Bat in the Attic

This begins with a story, back in the 2000's a bunch of folks were organized by Necromancer Games to fleshed out Judges Guild's Wilderlands of High Fantasy. The project took a lot of work but finally saw the light of day.
One of the author involved was Gabor Lux (also known as Melan).

So as a follow up to the Wilderlands one of the project Necromancer Games was planning on was Tegel Manor and Gabor Lux was tapped as the author. We all knew him from his blog and other writings and was excited about seeing his take on the venerable adventure from Judges Guild.

But alas it was not to be.

Now flash forward a decade, Gabor Lux revisited his ideas for Tegal and made his is own haunted castle adventure, Castle Xyntillan.  You can take a look it yourself at his store front. It is $40 plus shipping. You can also read up what Gabor has to say about in this blog post.

Finally I did the cartography for the adventure.

You can get a sense of the detail and scale from the players maps that Gabor Lux provides Or this snippet below.

Enjoy!

While Google+ was a thing I posted this map from my Majestic Wilderlands campaign

I seem to be doing a lot of them recently. This is a result of me getting close to finishing the map of the Main Campaign Area. The players are establishing themselves as merchant and managed to buy a ship. So I made a map centered on the Trident Gulf to use to plan for voyage and to act as a reference. For good measure I also started a political map.

The Main map

 The Political Map

This is for my campaign circa 4475 BCCC. The Majestic Wilderlands supplement reference how things were in 4436 BCCC. Those with the book can see there been several changes. Mainly the Council of Viridstan and the Dragon Empire.  Both entities came into being as a result of PCs doing their thing during their respective campaigns. The Council of Viridstan originated from the Fantasy Hero campaign I ran in college during the late 80s. While the Dragon Empire resulted from a GURPS campaign I ran in the early 90s.

The odd extension of the Dragon Empire around the Tiethoir River was one of the last things we did in that campaign. I took GURPS 3rd edition Mass Combat rules and combined with a little bit of Harn for the logistics and cost. The last couple of sessions saw +Tim Shorts and +Dwayne Gillingham play William the Conqueror and the Normans. The whole thing was to allow Duke Draco-lindus (Tim's Character) and his allies to gain a power base outside of the thumb of the Invincible Overlord of City-State.

Proved useful when Duke Draco broke away from City-State and reestablished the Dragon Empire.

As an experiment I mapped the progression of the last phase of the war. I experimented using colored transparent fills instead of just using borders like I did with previous historical maps I made,

Though out the history of the tabletop roleplaying the myth and legends of Japan has fascinated many hobbyists. For many there was a strong desire to player Samauri, and Ninjas. Have one's character wield a katana or throwing shurikens. Especially when I stated out in the late 70s and early 80s, I had numerous players wanting to play these types of character in my Majestic Wilderlands. So I carved a section called it the Karian Islands.

Flash forward 30 years, my friend +Dwayne Gillingham is running a campaign playtesting his RPG called the Crit System. He using his own take on the Majestic Wilderlands as the setting. As it so happens the campaign has taken a detour to the Karian Islands. So I thought to myself, I better make a map for it. Many characters were from there but I never had a campaign where the PCs visited it. So I looked at my notes and overview maps and started drawing.

First some background.

Karian Isles
Comprised of two archipelagos; the Silver Skein Islands to the south and the Isles of Dawn to the north. These islands were originally occupied by the Karians, humans with a culture similar to the early Japanese. They were contacted and incorporated into the Ghinorian Empire early in its expansion.

When the Empire collapsed one of the last pretenders to the title of the Imperial Prince of Ghinor fled to the islands to regroup. He married a local princess to win the loyalty of the Karian nobles. He left and was killed while trying to reclaim the throne. The princess was pregnant and gave birth to a son who was proclaimed as the new Imperial Prince.

Legends grew of the last pretender and some claimed he was the divine son of Mitra. His Karian successors adopted the legend as their own and assumed not only political leadership of the islands but religous leadership as well. Over the past thousand years their culture has grown more inward. They have developed an elaborate code of honor and social system.


Finally the main map itself. Remember each hex is 5 leagues with a league taking 1 hour to walk. A ship with average winds can make about 10 leagues (2 hexes) every four hours. Or 60 leagues (12 hexes) a day. Those of you with the Judges Guild will notices a lot of differences some due to the increased map size and other due to the different background I use.

Enjoy!

So I been running a Thursday night game using my Majestic Wilderlands rules. The group is currently based in Viridistan, the largest city in my campaign.



They are stomping around the region, which prompted me to make a regional map. Note that it is the most densely populated areas of the Wilderlands hence the extensive amount of cropland. Which is marked as a textured yellow brown fill.


Each small hex is 2.5 miles or 1 league, the distance a person can walk in an hour.
Each large hex is 5 leagues. For comparison a ship with sails can travel 12 of the large hexes in 24 hours or 2 per four hours.

The larger view



The Legend Key

Enjoy today's map fix.

I been doing maps for  Brendan Davis of Bedrock Games for a couple of years. As part of the process we get together online to various reviews of the work in progress. More often than not we wind up chatting afterwards and discuss all thing roleplaying.

So when Brendan started a podcast, I was happy when he invited me on for a episode. We talked about the early days of gaming, sandbox campaigns, and gaming in general. Also I talk up what +Tim Shorts  of Gothridge Manor is doing. Along with a mention of the stuff that +Dwayne Gillingham has been working on with 3d6 based Crit System.

You can find the podcast here.

+Tim Shorts over at Gothridge challenged all map makeers to show their favorite map. I actually have two.

The first is the Isle of the Blest of  the City State of the Sea Kings.



The original incarnation of Judges Guild produce modules under the Wilderness series. Each book took an area of the Wilderlands and extensively detailed it. Mines of Custalon and Spies of Lightelf were first two books. One of the details was the use of the Judges Guild Hexagon Mapping system to flesh out the interior of the various 5 mile hexes that book focused one.



For example


The Isle of Blest map for City State of the Sea King.was going to be a poster map making each hex over 1 inch. I figured with all that room why not draw it like the Wilderness series but update it with color. What made even more doable is that the Wilderness series maps were pseudo contour denoting slope. Similar to old style hachure maps. Full contour maps are finicky to create and do right by hand over the scale of something as large as the Isle of the Blest. Another challenge I wanted to overcome is better use of color on my maps.

The successful completion of this project not only led to the satisfaction of coming up with a new style, in color no less, but also to the license from Judges Guild that allowed to publish the Majestic Wilderlands and Scourge of the Demon Wolf. Finally it led me to be invited to help with the project to come up with new official maps for the original Wilderlands.

My other favorite maps is actually a work in progress.

Looks pretty complete? But it is actually a section of a much larger map that I been working off and on for the past couple of years. The map to the main campaign area of the Majestic Wilderlands.


I like the Nomar map because it represent the current pinnacle of the work I been doing ever since I made the Wilderlands my main campaign.

Starting with this


To This


To this


Then to the Nomar map above.

Finally this map gets an honorable mention. This was going to be the foundation map for the Majestic Realms. The Majestic Wilderlands with all Judges Guild IP stripped out but then I got the license which was not only cool of them but made it a lot easier to write the supplement. Instead of the City-State of the Invincible Overlord I had the City State of Eastgate (the name coming from Tim). Instead of Thunderhold, I had Hammerguard Keep named after the best dwarven PC ever to play in any of my campaigns, Zephrus Hammerguard.

I plan on still using this sometime as part of the loose setting behind Points of Light and Blackmarsh.

So there you have my favorite map err maps.

This is a real world map with a winding path to the observation tower. It as a small scale so we are forced to use an odd measurement for a hex. One-eighth of a mile or 660 feet per hex. When I drew this over top of the image it each hex measured from top to bottom 0.365 inches. The purple path I drew over the original map path measured 6.027 inches. Making the true length of the path, if you hiked it, 10,899 feet or 2.06 miles.

At a game table you could have a device with a wheel that you could roll along to measure the true length of anything on the map. But that not a common piece of equipment a person is likely to possess.

The virtue of a hex grid is that from each hex there are circles of hexes surrounding it out to an arbitrary distance. This makes it very useful to measure distance quickly from a center hex to an arbitrary point.

So what if you have a hex filled with winding paths inside the hexes. Well if I counted up the hexes that the path touches it comes out to 13 hexes or 1.625 miles. (the red numbers) Not very close to its true distance. However if I double counted (or even triple count) hexes (the blue numbers) with particularly convoluted paths. Then I get about 17 hexes or 2.125 much closer to the true distance of 2.064 miles.

Like any tool you need to use your best judgement in using this. In this case you need to estimate by sight whenever a convoluted path inside of a hex means you double or triple count it.

Wizards posted an article about mapping with hexes and scale. I played with hex maps a lot over the years. In particular how to join hex maps together and how to manage a hex map when making a hexcrawl setting.

Writing sandbox settings can be painstaking work at time. Even writing tersely the quantity of locales can be overwhelming. My observation that you will have a dozen or so really good ideas and the rest you crib from whatever idea generator or random table you have.

You could limit this but you don't want to make the region so small that the player are able to move past it's bounds in a session or two. Nor you want to make the locale spaced so far apart that that you get the howling wilderness of the 30 mile hex.

I found that making your hexes between 3 to 6 miles to be ideal. If you are using 1/2" hexes on a 8.5 by 11 paper you get a region of 135 miles by 90 miles. It comes roughly to 27 hex columns and 19 hex rows. For that size three dozen locales fit nicely.

For a 22" by 17" map, the size of a Judges Guild Wilderlands map, detailing that many locales becomes a bit of chore. If that what you want to do find some good random tables to help as an idea generator.

So you start off your campaign a letter size paper full of 1/2" hexes. Then you decide to expand the campaign. How to do you make sure everything lines. The easiest method to have some overlap, generally a
hex column, or hex row is sufficient to keep everything consistent across multiple maps.

There are two types of hex grids

Horizontal


Vertical



Of the two, the vertical hex map is by far the most popular.

The examples in this post will be using the vertical hex grid.

Hexgrids have several choices how they can be formed.

You can make the end columns even in number.
or

You can make the ends uneven in length.


The last arrangement is used when you sub dived a large hex into smaller hexes.


Joining Maps

If your map just going to be one page. Then you don' t need to worry about how to join two hex maps together. However with multiple maps then this issue needs some attention

For vertical hex grids the top and bottom of the map are uneven. If you don't want to overlap then you have to have one page start the first hex column high and the lower (or upper) page start the hex column low.



But there are other ways of handling the vertical joining of two hex grids and they have the virtue of making it easier to avoid mistaking in drawing features like rivers and coastlines across multiple maps.

A half overlap


A full overlap


Of the two I prefer the half overlap. It slightly spreads out the vertical coverage of each individual map and I only have to copy the top and bottom hex every other column.

The horizontal joining has several types.

If you use a hex grid with uneven numbers of hexes you can lay them side by side with no overlap.



Judges Guild in the Wilderlands of High Fantasy was one of the first publishers to deal with this issue. They used 18 hex maps arranged in a three maps across 6 maps vertically. Each Hex maps had 52 columns, and 34 rows on the odd columns (1,3,5, etc) and 33 rows on the even columns. The resulting hex grid had uneven ends on the left and right edges.

They decided to use the half overlap to join the maps on the top and bottom edge. However they messed up on the left and right edge and decided to make them overlap. Because of the even ends of the hex grid this resulted in a staircase effect as below. Each map to east was a half row south of the map to the west.



For hex grids that have even ends you can do a full overlap of the last hex column with the first hex column of the next map.




I prefer the full overlap option as it helps ensure that I am correctly drawing from one map to the next. The same reason applies to the half overlap option.

Numbering Hexes

For vertical hex grids the numbering system is XXYY where XX is the column number and YY is the row number. This is reversed for horizontal hex grids.



Sub-maps

Judges Guild is famed for having a complete mapping system that goes from campaign level of 5 miles per hex to a regional level of .2 miles per hex and finally to a local level of 42.24 feet per hex. Each larger hex was subdivided by smaller hexes 1/25 th the size of the larger hex. Hence the odd number at the local level.

If your scale per hex is an odd number (5 miles, 25 miles, etc) it is easy to draw up a subdivided hex as shown below. You pick a center hexes and count the remaining hexes outwards. You can use the six points to draw up the six sides of the larger hex.



Hexes with a even scale (10 miles, 30 miles, etc) are not as easy to subdivide. The lines you will be drawing for the sides will be meeting in the center of hexes.




There is alternative for drawing even scale hexes but you will lose the center hex. You will have decide which form is best to use for you game.



I hope with the Wizards article you find this results for your mapping with hexes.

A reader asked about a map I contributed to Fight On! Here it is, I drew a generic map for people to fill in with their own material. I just bought my CD full of 70s/80s style zipatone landscape fill and was eager to make a map using them. The symbols should be pretty explanatory. The triangle line near 0706 is a glacier. The line with hatch marks spaced along it in the lower right are escarpments. The X with a small L are lairs. The upside down triangles are ruins/points of interest. The circles are settlements. 

 
This map is open content under the Open Game License.
So feel free to use this for your own projects.

James Maliszewski of Grognardia ordered a Judges Guild style version of his Dwimmermount outdoor map from me a couple of weeks ago. Since he used the Outdoor Survival gameboard as his template and I done some work recreating the gameboard as a RPG map, it was a pretty straight forward project to do. I played around with some of the textures, finally getting around to recreating a scrubland fill to use for plains and other open terrain along with selecting a badlands fill.

 I enjoyed doing this and helping to get Dwimmermount closer to completion.

I reworked the northeast corner to fit the southwest edge of my Blackmarsh setting. If you like the tv show Fringe and parallel worlds then use the following table whenever the players try to leave Blackmarsh by land on the southern edge. Chalk it up to a weird by-product from the Mountain That Fell.

Roll a d10 (or a d12 if you are Jeff Rients or a fan of his)
1-5 they arrive in the Dwimmermount Wilderness
6-10 they arrive in Southland
11 they don't know where they wound up and it isn't good. 
12 Walternate greets the party and escorts them back to the Fringe Division where they are brainwashed into thinking they just came from having a really intense boffer LARP weekend.

Heading back north takes them back into Blackmarsh.

In the concluded Swords & Wizardry Campaign, I ran an adventure in an old abandoned Hill Fort that was rebuilt into a base for the PCs. Dwayne of Gamers Closest is think about using his recently acquired Hirst Art Molds to build it up. The original map were draw on five square per inch graph paper and was a bit dense. So to make his project easier I redrew the maps and thought that the rest of you could find some use using it for your own campaigns.

The Hill Fort
Also here is the original Hill Fort module. 



In addition to the normal size map (five square per inch at 5' per square) I blew it up to fives original size so it can be used as a battle map. The final paper size is 17" by 11" so it should be too expensive to take it to your local copying place to get it run off. Particularly that is it still greyscale.
The Hill Fort Battle Map

The best cool tool for creating dungeons is a really big sheet of graph paper. The only problem is that it is too cool. You want to save it for the extra special dungeon that never seems to get done. But back in the 80s I found another one just as cool and more importantly it get used.  The Computation Book.

No it not a misspelling of this;

A Composition Book. While composition books are great I am talking about this.
The Computation Book.

A Computation is a bound book of extra large sheets of graph paper. Typically about 75 or so sheets per book with stiff cardboard cover. They are typically used to record the results of experiment and as I found out when I was a freshmen in college they make a great place to draw up dungeons, multiple dungeons!.

The above photo two of the two dozen or so dungeons I have drawn in this book. This Computation Book is pretty much the only dungeons that manage to survive the various moves I made. The loose leaf ones are all pretty much gone. Unfortunately I did not record the full keys, luckily I penciled in room descriptions as you see above if you zoom in. The nice thing about Computation books is that you can use the next page for the key if you want.  The page numbering makes it easy to make a index to keep track what dungeons are on each page.

I am doing some mapping for Tim on Starter Adventures and a miscommunication occurred. He told he wanted a simple arena like the one in Spartacus Blood and Sand. So Dwayne of Gamer's Closet and I looked at some trailers and figured out what roughly it looked like on all four sides. Then I tweaked the layout to make it unique.

It turned out that what Tim wanted was more of a fighting pit than an arena. So rather then let the map go to waste I am posting it for use in your campaigns. Click on the image to get the full resolution version.

1. The Arena Floor, it is has a sand and sawdust floor.
2. Room is where the Gladiators stay before their fights.
3. The animal pens with a set of bar gates to safely get the animal from the cages into the arena.
4. These pens can hold larger animals or more typically those sentenced to die in the arena.
5. Store
6. Store
7. Commoner Entrance
8. Small Store
9. Small Store
10. Small Store
11. Noble Entrance
12. Noble Seating, The small room to the south is where slaves can prepare drinks and meals for their masters.
13. Common seating. They are in three tiers stacked three feet above each other.
14. Food vendors, commoners can buy food and drink during the fights.

Hope this is useful.

Been working on one of the maps for Tim of Gothridge Manor Starter Adventure. Had to figure out how to do scorch marks with a greyscale map. I think the end result will look good.

Figure do a full screen shot of my two monitor setup to show what it looks like. The right side is a monitor mounted in landscape. I like doing that as I can have an entire page up when I am writing. The mapping program is CorelDRAW. Underneath is all my images from Profantasy Campaign Cartographer. While I don't use Campaign Cartographer much for my professional work I do use the images.

Overlaying the images are all my CorelDraw dockers including my all important symbol palette of dungeon details.
I really recommend a two monitor setup for serious work. Triple is even better if you can afford it and have the space.

I never was a big fan of the "Mystara" style of mapping. But in the 80s Mystara was just as popular as Greyhawk if not more. I did one large map using the style. It wasn't anything related to any of my campaigns at the time I drew it just because. I believe I was thinking of 30 or 60 mile hexes here.



The circular sea to the west was meant to be a meteor strike or a big magical explosion. In the northeast is a complex coastline that is meant to be fjords a viking home. One of the large southern islands was supposed to be the X1 Island of Dread. The center area of the southern continent suffers form rainshadow, very arid and has lots of deserts.

If it inspires you feel free to use it for your own game. If you want to clean it up a bit try Hexographer which is one of the best mapping software out there for the Mystara style.