Building the World (pt 2) - The Region

In part 1, we built a fairly low-resolution image of the globe, using icosahedral projection and 150-mile hex scale. We also zoomed in on a region (ie. one triangular face of the 20-sided polygon) to take a look at the 30-mile hex scale. You can see the hand-drawn results here. As you can see, one region takes up six sheets of 8.5x11 hex paper. And it ain't pretty, but that's ok--this map is just for organization, not showing to players. You just need to be able to look at your map with your own eyes and understand clearly what everything means.

The great thing about working in multiple scales is that each has its own functionality. At 150m, you're managing geology: continents, oceans, and analogues to the Rocky Mountains or Himalayas. You're painting with a thick brush. 30m scale still has geographical functionality, of course. This is where you place your major rivers, lakes, foothills, canyons, and so on. You break into the edges of those grand mountain ranges ever-so-slightly to reveal great valleys when you drill down to 6m later. But this is also the scale where you start placing major nations (mine are visible on the region map if you look closely--they're the red-bordered areas). Note that a nation isn't necessarily a formal concept, depending on the era and the cultures involved. A nation in this sense can be merely a sense of shared cultural identity, as in the warring clans of Ireland and Scotland, or the tribes of Mongolia prior to unification. In the case of my map, some of those nations represent no more than a single great dragon, possibly its mate and young, and the range of its demesne and hunting grounds. We'll explore this stage in greater detail in the future, particularly regarding how to populate your world with its intelligent and monster races, but for now it's sufficient to say that I used the tables provided in the excellent World Builder's Guidebook to lay down some basics.

It's always a good idea when building a campaign to rely on random tables here and there, because they help you break up the ruts of your creativity by introducing elements you wouldn't have thought of, which you now can integrate into the parts that you have. Of course, you don't have to obey the tables--they're just there to get the juices flowing. For example, the dragon-ranges-as-nations bit I mentioned above was a fluke of randomness that I immediately fell in love with. We tend to create with an eye toward the logical, but the real world is full of weird, unpredictable bits that are difficult to emulate without some degree of random input in the process.

Using those World Builder Guidebook tables, I came up with two dominant races. I made one of them human and rolled for the other, which is where I got dragons. I further rolled for distinct cultures and got five for humans and five for dragons (which I interpreted as five dragon types. Within each culture or type, I rolled for a defining attribute and a number of independent nations, then for the nations I rolled a number of occupied hexes.

A similar process governed my major races (halfling, orc, goblin, dwarf), minor races (aarakocra, urd kobold, standard kobold, giant, forest gnome, ogre, troll, and elf), marine races (merman, triton, aquatic elf, sahuagin, koalinth), and subterranean races (drow, duergar, myconid). A lot of these will be reskinned or replaced to suit my milieu as it comes into clearer focus, but these are the basic nation-building races of the region.

Speaking of milieu, now's a good time to look at my human cultures and their characteristics, zoom in on one of them, and start building an ethnocentric concept of the surrounding region from their perspective. This will serve to create a timeline, names for monsters and other intelligent races, and religions. I put some options that were floating around in my head out to my pool of players to hear their thoughts on what sounded fun, and we settled on a Celtic-style starting area.

Good thing I've got the Celts Campaign Sourcebook on hand to help me along.

Building the World (pt 1) - The Globe

Icosahedral Map of Earth (Progonos)

I've always settled for the standard Mercator Projection (flat, cylindrical) style maps in the past and they've always been fine. It would've been fine this time too, I'm sure, except that I'd become obsessed with this being my greatest and final creation as a world builder. I wanted to take my time and do it right. Design Principle #3 demands persistent and concrete environments, and that requires locations that occupy a logically real space.

Naturally, I'd come across Icosahedral Map templates here and there over the years, but they always seemed fiddly--the difficulty of understanding what you're looking at exceeds the value of accuracy, which is easy enough to account for in a standard game with some hand-waving and a couple installments of the ol', "the voyage takes two-to-three weeks." It wasn't until I encountered Justin Alexander's hexcrawl guide (linked in resources below) and, from there, Ben Robbins' West Marches write up, that I had the scales fall from my eyes. It was the notion of zooming in that did it for me--there was no need to operate on the global scale, except to lay down some continental features. After that point, you can build close up flat maps of your regions for play, just checking against the global scale occasionally to reorient yourself to True North.

I'm not the strongest student of math, but I set out to learn what I could about the geometry of hexagons. I hit a few roadblocks along the way to understanding, so if you math-inclined folks notice an error at any point, please speak up. I set a planetary circumference of 18,000 miles (right around halfway between Earth's 25,000 and Mars' 13,000). I settled on a 6-mile hex scale, with 30-mile hex regional scale, and 150-mile hex continental/global scale. If I'm not mistaken (not a given!), that's 3,600,000 6-mile hexes! Design principle #1 is well in hand! Of course, I won't be drilling down to the 6-mile hex scale except to fill in campaign areas, so there's no need to feel intimidated by large numbers here.

I picked up a copy of the Worldographer beta (aka Hexographer 2), had it generate an icosahedral map for me, and then... hmm. You know that feeling when a random generator is a little too random? No matter! I've got my handy-dandy 2E World Builder's Guidebook, and wouldn't I rather do this myself? And so I did. Every couple sentences sent me down rabbit holes of researching geology, volcanism, water cycles, prevailing wind and current patterns, meteorology, and plate tectonics. Two weeks later, I had a map of a world I felt was within the margin of error of being real.

I dub thee... CoolWorld001.png

The beta ran into a few problems when I tried to zoom down to the next scale on a map of this size, so I isolated a region, recreated it by hand, and set that as my world on a second map for purposes of scaling.

It's not Europe. It's not.

As a scaled down, I wanted to use some of the Welsh Piper tricks for terrain placement, but I found them too difficult to implement on the digital map. Time to move over to my good ol' pen and paper. As an exercise, I went ahead and connected two regions to have a look at the area undisturbed by the artifact of the icosahedral projection.

It's not Europe and the Steppe. I'm not seeing it.

From there, I drilled down from 150-mile hexes to 30-mile hexes, which I'll put behind this here link rather than posting here large enough for you to make out. As you can see, things escalate quickly. The center of each 150-mile hex is represented on that scale by the parent hex's terrain type, giving me room to allow for some regional variation in terrain per the Welsh Piper method. I referred to the tables in the World Builder's Guidebook (as well as my own intuition) to place lakes, rivers, foothills, etc. If you look closely, you can see the red borders of kingdoms, which we'll get into in the next post. I won't need to drill down any further until I'm ready to build a local map for actual play.

So, what do you think? What methods do you use to build your worlds? What kind of map projection do you favor? Got any resources you can't do without that I should add to my tool box?


Invaluable Resources
Hexographer - amazing hex mapping program
Hex Based Campaign Design guide from the Welsh Piper blog
Hexcrawl Series from The Alexandrian blog
How to Make a Fantasy Sandbox guide from the Bat in the Attic blog
Medieval Demographics Made Easy by S John Ross
Medieval Demographics Done Right - a tempering companion to the "Made Easy" above
The World Builder's Guidebook - possibly the best money I ever spent on an official 2nd Edition product