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.
Thank you for this. In my blog I often deal with maps where each hex is 8 miles. This is a really good reminder just how much could be fit into a single hex. Also it brings up one limitation of hex-maps. Generally speaking only one symbol will fit into a single hex so I need to prioritise which symbol is most important if there are several features within that hex.
ReplyDeleteYes, I tend to prefer 1-mile hexes for this reason.
DeleteMy first thought is that we may have a skewed view of how much could be in a hex since we are so much more populous and so on than it used to be. I just found these maps which might be interesting for you to compare - https://www.flickr.com/photos/newcastlelibraries/albums/72157666225808630/with/25961358990.
ReplyDeleteThe other thing is, the Rules Cyclopedia had castles on their random encounter tables. I always thought it was a bit strange; how could someone not know there was a castle there? But maybe it's not as strange as I think!
Definitely not so strange! In this neck of the woods you often come across small castles, holdfasts, peel towers and bastle houses that are known by locals but not famous at all.
DeleteI hadn't heard of those before.
DeleteA strength of D&D's assumed zero to hero progression is that you start out concerned with things that are within a mile of the starting town or dungeon entrance. The initial grounding at that scale can then be drawn on as a template for what might be in each square mile you ride through at higher levels. This does not suffice in itself because even after so many years of playing D&D I am still amazed by how much there is in any square mile of the real world (or contrariwise how cramped and unsuitable for fighting any real underground space is that was not excavated by power machinery).
ReplyDeleteYes, well said.
DeleteI like that "the adventure is within a one-mile radius at level 1" idea. This works well with stereotypical assumptions about the mobility of rural European sedentary peasants. Would it be two miles at level 2? Or perhaps square the party's mean level to determine the radius within which the adventure site is found?
DeleteI suppose that might also be a formula for determining the area in which the party has gained reknown...or infamy. This assumes the PCs are behaving like loudmouthed murder hobo, driving horrendous inflation in the local economy and providing dubiously beneficial monster-slaying. Another option would be to set the party's sphere of reknown/infamy to equal [(mean level of party) -1]^2.
You might have to scale it. Level 1 = 1 mile radius makes sense. Level 10 = 10 mile radius doesn't.
DeleteWhen I first got into the OSR I did loads of reading about 12 mile and 6 mile hexes. It struck me that this was maybe an American idea of space, because to me these seemed like huge "units" to have for a small scale adventure. But I'm from Ireland, and my mental geography is based on Ireland as being the "normal size" of places, so places like the US are just inconceivably vast to me.
ReplyDeleteI tried it out in my games but found it wasn't really much like the experience of hiking through countryside that I was familiar with. I've done several hiking holidays where I carried my gear on my back and slept out rough, and although I'm not an adventurer I was pretty fit for most of them. Hiking over rough ground with gear is extremely tiring. Doing it in bad weather is also mentally draining. And the number of distinct places you encounter on a hike through Irish or Welsh or English countryside is huge. Old ringforts, castle ruins, ancient mills. You could live in an area for years and only find some of these things after some serious searching. Once, my brother and I were tramping around a small patch of woodland with a ruined mill in it. We took a wrong turn and then decided to cut through a particularly rough patch to get back to the car so we wouldn't be late. In so doing we literally stumbled into a hermit living in a shack in this fairly small (about a mile square) area of woodland. Never knew he lived there, from the look of things he'd been there a long time, and he was really shocked that we came across him. We had a friendly chat and headed on our way, both of us amazed that we'd never known this guy was living in there.
The other thing I found weird about the OSR hexcrawl stuff was the hex itself. I get that you can model more directions with a hex, but I dunno, I feel there's very little to be gained with hexes vs grid. Just use the "every second one counts as two" trick for diagonals and it's pretty spot on for a grid, and gridded paper is way easier to get your hands on (I use those bullet journal style notebooks for my stuff), way easier to do co-ordinates for (there's a reason the Ordinance Survey doesn't use hexes!) and for me just easier to conceptualize. Once you're comfortable with diagonals, then all the faces of the square map onto the cardinal directions, and you can do North-East and so on easily. It also scales up and down very easily.
So now I do 3 mile (~5km) "league" grid squares for my "big" maps and 1 mile grid squares for my "local" maps. Very happy with it, and I find I can conceptualise things around this scale more easily. I haven't had a lot of chance to try it out in play yet though!
I'm with you. A grid works well in general and is easier to scale.
DeleteI'm with you. A grid works well and is easier to scale. THats why we use grids in the real world.
DeleteThis is madness! Travesty! Heresy! Sinful!
DeleteI'm on my way to nail a sheet of grid paper with an overland map on it to the doors of Gencon.
ReplyDelete