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.

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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!

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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.

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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.

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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.

Dungeon by Table

I posted this quick table in the G+ Map-Making in Games group, and people seemed to like it, so I thought I'd preserve it here for easier reference.

These tables are a very loose mechanism for laying out a dungeon map. Roll the General Space table for an initial what's here, then roll other tables as needed to fill out / inspire details. I've been using this method for Dungeons in Blue geomorphs, making one or two rolls per tile when I need a bit of inspiration.

Deadly Blows - Critical Hits Tables

Over the years my regular gaming group has oscillated between using and not using critical hits tables. Our original tables dated from the late 70s/early 80s and were type-written copies from The Arduin Grimoire. Later we expanded these tables with new entries, and finally created multiple tables linked to various damage types.

Ground Rules - Live

Ground Rules is a web-based implementation of the hex map generation tables I've been writing about here. After running the beta version for a while, it's now live on the PBE Games site. Using Ground Rules is straight-forward, and there's a full set of directions on the page. You'll need to provide your own mapping medium, be it hex paper or something like Hexographer.

Ground Rules - Hex Map Generator Beta

If you read this blog, you've probably seen the articles I've been posting about hex maps. I've just finished off the beta release of Ground Rules, a web-based hex map generator based on the tables I've been talking about. It's a bit rough around the edges, and not fully tested yet (thus the beta designation), but if you're interested, it's available here:

• Ground Rules

There's a fairly complete set of instructions on the page. The system isn't particularly complex, but it probably won't make sense without at least a quick read of these.

I'd greatly appreciate hearing from anyone who tries out the system. Feedback here as comments, or via the web comment form on the PBE Games site.

Hexmap Speed Test I

I decided to run a test using the hexmap tables I've been working on to create a terrain-only map from scratch. Starting with a blank map, I dropped a few predetermined hexes into the grid, then started working. This is the starting map.

 After 20 minutes of random generation, this is what I ended up with.

Not too bad.

Hexmapped Again

This is another demo map created using the Fudge-dice table system I'm working on. I did this one a bit differently, using an alternate 'rule' for the map processing. If you've read the previous articles in this collection, you know there are several terrain tables that are sorted in numeric order. Each hex you generate is marked up with terrain and a table number. When generating a new hex, you use the lowest numbered table marked in the already generated surrounding hexes. Table I is a random table.

Hexmap in Progress III - Complete!

Here's the final result for my latest randomly generated hexmap. Terrain-wise, I'm pretty happy with how this looks for a five-mile per hex map. The ocean terrain is still a bit fjord-like, but as I said before, I'm OK with an emphasis on land as opposed to water.

Hexmap in Progress - Part II

I've done some additional map generation on this map, after tweaking the tables a bit more. I really need to sit down and rebuild the special sites tables to cover civilized vs. uncivilized lands. I also need to remember to follow my own rules, as I sometimes forget to check for special features in a hex, leaving me with too much blank space.

Hexmap in Progress

This is another iteration of my hexmap random generator project. I decided to throw this out as a work in progress, so you can see how things have been working out. This map is about a third-done, and I've changed up the process I'm using a bit.

Hexmaps Again - Round Three

Another sample hexmap, using the latest revision of the tables I'm working on. As you can probably tell I've added support for placing settlements, ruins and lairs, and a few other features. I've also modified the ocean generation process a bit, so it looks more like ocean instead of fjord-world.

Enjoy!

Random Hex Terrain II

Another map generated by the random generator I mentioned earlier today. This one started in wetlands, and  has a fair amount of ocean. I think it looks fairly solid, no real why is that there spots.

It's getting better. I've been visualizing these maps as 25 to 30 mile hexes, so about 375-400 miles across and 250-300 miles north-south.

Random Terrain Generator

I mentioned in a recent post that I was working on a set of random tables for terrain generation. The tables themselves aren't quite ready for use; at the moment they only exist as an Excel spreadsheet; but I did spend an hour to build a small test map. Once I had the raw map done on graph paper, I used Hexographer to create a legible map.