with some locales and named areas. This was still a very rough version of what I wanted from a map, and it wasn't quite ready for play. The extremely large forest to the west was suppose to be massive Mirkwood sized forest that stretched all the way across the neighboring region and then some. I would eventually abandon the idea of these massive biomes altogether, and instead focus more on smaller, more fantastical terrain features in the interest of choosing fun over realism.

The reason I chose to have an Atlantic-sized ocean to the East was because my original intent was to run a west marches style game that was very true to the original concept. My idea here was pretty simple, and took the notion of a west marches game to its logical extreme: you can't go east because there's a big, massive ocean. Even if you cross that ocean, you'll just return to civilization, and there won't be any ancient ruins or monsters or treasure. You are basically explorers landing in a small colony on the frontier of a recently discovered continent, which served as an explanation for why everything is abandoned, unmapped and in decay. The mystery of who or what used to inhabit the ancient ruins wasn't one that would be ideally solved, and was besides the point -- everything was just a post hoc justification for a west marches style hex exploration game .These thematic elements were stressed heavily in my original handout. ("You are strangers in a strange land;" "You can’t go home again.")

Eventually I decided to create more interesting things closer to the initial settlements, and I filled many more hexes with things of interest, which led to the next iteration:

Region Map 2.3

The map above was the first one that saw actual play. Due to some absences, we took a week off from our weekly 5e D&D game (I was a player, not DM, though prior to this I was running a Stars Without Number campaign for the group so most of them were already somewhat familiar with OSR style games). This game me the opportunity to run B/X for the very first time. Even then, I referred to the session as a "test run" for a future campaign I was working on, though my motives for calling it that were largely because I didn't want to committer everyone to another campaign. Pitching it as a one-off playtest was an easy way to get everyone to try it in a non-committal fashion.

Although everyone enjoyed the session, this would be the only time I used this map with that specific group. The next time I played, it was online with a different group of friends. With the online group, I ran several sessions, and I was able to get a lot of good feedback. I went right back to the drawing board and came up with the following:

Region Map 3.0

You can see that the map is now vastly different, although there is a clear through-line from the first version and this one. Many of the biomes remain intact, or evolved over time. Notably, the biggest change to this map is the removal of the vast ocean to the east, and placing the starting town in the center of the map as opposed to the far east.

My reasons for this were twofold: 1.) I wanted to move away from slavishly constricting myself from the literal concept of the west marches, i.e. only being able to travel westward; 2.) Placing the town at the center of a map would allow for greater change in scenery and reduce the travel time it takes to get to different interesting places.

I feel like I should explain that second part in greater detail. Basically my problem with only being able to travel west (with north and south being coastlines, and everything east being a vast sea) was that the players would have to travel past the same few hexes every single time they set out on a journey. If there's a swamp right to the west of town, for example, they will pass through that swamp every. single. time. they set out for an adventure. It gets really repetitive and dull, and even if there are interesting places to stop off at like NPC locations or towns or whatever, they will eventually become tedious because pass by them every time no matter where you want to go.

By putting the town in the center of the map, you can have a couple interesting locations north, east, west and south of the starting town and they are all about equidistant from town. And you can put different biomes and terrain features in each direction, which helps to break up the monotony.

This map did get played a little, but only a couple sessions with an online group before we lost interest in it. I still think the end result is one of my better maps, but while I was working on this I was also working on another project:

World Map 1.0

Meet the first version of my current world map. I had been watching a lot of the Vikings TV show and was really digging the idea of having a Scandinavian themed setting as opposed to the mainland Europe fare that is more frequently pulled from when crafting fantasy worlds. I know vikings and Norse mythology aren't exactly breaking new ground when it comes to inspiration for world design, but the idea of a frozen continent filled with dangerous draugr and jötnar really motivated me to start thinking about world building in a new light. There's also just so many good sources for inspiration when it comes to the norse-inspired stuff, it's really fantastic.

With this map I decided to try and top down approach instead of bottom up. Usually, I would begin with a single hex, and slowly build a region around that hex, with different biomes and such. I had never even got to the atlas stage before because I was too busy fine-tunning the minutia. This time I wanted to try to create and entire WORLD, and then zoom in on one area of that world and go from there. Eventually I would decide that no, this isn't the world, just decent sized landmass with it's own unique culture and history. 

World Map 1.1

I refined the map a little bit and came up with this. The idea was to have each square be it's own named region that would break down into a smaller map. Each hex on the world map would show what the hex that has a plurality on the smaller one. With that in mind, the very center square looks like this:

Region Map 4.0

 This is the map that I started a new campaign on. As you can see, I'm using forest hexes a lot more -- the default assumption is that this region is well forested and there are trees pretty much everywhere you go, with only the occasional clearly here or there. The dungeon in the bottom middle is B1, which is where I started the party in the first session. From there they could go wherever they wanted -- most of the dungeons and towns connected to various low level modules I was interested in running.

Region Map 4.1

This campaign ended up lasting about a year and a half. We played monthly, and as seen here, I made a few minor tweaks along the way. Overall, I was very happy with this map, and there's a small chance I'll even use it again some day!

One question my players have asked me a few times lately is, "does this new campaign connect to the old one?" It's a question I've intentionally kind of dodged, because the answer is "yes and no". I'm reusing a lot of names, lore, etc. but many rules and the overall tone of the game are vastly different than the last campaign. I officially pitched it to them as a complete reboot with some similarities, but in truth I kind of see these old adventurers they had as taking place on the same world, just in a different region in a different age of the world.  Next time I post about maps, I'll talk about the vastly different way I'm handling mapping and exploration in this new campaign.