Distance and Vastness in Hexmaps

 

The world is extremely big. It's hard to appreciate how big it is without spending a lot of time of it on foot, and without making the effort to notice the bigness. But once one does, one cannot help but reflect on it. Landscapes contain, and conceal, great vastnesses of contents which the mind struggles to really grasp.

The photograph above was taken from the top of the highest hill in the town in which I live. It looks out over parts of the city of Newcastle upon Tyne, and to beyond. I would like you to notice two things about it.

The first is that the hills in the distance, the Cheviot Hills - where the red arrow is pointing - are about 40 miles away. The hill from which the picture was taken, Sheriff Hill, is only about 500 feet high. This is a simple but important thing to observe: from a mound of any sort of prominence, it is possible to see very far indeed across a roughly flat landscape. 

The second is that between the viewpoint in question and the hill pointed to by the red arrow there is a very great deal of content. There is an entire city in the way, for one thing, as well as one of the country's largest and longest rivers, not to mention a large number of villages, entire towns, many smaller hills that just look like low undulations from this distance, streams, ponds, lakes, marshes, forests, heaths, and fields. As well as this, there is a large number of ruins, castles, churches, monasteries, monoliths, caves, chasms, and other features which one might describe as 'interesting' in some way. The world is full of stuff to interact with, especially in a fairly crowded and historied place like England - to an almost self-parodying extent. It might not look like it, because so much of the contents of the world are coyly hidden when it is examined from a distance. But one need only roam around it to discover the extent to which this is true. 

I have written a lot about what you might call the DMing side of these phenomena - namely, the importance for a hexmap to have a proper density of contents. (See the loosely connected series here, here, here and here.) But it is also important for PCs to be given the sense that they are immersed in a landscape of the proper bigness - that, if they climb up a hill and take a look around they will see an awfully big world around them, and that they will also get the sense that it is filled with stuff to do and places to explore if only they are motivated to look. This - conjuring in the mind the awesome scale and fullness of what lies before them in confronting the abstraction of the hexmap - is of vital importance in conveying to the players the impression that a campaign setting is something that is going to be rewarding and exciting with which to interact.