TheRPGSite

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.

Full Size (http://wilderlands.batintheattic.com/Greyhawk_Map.jpg)

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.

(http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-jdMcYZbgKiU/UEX3NrfprtI/AAAAAAAAAaw/Y1HKQHOkvpo/s1600/Kallent+Marches.bmp)

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 (http://mewo2.com/notes/terrain/). 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. (http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_mFjy4EWzmtg/S2JmRso-NEI/AAAAAAAAAuI/9W0k5mpWaIU/s1600/Region,+Gormmah+Sm.jpg)

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  (http://ghmaps.net/)as she already done the hard work for Greyhawk (http://ghmaps.net/greyhawk-maps/flaness-map-download/).

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 :D

Quote from: Larsdangly;1001873Anyone who thinks there isn't much meaningful terrain variation at the scale of a mile needs to get out more.

Yep. A distance mapped in 1KM or 1 mile hexes is something I can imagine because it is something I can see in the real world by going for a walk. A 30 mile hex is almost completely worthless to me as a GM tool. At that scale I'd much rather have a map without hexes.

Quote from: S'mon;1001730Running 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.

When the new version of Hexographer comes out, it is supposed to have a zoom in hex feature for precisely this kind of mapping.  How well it will work, I don't know, given that it is still under development, and I haven't received any kick starter notices in some time.  Also, I'm not sure how much RAM you need on a machine to run Hexographer to handle maps as large as Greyhawk, though of course you can judiciously divide them into regions.  (I'm hoping that the zoom in feature handles that effectively, by only loading the details when you pick a hex from the larger scale.)

The whole thirty mile hex scale?

That's about the distance a man can travel hiking from just after sunrise to just before sunset during the spring solstice. So, one's day's foot travel. On horse, overland (not on a road, trail or path) two hexes a day. Used to ride out at Dawn and go about 25 miles by lunch, nice and easy like, just some steady riding with a couple stops at streams to water the horses. This was through rugged terrain, mountainous foothills, and mountains. On flat level ground or plains, would not have any trouble at all riding ninety miles a day. Pony express couriers, with afresh changeout of horses every ten miles or so, could easily make ten miles an hour, most made better than twelve, so just riding for twelve hours flat out with changes of horses every dozen miles or so will get you through four hexes a day.

One hex is just about the limits for a castle or stronghold patrol if they want to return to the castle before nightfall. When I was young, I worked on a single ranch that was thirty miles wide from east to west (40-45 in some places), and cut a swath seventy miles from north to south. This was small as far as real Wyoming ranches go, But I was on the southern third of this vast ranch, and there were three big houses (where members of the family that owned the ranch lived). The big houses were about 70-100,000 square feet, and their were three or four bunk houses for ranch hands clustered around the big house, and a cook shack with a dining hall. There were also cabins located in the far and remote areas of the ranch, and taking a ride out, one would overnight at the cabins if one had to set out in the afternoon, because it was too far to ride back to the big house.

For any adventurers, keeping a thirty mile hex cleared of hostile monsters meant that one could attract settlers to the vicinity of the stronghold.

Thirty (or ten leagues) was a handy figure, for working out all the logistics of running a stronghold.

Pony express would swap riders too and ride around the clock, and Pony Express couriers averaged 1,966 miles in ten days, from St. Joseph Missouri to San Francisco ...so 196 miles a day

Quote from: GameDaddy;1002173Pony express would swap riders too and ride around the clock, and Pony Express couriers averaged 1,966 miles in ten days, from St. Joseph Missouri to San Francisco ...so 196 miles a day

Those 196 miles were ridden by 2 different riders swapping out 20 different horses from posts staggered about every 10 miles along the way. PCs will often have some difficulty arranging that kind of logistical infrastructure in the wilderness.

The best commercial product I've seen for an outdoor setting that has the level of detail you need to make decisions at the scale of a day is Arden for Chivalry and Sorcery. I've probably used that supplement for every fantasy and historical game I've run for any extended period of time. It is basically a set of 2-3 dozen hand drawn maps of a forested, rugged landscape dotted with farmsteads, villages and feudal holdings, with a transparent hex sheet overlay, and an accompanying book detailing the populations of the various spots (which you can ignore if you like). It really changes how people play when you present them with a real choice about where they go and how they get there.

Just my $.02 but as an avid mapper over 35+ years of gaming Ive come to the conclusion that the very detailed, 1 mile per hex/scare/cm or whatever scale is a lot more work than it is worth. Knowing that a town is here and that its in generally hilly and lightly wooded terrain is typically more useful and sufficient to run a game than knowing exactly how it fits along this slope with these two small streams along this copse of trees her... etc. You can sketch these features out if it becomes really important tactically or something and clip them to your area map so as to be consistent later but having a zoomed in, detailed typographical rendering for every mile of an entire continent or something is pretty much overkill as far as Im concerned. At one time I had over 300 of these hand drawn for an old campaign and looking back, they were impressive table dressing and thats about it. A 25 or 30 mile to the inch scale is far easier to map and just as useful.

If your game sessions are organized around the 'encounter' as the basic unit of play then I'd say you are right. If you spend a significant amount of time every session with the players in the driver's seat, I'd disagree.

Quote from: Larsdangly;1002343If your game sessions are organized around the 'encounter' as the basic unit of play then I'd say you are right. If you spend a significant amount of time every session with the players in the driver's seat, I'd disagree.

Not in my experience with sandbox campaign. A fine level of geographical detail often bogs down play by overwhelming the players with a number of choices with little information on which to make a decision.

During one of my first Earthdawn games, a midnight encounter check led to a minor Horror (called a Kreescra) shadowing my elf Archer adept for a month, only sneaking close enough to him when he slept in order to mess with his dreams, and deny him useful rem-sleep (no automatic Recovery tests on waking, some other BS rules, heh), and feed on the fear from the nightmares. For a MONTH... and when the GM's dice came up really low I would get a description of the most recent terrible nightmare. My character was a nervous-wrek, as this was done through the adventure: tracking down a nethermancer that had been digging up and stealing skeletons from a local ancestral graveyard.

By the time we tracked down the nethermancer (an attractive elf), she had prepared enough magic to animate the mausoleum she had been standing on and using for cover as her skeleton horde kept us at bay. Like, the building got up, grabbed a tombstone to use as a club, and came wailing at the party. And that's when that damn Kreescra decided I was lunch (having separated myself from the party, he jumped me from behind some tombstones, literately onto me and started gnawing on my head). My fireball enchanted arrow went wide (mostly hitting the animated building and not the enemy caster), and my wailing bloody murder while trying to knife the thing on my head distracted the party enough that the nethermacer stomped her tomb-puppet to my position (thus flanking the party while the skeletons kept them busy). Result after we mop up and drive her off - character note: phobia of mauloseums. Typical Earthdawn day, lol.

To bring it back to encounters... I keep maps fairly abstract, and use encounter generation as a "procedural generator". So the encounter isn't "something the party has to deal with right now".. it is "something that is now in the world with appropriate backstory" (& may track the PCs for a month if they fail their initial Perception checks). In this case, when/if the PCs run away from something (an Ogre-Mage gets generated into some woods and the PCs just can't handle him), it doesn't just go away. OgreMage is now lord of those woods, and starts to bring the other factions under his control & or kill and eat them... As the PCs travel through the relatively abstract map, they leave these procedurally generated elements that I then use to generate in-world conflicts. And the map begins to fill itself in through campaign play.

Quote from: Larsdangly;1002343If your game sessions are organized around the 'encounter' as the basic unit of play then I'd say you are right. If you spend a significant amount of time every session with the players in the driver's seat, I'd disagree.

Not in my experience with sandbox campaign. A fine level of geographical detail often bogs down play by overwhelming the players with a number of choices with little information on which to make a decision.

What I do is periodically note anything that seem out of the ordinary to the PC with the reason why (as far their characters would know). I may throw in a bit of color make the setting come alive. Once in a blue moon the players may decide "Hey that sounds interesting" and it become something more.

Examples of Actual Play

Session 2 where the decision was made (https://gamingballistic.com/2015/02/10/majestic-wilderlands-2/) to go through the countryside.

Normally I operate at this map sale where each hex is 2.5 miles. This is a bit cruder because I didn't have time to draw it up fully so I just expanded my 12.5 mile per hex map and superimposed the grid over it. But the party did not make it out of town by the end of the session.

(https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-js-4H703NiE/VNlwOTOTWcI/AAAAAAAAEIc/vww1X32pbAU/s1600/Local%2BPolitical%2BEnviron.jpg)

So for the next session I decided. I wonder how things would look at the .5 mile per hex level i.e. one level down. The place they wanted to go would easily fit. Note that at this scale one big hex is one hour of walking. So each small hex is 12 minutes at a normal walking pace.

Here is the account (https://gamingballistic.com/2015/02/17/majestic-wilderlands-journey-and-recon/) of the following session.

(http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-zY6LvYZdYFw/VP5Lb_nnKCI/AAAAAAAAELI/1XH3HvIn0UI/s1600/Local%2BArea%2B2.jpg)

Now despite the use of the small scale map, I did run it any different than when I use the 2.5 mile scale map or even the 12.5 mile scale map. An encounter was randomly rolled, I know how the climate and terrain interacted (think inland Virginia). I done enough camping and live action to know that the start of the encounter is likely going to starts when one or the other party crest a rise and has a longer sight distance. In this case (random roll) the party had the advantage of having the higher ground. And the rest unfolds as described in my player's post.

After the session was done, my conclusion that it was overkill for what I got out of it. The only small benefit was the layout of brush, forest, and field around Highgarden which the party used to plan their approach. But then again that can be seen from what lies along the edges of the local map I make or use for my sessions.

Note that the image is cropped from the larger map I used. But I think it illustrate my point.
(https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-EwXwKWEisdM/VOKdLaM8pvI/AAAAAAAAEJI/ZqbKKXUOsuo/s1600/Highgarden.jpg)

Greyhawk's 30 miles hexes is too coarse in my opinion. If Greyhawk was my main campaign I would make a 5 or 6 mile per hex scale map. That is more than sufficient to show some small scale terrain and to improvise the terrain of any encounter or investigation.

Quote from: Larsdangly;1002252The best commercial product I've seen for an outdoor setting that has the level of detail you need to make decisions at the scale of a day is Arden for Chivalry and Sorcery. I've probably used that supplement for every fantasy and historical game I've run for any extended period of time. It is basically a set of 2-3 dozen hand drawn maps of a forested, rugged landscape dotted with farmsteads, villages and feudal holdings, with a transparent hex sheet overlay, and an accompanying book detailing the populations of the various spots (which you can ignore if you like). It really changes how people play when you present them with a real choice about where they go and how they get there.

Arden had an amazing number of maps and detail on the maps. I recall being very tempted to use the maps for a Arthurianesque setting.

I wonder how many of the folks who think more granularity for wilderness mapping is wasted or even harmful to play run dungeon exploration in a similar abstract fashion.

British Ordnance Survey Maps have the level of detail you are looking for. I've used several Ordnance Survey maps for hikes and the level of detail is exactly what I'd like for detailed overland movement and wilderness exploration. Sadly most published versions of the Ordnance maps are too modern, though I did acquire one Seventeenth Century period map which is nice and doesn't have anachronisms like Railroads and M-level highways.

useless or even

Quote from: Bren;1002401Arden had an amazing number of maps and detail on the maps. I recall being very tempted to use the maps for a Arthurianesque setting.

I wonder how many of the folks who think more granularity for wilderness mapping is wasted or even harmful to play run dungeon exploration in a similar abstract fashion.

British Ordnance Survey Maps have the level of detail you are looking for. I've used several Ordnance Survey maps for hikes and the level of detail is exactly what I'd like for detailed overland movement and wilderness exploration. Sadly most published versions of the Ordnance maps are too modern, though I did acquire one Seventeenth Century period map which is nice and doesn't have anachronisms like Railroads and M-level highways.

useless or even

I liked Arden as well, it was a great adventure setting especially for any medieval Europe style fantasy campaign. We actually adventured in Arden playing C&S back in 1980-81. Since then I have used it as a resource for D&D games.

Also what Estar said. Greyhawk used a 30 mile hex, and that is fine. Most of my games were homebrew campaign settings though. I had learned to use the Judges Guild hexagon campaign system, and absolutely prefer doing all my homebrew maps as 5 Mile hexes, and doing high detail work on villages and strongholds using .2 mile hexes, or with graph paper, or even as an architectural drawing. This fits very nicely with the traditional 0D&D travel times as well because Underworld & Wilderness Adventures specifically states on page 17 that the distance to cross a hex is five miles.

Quote from: Bren;1002401British Ordnance Survey Maps have the level of detail you are looking for. I've used several Ordnance Survey maps for hikes and the level of detail is exactly what I'd like for detailed overland movement and wilderness exploration.

We're using a large Ordnance Survey map ("Britain Before the Norman Conquest") for our Ars Magica campaign.  Great stuff!

Allan.

I don't dispute the value of a 30 mile hex map. No one can deal with creating a 1 mile scale map of a fully fleshed out game world. And if you did 99 % of it would never see the light of day. But I'm holding my ground on the value of having 1 mile scale maps as what you usually have on hand to deal with decisions made during travel. Of course the DM can just say, 'you walk for a week and are at the gate to a dungeon'. And if that's what you want to do, go for it. But I think it is a missed opportunity, comparable to saying 'you wander in a dungeon for an hour and end up in a room with a couple of orcs'.

Those are some impressive maps, but I'll still stick to Mystara's amazing series of official and fan-made maps.

Quote from: RPGPundit;1003641Those are some impressive maps, but I'll still stick to Mystara's amazing series of official and fan-made maps.

Holy crap, I had no idea there were so many amazingly good quality maps for Mystara out there. In 10 seconds of googling I found a wet-dream set of 1 mile scale terrain maps that look to be fan made, presumably using one of the hex cartographer sorts of programs you can get online. These are exactly what I was talking about in my OP.

Quote from: Larsdangly;1003710Holy crap, I had no idea there were so many amazingly good quality maps for Mystara out there. In 10 seconds of googling I found a wet-dream set of 1 mile scale terrain maps that look to be fan made, presumably using one of the hex cartographer sorts of programs you can get online. These are exactly what I was talking about in my OP.

Yup. It is, without a doubt, the greatest hexmap collection of all time.