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.

PBE Games - The Litany of Releases

Since last post, I've been busy with new stuff over on DriveThruRPG / RPGNow. Here's an update on the latest PBE Games releases, beginning with several new entries in the Uncommon Ground texture pack series:

• Flecked - A stone surface with flecks of bright material embedded.
• Erosion Control - Rough stone with lighter areas protruding from a darker substrate.
• Petrified Lichen - A stone texture with an irregularly colored surface.
• Worm Rock - A two-color hatching pattern for old-school style maps.

Note there are previews of each texture available on the relevant product page. Looking forward, I have another eight to ten Uncommon Ground textures almost ready to roll, including two more hatching patterns, another wood grain, and more stone too.

Petrified Lichen Preview

On the Dungeons in Blue front, I put out Twisty Tunnels, a geomorph pack of natural caves. This is similar to the Corridors and Intersections pack in that it's primarily passages, intersections, and curves, with very few rooms. As I've been making more use of geomorphs in my own game, I've discovered you need a lot of these connector-style tiles to fit things together. I have a similar package, Tunnel and Cave, in the works, which provides the same sort of passages and intersections, but each tile is also a natural to worked tunnel connection.

Twisty Tunnels Preview

I've also updated the Master List to include the most recent additions to Dungeons in Blue, plus planned additional releases. Look for three more full geomorph packs, plus the associated triple pack in the next week or two.

Lastly, I released One Page #14 - Arctic Features and Hazards which provides twenty locale-based minor encounters ready for use in any fantasy RPG. I have two more of these planned, one for Jungles, and one for Wetlands, which should round out the One Page terrain types nicely. I'll be doing a standard five pack deal for numbers 11-15, and I'm also planning on bundling up all the outdoor features and hazards One Pages into the Great Outdoors Collection.

Worm Rock Preview

OK, so that's about it for the product updates. Thanks as always for reading, and enjoy the weekend!

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.

Wilds - Scratch that Last, Feed the Reptiles!

After splitting up a bit the last few turns, the party gets back together and decides to do something about the lizards in the Reptile House...

Wilds - Do Not Feed the Reptiles

The next two turns in my play by email game find the party doing some exploration, with two party members splitting off to do their own thing. Chaos seems to be the order of the day...