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Monday, February 7, 2011

Daruna - A Map

Starting a campaign without a map is like a peanut butter and jelly sandwich without peanut butter. This is my first effort at a map for the previously mentioned Daruna campaign. I've created this using the free version of Hexographer, a hex mapping application from Inkwell Ideas. I really do need to buy a copy of this excellent application sometime soon.



Daruna Campaign Map

Click for full-sized version. The scale on this map is 25 miles per hex. I'm pretty pleased with the way this has developed, and I'm considering this close to done. There's a temptation to add more labels, but I think it's getting a bit cluttered, so I will probably resist. Most of the names appearing on the map were created using my own random name generator using the Sanskrit / medium length option.

5 comments:

  1. TimeshadowsFebruary 7, 2011 at 10:27 AM

    Lovely! :)

    Nice icon set.
    --Is that the commercial alternate set or one of your devising?

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  2. Mark ThomasFebruary 7, 2011 at 11:05 AM

    It's actually the standard free set. It works pretty well for my purposes, though I find it gets a bit cluttered for larger maps.

    ReplyDelete
  3. TimeshadowsFebruary 7, 2011 at 12:00 PM

    I can understand that.
    --I have a map of the Black Crown which is the north-polar continent (12 million sq. miles), and it loses definition and simply becomes a strange painting unless one is willing to explore sections at a time.

    Yours looks very nicely lain out, and possesses a high degree of verisimilitude.

    Thanks for the clarification.

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  4. Mark ThomasFebruary 7, 2011 at 2:22 PM

    Thanks! What I'm finding with hex maps is that more than 30x30 or so becomes too busy to make much sense of. I started mapping out the region in this map with a 5 mile per hex map and quickly gave up. I could capture more of the detail I wanted, but the map became unreadable.

    My plan here is to finalize this map, then use a series of 1 mile per hex maps to blow up important locales as play progresses.

    ReplyDelete
  5. TimeshadowsFebruary 7, 2011 at 2:39 PM

    M,

    Thanks for the details.
    --I will have to keep that in mind when I scale down the maps. :)

    ReplyDelete

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