Quote from: Dumarest;984791Was that part of the main set? I have Rolemaster somewhere, just the books without the box.

No I don't believe so but I'm talking about first edition. Back when it was just arms law, spell law, character law
etc.

Quote from: mAcular Chaotic;984793Hey, I just had an idea. What if you took a real life place off a map and converted it into a hexcrawl format.

That would handle making "realistic" terrain.

I used Néw Zealand once.

Quote from: mAcular Chaotic;984793Hey, I just had an idea. What if you took a real life place off a map and converted it into a hexcrawl format.

That would handle making "realistic" terrain.

Rotate it 90 degrees from the usual presentation, and it will work even better.

Now if only there was a tool that would convert a real map into a hexmap.

Quote from: mAcular Chaotic;984811Now if only there was a tool that would convert a real map into a hexmap.

It's not a tool, but check out http://tao-dnd.blogspot.com/

Alexis has a certain style of writing that can some times grate, but he's doing awesome work on mapping Earth.

Frank

Quote from: Steven Mitchell;984810Rotate it 90 degrees from the usual presentation, and it will work even better.

That would actually damage the realism because wind and ocean currents are driven by the Earths rotation and attitude to the sun.

Frank

In a fantasy world the world may not be a planet or be circling its (single?) sun.

Quote from: ffilz;984821That would actually damage the realism because wind and ocean currents are driven by the Earths rotation and attitude to the sun.

Frank

Rotating a land mass would only affect the wind and ocean currents because of the size and shape of the land mass and where the mountains are located, aside from these effects the wind and ocean currents would still be driven by the planet's rotation and the axial tilt and solar energy effects.

I don't if you are aware of my how to Make a Fantasy Sandbox series of post which goes into the world building part.

Quote from: ffilz;984821That would actually damage the realism because wind and ocean currents are driven by the Earths rotation and attitude to the sun.

Frank

In 30 years of gaming I don't think I've ever seen a player complain about this kind of detail in a GM's campaign setting. I am sure there are players who do care about this but I suspect the poster can easily rotate the map and not have any concerns expressed by the players.

Quote from: Crimhthan;984872Rotating a land mass would only affect the wind and ocean currents because of the size and shape of the land mass and where the mountains are located, aside from these effects the wind and ocean currents would still be driven by the planet's rotation and the axial tilt and solar energy effects.

Depends on the scale. I used a rotated portion of the coastline of Mexico in the Amacui setting found in Points of Light II the Sunrise Land. But the map is 125 miles by 95 miles. At that scale the final climate can be easily justified. The problem you are talking only occurs if you trying to rotate continents or huge regions like the eastern United States. Even then what plausible to a hobbyists  is a very low bar.

My recommendation is
1) Take it into considerable if you like that part of worldbuilding. if you don't care about, don't sweat it.
2) The basic rules are not that difficult and can quickly generate plausible result. Won't survive nitpicking but few setting do when it comes to geology and climate.

For rotation, I meant mainly on maps small enough where world scale problems aren't an issue, but big enough that some of the players might recognize the shape if they saw/drew the outline.  

Twice, in my high school days, I used a map of my county and the surrounding terrain as the basis of a map for a campaign.  Once it was rotated 90 degrees, the other time 180 degrees, and at a slightly larger area.  Despite the fact that all the players lived in the area, and some had all their lives, no one ever caught on.  I even used an overhead shot my parents had the location of our house before it was built, rotated, as the area around a castle on a hill.  We were playing the game in the location, in the afternoon, and the players could look out the windows and see the terrain I was describing.  No one caught it.

Quote from: Steven Mitchell;984900For rotation, I meant mainly on maps small enough where world scale problems aren't an issue, but big enough that some of the players might recognize the shape if they saw/drew the outline.  

Twice, in my high school days, I used a map of my county and the surrounding terrain as the basis of a map for a campaign.  Once it was rotated 90 degrees, the other time 180 degrees, and at a slightly larger area.  Despite the fact that all the players lived in the area, and some had all their lives, no one ever caught on.  I even used an overhead shot my parents had the location of our house before it was built, rotated, as the area around a castle on a hill.  We were playing the game in the location, in the afternoon, and the players could look out the windows and see the terrain I was describing.  No one caught it.

Or were having so much fun they didn't care.

Quote from: estar;984897The problem you are talking only occurs if you trying to rotate continents or huge regions like the eastern United States.

What problems are you talking about? What does it have to do with the size of the area you are rotating?

Quote from: estar;9848972) The basic rules are not that difficult and can quickly generate plausible result. Won't survive nitpicking but few setting do when it comes to geology and climate.

Why would anyone nitpick, assuming they are there to have fun, if you are an expert in anything you can nitpick about it, but only a real jerk would do that in a game. I see that as a non-problem and if you are gaming with a friend, he would more likely ask in private if you would like help with that, not try to embarrass you in from of your other friends, at least not on something like this. There are other things that good friends keep as a running joke, but not things like this.

Some of the players I've gamed with tend to notice when a GM takes a piece of the real world and rearranges it to get their world map. We can decide not to care, but there remains that "we're on 90-degree-rotated New Zealand" effect that sticks around, and the OOC geographic knowledge aspect, too.

rgrove, it's funny how often you refer to some idea like having geography make sense as if it's an esoteric idea that probably no one ever does. In 6th grade my players were aggressively critiquing the geographic realism of my first maps.