I really like the world of Greyhawk, as represented in the 1980 folio or 1983 boxed set. It has beautiful maps, evocative features, but is open enough that you can take it in any direction you like. Into Game of Thrones style gritty historical realism? Cool; most of the settled world are human-dominated medieval nations of just the right size and state of chaos. Into demi-humans and high magic? Fine; that option is turned 'on' and can be turned up as high as you want. Crazy adventures in dangerous uninhabited wastelands? Plenty of those are on offer.

But one significant disadvantage it has relative to, say, the Judges Guild Wilderlands setting, is the coarse granularity: the smallest scale feature in Greyhawk is the 30 mile hex. The advantage is that the world is actually big enough that it takes some effort to cross. My guess is a party moving under its own steam would need a year to get from one corner of the map to the other, which I think is good -- you can't just take it all in with a stroll. But, there is no information about what is there at the scale you cross in a day or, better, a block of a few hours that might represent one random encounter roll or significant event or decision during travel. Wilderlands is awesome for that scale of play.

So, what do Greyhawk fans do about this? The world is simply too big to map the geography at the scale of say, a mile or two. My guess is that the best approach would be to have a dozen or so representative, generic maps for each type of topography (open, forest, mountain, etc.), and just randomly pick one of them as needed. Do any materials like that exist?

What I did once upon a time in the 1980s.

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Grab some hex paper and start drawing.

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That's cool, but I had something in mind that is likely more detailed than you could reasonably map in its entirety. I don't know what the scale is of that map, but something like a 1 mile hex would probably be appropriate for overland travel where the terrain you encounter over the course of a given day makes any difference. That is a shit ton of hand mapping to get done if you want to cover a meaningful fraction of Greyhawk. But you could probably have a pretty good simulation if you had a few representative versions that tesselate with each other.

Quote from: Larsdangly;1001617That's cool, but I had something in mind that is likely more detailed than you could reasonably map in its entirety. I don't know what the scale is of that map, but something like a 1 mile hex would probably be appropriate for overland travel where the terrain you encounter over the course of a given day makes any difference. That is a shit ton of hand mapping to get done if you want to cover a meaningful fraction of Greyhawk. But you could probably have a pretty good simulation if you had a few representative versions that tesselate with each other.

What I did back in Ye Olden Times was to break down each 30 mile hex into a smaller hexes using 8.5x11 hex paper. It came out to be  approximately 50 km across (30m = 48.km), with each small hex being 1km. This was perfect for a hex crawl/localised adventure, and when I needed a "big picture view" I just went back to the large map.  A few sheets of paper and you had enough terrain developed to last for a while. Worked well for me.

Shemek

yes, this is what I have in mind, but was thinking a good solution would be to have a set of more or less generic hexes. And, I was wondering whether there is a product or crowd sourced version of that sort of thing floating around. I seem to recall that someone put out a series of hex crawl supplements that could fill this niche, but I can't remember the details.

Quote from: Larsdangly;1001589So, what do Greyhawk fans do about this? The world is simply too big to map the geography at the scale of say, a mile or two. My guess is that the best approach would be to have a dozen or so representative, generic maps for each type of topography (open, forest, mountain, etc.), and just randomly pick one of them as needed. Do any materials like that exist?

I'm with Rob on this one:  find some interesting spots, and start to detail the hexes.  You can detail them at whatever scale works for your game, of course, but I use multiple-layers of hexes to zoom in to the scale that I want.  There's some good discussion of drill-down hex scaling in the thread @ http://www.therpgsite.com/showthread.php?37503-Hex-Crawl-Questions and my post @ http://www.therpgsite.com/showthread.php?37503-Hex-Crawl-Questions&p=987802&viewfull=1#post987802 points to some more Greyhawk hex maps as possible examples you may want to check out.

Allan.

Quote from: Larsdangly;1001617I don't know what the scale is of that map, but something like a 1 mile hex would probably be appropriate for overland travel where the terrain you encounter over the course of a given day makes any difference.

Running EGG's Yggsburgh setting, I found the best approach was 1 mile/hex trail maps along the major travel routes. I had Arr-Kelaan Hexmapper, which made this easy to do but sadly no longer functions (I get 'missing file' messages on modern PCs). I guess Hexographer would work. I did 25x50 mile maps showing plenty of off-trail area, around 10-15 miles from the road, which worked excellently. But you could do maps that only showed features visible from the road, say a 7-mile wide band, 3 miles each side of road. You get 90%+ of the benefit of a full detailed 1 mile/hex map, with far less work.



So I would recommend 1 mile/hex for the starting area, and later on for points of interest such as areas around PC fortressses, but connect these with narrow travel-map 1 mile/hex trails and you get most of the benefits of detail without excessive work.

Quote from: Larsdangly;1001623yes, this is what I have in mind, but was thinking a good solution would be to have a set of more or less generic hexes. And, I was wondering whether there is a product or crowd sourced version of that sort of thing floating around. I seem to recall that someone put out a series of hex crawl supplements that could fill this niche, but I can't remember the details.

I haven't found randomly generated terrain or generic hexes (like in the old Wilderlands supplements) to be of much value.

Quote from: Larsdangly;1001617That's cool, but I had something in mind that is likely more detailed than you could reasonably map in its entirety. I don't know what the scale is of that map, but something like a 1 mile hex would probably be appropriate for overland travel where the terrain you encounter over the course of a given day makes any difference. That is a shit ton of hand mapping to get done if you want to cover a meaningful fraction of Greyhawk. But you could probably have a pretty good simulation if you had a few representative versions that tesselate with each other.

You are overthinking it. In real life there isn't much terrain variation within 30 miles. Habitats, settlements, and points of interest, sure. But terrain no so much.

Also random terrain generation pretty much suck at the human usuable level. The best random generators use various algorithm that while straight forward to understand are reasonable to be calculated by hand. Hence they are mainly used by software like Fractal Terrain.

This is an example of one that makes cool b/w maps. As a side bonus he leads you step by step through the algorithms he uses.

Far more gamable and a better use of your hobby time is to use the satellite and terrain view of Google maps on various real world locations.

For example this map I made to act a reference for placing the Point of Light/Blackmarsh setting in relation to each other.

I used a variety of real world land forms at different scales as reference for creating this. If you look closely you will see Wales, Scotland, North Carolina, the Tibet Plateau, the Valley Ridge terrain of central PA, etc.

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The same with the 30 mile scale. Use the original Greyhawk terrain as the default. Look at real world location with that type of terrain and then draw your own take.

Here are two example of real world 30 mile hexes. One on the Grand Canyon and the other on the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia.
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I'm not over thinking it; I'm just thinking it. Anyone who thinks there isn't much meaningful terrain variation at the scale of a mile needs to get out more.

More to the point, it degrades the role of travel and wilderness adventure in the game when terrain is generic across the scales traversed in a day. Imagine that you didn't map dungeons at scales smaller than the distance you could wander underground in a day - the game would devolve to players sitting on their asses waiting for the DM to tell them what monster they are supposed to fight or what trap just fell on their head. The fact that the environment has some objective, detailed reality is what gives the player the agency to make his or her own decisions. When you move outside all the same things are true, but it is unusual to have a map that is sufficiently detailed across a large enough space that players can just go where they want, making decisions that are informed by some kind of information. Because of this, travel is usually boring: you set a goal (go to Blurgburg to search for the Maguffin) and then sit there and listen when the DM tells you what happened during the week on the road. And there is nothing else you can do because you don't know anything about what is on the road. And neither does the DM because the lazy bastard didn't make a map.

The trouble with the 1-mile scale terrain map is that you need so many of them. Consider the case of a party that is going to spend a week traveling. If they are free to do as they wish, they could get to anywhere in a 7-greyhawk-hex radius. That's about 150 hexes that are in reach. If you don't have maps of those 150 hexes, you have to fall back on narrating random encounters or something, which everyone knows is the crappiest part of any D&D session. And in the next week they could be 14 hexes from where they started, and now you have an area of something like 850 hexes that need to be mapped. It is just overwhelming.

Random terrain is not a good solution because terrain isn't random.

Drawing from blank sheets isn't a good solution - no one will (or can) do it all. The proof is in the pudding: Other than Judge's guild's work 40 years ago, who has put out a well done detailed and described map that extends down to the scales of decisions you make during a day of travel? It is just too hard and we're all too lazy.

I suspect the best solution would be set of some manageable number of representative tiles that are designed to tesselate in some fashion. If you had 10 terrain types (woods, clear, etc.) and 5 of each, you could probably do pretty well. That's a doable project.

Quote from: estar;1001769You are overthinking it. In real life there isn't much terrain variation within 30 miles. Habitats, settlements, and points of interest, sure. But terrain no so much.

Get down on the ground and you discover that is not as true as satellite imagery might make you think. Within 30 miles of where we hunt near Dallas are large flood plains (with lakes and rivers), huge forests, areas of almost desert like rock (think first part of original Planet of the Apes), swamps, and ridiculously hilly areas.

Head down closer to the coast and add beaches and coastal swamps, without losing any of the other features.

Quote from: Tod13;1001882Get down on the ground and you discover that is not as true as satellite imagery might make you think. Within 30 miles of where we hunt near Dallas are large flood plains (with lakes and rivers), huge forests, areas of almost desert like rock (think first part of original Planet of the Apes), swamps, and ridiculously hilly areas.

Head down closer to the coast and add beaches and coastal swamps, without losing any of the other features.

I am aware of that.

Each hex is 1/5 of a mile.
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Each small hex is 2.5 miles and the large hex are 12.5. Basically 1 hour to traverse a small hex.
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Link to full size map.

My original point still stands. In the area that you mention those are small scale features in relation to the overall terrain of the region. That why I posted an image of the Grand Canyon which has a half dozen distinct terrain packed in there. Several in the canyon itself. What north of the canyon, and what south of the canyon.

Which I recommend blank large hex/small hex grid as in both map I just posted. You draw in the overall terrain, make sure it transitions into the other hexes, and then sprinkle a dozen or so interesting features like what you mentioned with swamps, lakes, hard stone desert like areas, etc. This is something a paper based random generator can not do adequately.

And because Greyhawk is a pre-existing setting, it makes 99% of the computer based random map generators useless.

Of course you could head over to Anna Meyer's site as she already done the hard work for Greyhawk.

12 mile hexes
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Wow! Anna's maps are fantastic. I don't know how I missed that before.

Quote from: Larsdangly;1001910Wow! Anna's maps are fantastic. I don't know how I missed that before.

I concur