Some Hexing

A while back I did some work on a hex map sandbox, the Nameless Coast. I never really took it anyplace, because I kind of got lost in messing around with immigration history and population groups and how they moved into the area. I also think the area was too big, it's approximately twice the size of the state of Pennsylvania.

Anyhow, a few RPG.net posts started me thinking about hex maps again, and that led to messing around with the classic six-mile hex. From there I decided to subdivide into one mile hexes just to see where that ended up. Starting with a mountain hex, I ended up with this:

And a forest led to this:

Of course tiling these together is a bit messy, because there are overlapping partial hexes on the corners and edges. I'm not sure how I'd handle that. There's also the problem of roads and rivers crossing from hex to hex, and for a geomorph-ish approach, those are hard to do, though I guess you could standardize some cross-over points on the edges.

Anyhow, there's some random map musings.

Oh, if you're missing the Wilds updates, well, players are being disorganized, and work travel is interfering, so Monday's turn... wasn't. Soon (TM).

Nameless Coast - First Hexes

I've spent some time this past week getting organized and doing some map tweaks to get moving on this project. I'm using TiddlyWiki 5 to record ongoing developments, along with a spreadsheet to provide a tabular look at the various groups that come out of the group / event simulation I'm doing.

Nameless Coast - An Update (of sorts)

No, I didn't give up on this project. I've been working out how exactly I'm going to be mapping this out, and my first snag was applying some sort of coordinate system to the map. The tool I used to lay out the initial map didn't include a coordinate option, and I was trying to avoid doing it all by hand in Gimp. After messing with other hex tools I finally bit the bullet and did it the old-fashioned way. 2500 hexes later...

Nameless Coast - Group Events

Last post I laid out some general thoughts on how I was going to populate the Nameless Coast with groups. Part of that process is having events occur to groups over the course of time. Here's a start on a list of events that might show up.

• New Arrivals - additions to the group.
• Group Division - splitters!
• Resource Exhausted - time to move on?
• Resource Discovery - time to settle down?
• Natural Disaster - trouble at the mill!
• Disease - bring out your dead!
• Scarce Food Supply - so hungry.
• Rich Food Supply - so fat.
• Internal Conflict - Economic - the rich get richer, the poor get poorer.
• Internal Conflict - Social - that ain't right!
• Internal Conflict - Military - we're takin' over, see?
• Internal Conflict - Religious - kill the heretic!
• External Conflict - Economic - your stuff, give it to us!
• External Conflict - Social - death to vermin.
• External Conflict - Military - we'll call it a police action.
• External Conflict - Religious - kill all the heretics!
• Trade Alliance - nice stuff you have there.
• Military Alliance - two are stronger than one.
• Social Alliance - why can't we be friends?
• Religious Alliance - what's so funny 'bout peace, love, and understanding?

More to come.

Nameless Coast - Arrival

In the last Nameless Coast post, I outlined the major races I was going to use in this little sandbox. Over the last few days I've laid out a basic method of populating the area and tweaked the races tables to suit. Now I have a plan.

Major Races of the Nameless Coast

Since the last Nameless Coast post I did a bit of thinking about how to introduce population groups into the area and use these groups to drive the development of hex contents. Today I sketched out a quick table of the major races I'm going to use for this, and some broad categories to assign to these groups.

Nameless Coast - Now with Name!

So I've decided to run with the Nameless Coast as the overarching name for this place. I've also started to frame out how I'm going to populate at least parts of it. I'm going to start with pure wilderness with no established populations of intelligent, community-forming creatures (so no humans, elves, dwarfs, goblinoids, or similar). Of course this is a bit of a fuzzy set, since depending on how you interpret creature-descriptions they could be in or out (things like trolls and giants).

Next I'm going to start sending in groups, each with a set of characteristics that include why they're here, how many they are, and how they got here. For example I may introduce a tribe of goblins looking for new territory since their old area is getting overpopulated. They're traveling in from the south-west on foot, they're well-prepared for survival, but they're relatively few in number. Another group might be a shipload of human refugees fleeing a distant war. They stole the ship, are poorly organized, and have little in the way of supplies. Where they land could well determine how long their pseudo-colony survives.

I figure I'll run about 100 years of this sort of thing, with new arrivals coming in randomly over time. Not exactly sure what system will be a fit for this, so I may pull together something in Fudge. I did a quick brainstorm on group motivations / attributes (really quick), and came up with this:

Why are they here?

• Looking for something
• Fleeing something
• Population pressure
• Invasion

Who are they?

• Leadership
• Numbers
• Unifying characteristics / aspects
• Underlying divisions

Resources

• Military
• Survival
• Trade

How did they get here?

• Ship
• Land
• Magic

What is their attitude toward others?

• Friendly
• Xenophobic
• Hostile
• Cooperative
• Neutral

When did they get here?

• Which decade / year

Obviously this is still very rough, and I haven't really framed how I'm going to achieve forward progress, but it's a start.

Coast of [something] Hex Sandbox

Terrain is done! I spent a few hours (OK, more than a few), finishing off all the six-mile hexes with basic terrain, and then dropped in a couple islands for good measure. Here's the final result.

Final Terrain Map

Nameless Hexes

I really need a snappy name for this project, but I'm not feeling inspired yet. I had the time to add to the previous map. I'm still using the same basic filling strategy with Ground Rules, and now that I have the edges finished off, it's easier to deal with a full hex at a time. Detailing out a hex worth of terrain takes me about 20 minutes now.

Sandbox Update

Just a quick progress image from this map. Finished off all the border areas, and I'm now working on the coast, including where I anticipate placing my "civilized" area.

And here's a cheesy GIF animation of the process, which may or may not work in Blogger's image viewer.

• Next!

Progress by Hex

Not much to say about this, just showing forward progress. I changed up how I've been building these a bit. I think the first hex I built out was a little too monotonous, so I'm using a slightly different method now. Before I was treating all unfilled hexes as the large hex terrain. Now I'm placing a single 'best match' hex in the center of the large hex and treating all A1 results (the randomizer hex) as the large hex terrain type. This has led to more variety, while retaining some of the basic feel of the big hexes.

Early Small Hex Work

In progress

It's not exactly a fast process, but that's more because I'm keeping careful labels on everything and flipping between Gimp for mapping and Excel for dice rolling. I've tweaked a couple table entries along the way (and fixed a couple more typos too). I think I want to finish off all the border hexes and then start moving in, so... onward!

• Next!

Hexing Onward

I had time to do a bit more work on this hex map project, so I picked a large hex to fully map out with smaller hexes. I started on the coast, in one of the mountain hexes, to see how things turned out. Instead of using a random pick I started in the center of the hex and worked my way out from there. Because I was treating unfilled small hexes as the containing big hex's terrain type, the small hexes were fairly homogeneous until I got to the edges and started considering bordering hexes too.

Before

After

As you can see, mountains overwrote most of the original hill terrain, making this a pretty rough coastline. Small patches of woods and a few more open areas along the coast popped out, along with a small wetland on the northwest side. In retrospect I probably should have treated the mountain results as hills, since that was the base terrain for the big hex, but I think this looks fine. I think I'll work through a few more hexes to the south before I focus on my planned settlement hex, either the scrub area or light woods next to that little jag in the coastline.

• Next!

Más Hexes

Lest you think I forgot about this hex map project... I haven't. I got side-tracked last week with new PBE Games releases, and then sports-related events. Now it's back to the hex map, and a refinement pass on the previously generated big hexes.

Hex Complete

When I finished up the last post, the hex map I'm working on looked something like...

I spent some time working on this last night, here's how it went. I started by rolling the actual terrain for each of the marked hexes. When Ground Rules generates terrain, there's a chance it will also generate additional terrain in the surrounding areas according to built in rules based on terrain type. Mountains can generate mini-ranges, swamps spread, and oceans create shorelines of land terrain. By the time I was done with this phase, the map looked like the one to the right. You can see where the swamp expanded down south, and the ocean hexes generated a strip of coastline in the northeast (the extra forest is me getting ahead of my narrative).

With this process out of the way, it was time to start adding new hexes. I'd planned on filling in hexes randomly, but decided to do something a bit different instead. Since each hex's terrain is determined by nearby neighbors, I elected to roll a d20 and count off filled-in hexes with open borders spaces, left to right, top to bottom. Then I'd roll up the first empty hex in a north / clockwise rotation around that spot. That seemed to work out pretty well, giving me this as a map about half-way through.

In this image you can see some of the terrain / hex type crossover that Ground Rules creates. For example there are two A5 light forest hexes in the NW. A5 is mountain terrain type, so these woods will likely end up surrounded by more mountains. You can also see how the A1 random type breaks things up a bit. So far so good.

It was about here that I discovered a couple minor errors in my Excel sheet, so I put the map on pause and fixed those. Today I continued with the build out process, and finished up this afternoon. The final map looks like this.

Not bad for a couple hours of dice plus Gimp work. Of course this isn't done by any means. Next I get to start working on the 6-mile hex version of the map. As I work through the more detailed version I'll also be making notes on all the generated hex locales and features too. That's a lot more note-taking, so I need to figure out how I'll be recording all this. As you can see, the detail level takes a major jump up with the small hexes shown.

• Next!

Ground Rules Revisited - Hexes Again

A while back (a long while actually), I built a bunch of tables designed to create random hex maps that were not completely nonsensical. The result was Ground Rules, a web-based hex generator. I've been reworking the tables underlying the generator a bit, in hopes of putting something together that would work in a PDF format.