Map Porn

I am going to be very busy with work for the next few weeks. Posting may become sporadic. Here, have some map porn, and click to enlarge:

Map of steam-boat routes around Dutch New Guinea, early 20th century

Map of the Khanate of Khiva, later 19th century

Zonal Combat

What do you say we lighten things up around here and talk about abstract mapping?

Diaspora has an interesting approach to combat, which would work equally well with D&D - indeed any game system you can think of with a bit of tinkering. I've been tinkering with it. It goes something like this:

When combat looks likely, the DM draws a map, and then divides it up into zones. Zones are not a grid, and do not represent strict distance. Rather, they represent a combination of space, ease of travel, view, and time to pass through. Thus, an open field might be one zone, but a nearby cottage with three rooms might be made up of three separate zones, because the time it takes to sprint across the open field is the same as the amount of time it would take to move between rooms cluttered with furniture. Likewise, a thick forest full of boulders might be divided up into three zones, whereas an area of light woodland of the same "size" might just be one zone - representing the speed with which one can move through each area.

With me so far?

If there are borders between zones (a hedge, a wall, a ditch, a door) these have numerical ratings indicating how long it takes to pass through them. So a hedge might have a rating of "2", indicating that it takes 2 "zones" worth of effort to cross over. (You can climb over in the same amount of time it would take to cross 2 zones.) This is called the "pass value". 

Pass values can change if there is a doorway. If there is a doorway, the pass value is 0 - unless the door is shut, in which case it costs "zones" to open it, indicated by a number, called the "opening value". (A wall would cost 2 "zones" to climb over, so it has a pass value of 2, but it has a gate which would cost "1" zone to open, or an opening value of 1. So the hedge has a pass value of 2/1.) 

Each turn, the player gets one zone of movement and an action. The zone of movement might consist in eroding pass value (e.g. getting half way over a hedge with a pass value of 2), or opening a doorway (e.g. eroding an opening value from 1 to 0.) The action would be the usual sort of thing (cast a spell, attack, whatever). Or he can give up the action to make two zones' worth of movement.

A turn is however long it would take to cross a zone. This means that combat can scale up and scale down to suit the situation. A fight taking place in an area covering a square mile of countryside, or taking place in a few rooms in a hotel reception, would follow exactly the same pattern - it's just that the zones would represent different levels of abstraction. The zones in the former would probably be bigger by area on average, and a turn would be longer (maybe two minutes in the former as opposed to around 10 seconds in the latter). But the rules are exactly the same. Only two things would really change. First, the larger the zones and the longer the turns, the more abstract attack rolls (the attack roll would represent a period of maneuvering and trading blows), and the smaller the zones and shorter the turns, the less abstract attack rolls would become (the attack roll would represent literal single attacks). The other thing that would change would be pass value. A hedge separating two open fields, each about 100 square yards and represented by a zone each, would perhaps have to have a higher pass value than a hedge separating two small gardens of 10 square yards each.

Example:

Here, the open spaces are fields and easier to cross than the woodland areas, so their zones are spatially larger. The stream and hedges have a PV (pass value) of 2. The barn in the middle is its own zone, full of bales of hay. Red lines indicate zonal boundaries; green lines are hedges; blue is the stream; the black line is a road.

The Contents of Hexes

A few days ago I posted a selection of grabs from google maps, indicating how large a 1-mile hex actually is, and the kind of things that you might find in one. Then Chris responded, to the effect that (and I'm putting words into his mouth here) 1-mile hexes are all very well, but they are perhaps too granular - it's a heck of a lot of work to map out a setting at the 1-mile level. He posits an "emergent exploring rule" for 6-mile hexes, wherein you simply discover more things in a 6-mile hex the more time you spend exploring it and the more guidance/information you have about it.

The commenters immediately provide solutions, which are pretty good. Myrystyr's one seems like the best:

A generalised X-in-dY check per Z-time-period, mayhap? Default 2/1d6 per day - 1/ for stumbling-about blind luck, 3/ or 4/ for guides, clues, or character types with better search capability - and up to 3 or 4 times per day for potentially feature-rich locales... And, roll two different-coloured d6 at the same time, 1 the feature check and 1 the encounter check.

I like the elegant simplicity of this, and I think you can add some other modifiers: the chance would increase or decrease depending on terrain (lower for a forest, higher for plains), demographics (lower for empty wilderness, higher for settled), and so on.

Chris also suggests some other rules of thumb:

• Castles, cities and the like should all be in plain sight unless intentionally hidden away (like Gondolin or Derinkuyu). Heck, roads point you directly to most of them.
• Infamous lairs, ruins and dungeons should, of course, retain their "Here be dragons" hex map icons and easy-to-find status. The yokels can point out exactly in which direction the castle we don't go near lies.
• More obscure lairs, lost ruins, buried tombs and especially treasure map loot should require a bit of active hunting out by adventuring parties.

The main, immediately identifiable problem is that you now need some way of governing how many locales can be discovered in this way. The amount of "interesting stuff" in a hex has to be finite. But it is also variable. In my 1-mile hex examples, some have only one thing that you could make into a "locale", but some have several. This is a function, mostly, of how settled the area is, but it also introduces other factors. The more mountainous a region is, for instance, the more stuff you will get per hex on average, because each hex represents more land. (Hexes are "as the crow flies", whereas the land underneath is folded by hills and valleys, making it more packed with actual physical geography.)

What I would suggest is that, by default for a 6-mile hex, any settlement of more than 250 people, any castles or towers, and major geographical features like lakes, rives and mountains, are basically discoverable without the players doing much more than travel through the hex a few times.

You would then have a default of 3 'discoverable' things per 6-mile hex, modifiable by geography, level of settlement, history, and so on:

• One of these would be something that the players can find if they make an effort to explore. All it would require would be for them to say "we look around the area".
• Two of them would be 'secret', obscure, or lost things (a ruin, buried tomb, a secretive monster's lair, etc.) These would be near impossible to find by exploration without some level of guidance or inside knowledge. 

This would allow the players to discover stuff just by looking, but would also reward efforts they made to interact with locals to try to get information, and to risk random encounters by searching.

"Why 3 things per 6-mile hex? Isn't that too much?" I hear you cry.

The answer is: no. To illustrate, I'll use two of the 1-mile examples I put up a few days ago, zoomed out to 6-miles (ish; they're a bit smaller and probably more like 8 kilometres):

 

This is Canterbury. As you can see, there is not only the city itself, but two other large villages or small towns (Bridge and Sturry) plus a shitload of other hamlets, and plenty of woods as well as farmlands. In a densely settled area like this (probably much more densely settled than in medieval times, admittedly) you would need at the very least 3 adventuring locales not even mentioning Canterbury itself.

 

This is Tiree -a good chunk of the island. Note that there are 5 large bays to be found here, along with several smaller ones and a lot of little sheltered coves in the centre-right. There are four scattered farming villages, an airport, and 3 lochs. There are also some tiny islets here and there in the sea, too. Again, at least 3 adventuring locales needed.

But 3 is a default, and can be reduced. For example:

 

The mountains of Assynt. It's empty and devoid of settlement, though there is still plenty to interact with - 6 named lochs, plus lots of smaller ones, and a folded, rugged landscape concealing God Knows What. 3 adventuring locales might be inappropriate in such a landscape, because you don't want to be silly - not every lake has to have a Water in the Waters; not every mountain has to sit atop an ancient dwarven citadel. But perhaps it's also unrealistic to just say "it's an empty hex".

Of course, you wouldn't want your players to figure your system out. An alternative would be to randomise the number of adventuring locales in a 6-mile hex: d3-1 for sparse, d3 for average, d3+1 for settled, etc. Modified also by type of geography.

Being an Illustration of the Contents of 1-Mile Hexes Through Examination of Divers Locations in the British Isles

How much adventure is contained in a 1-mile hex? Usually, more than you would think, although it depends very much on the context. Here are a series of illustrations - screen grabs from google maps of various locations around the British Isles, each approximately 1 square mile (at rough and ready estimates).

This is Canterbury, an ancient town in the South East of England. Here, as you can see, 1 square mile is enough to contain the entire old town (the oval shape of roads in the centre of the map, bounded in the West by the yellow ring road and in the East by Broad Street and Lower Bridge Street). The old town was encircled by huge walls built during the Roman era and maintained throughout the Middle Ages (and still present in places today). It contains, amongst other things, one of the largest and most famous cathedrals in Britain, numerous other churches, the town hall, the old 15th century library, a vast number of pubs, shops and restaurants, and several museums. Outside of the old town are two railway stations, wooded areas, plenty of houses, recreation grounds, and a university. Clearly, in this 1-mile hex the question is not where adventure could be found, but where it couldn't be.

This is an area of quintessential English countryside, in Somerset. There is a small village in the North East corner - a row of houses along a road - and several farms. While it looks relatively empty, each of those fields is divided by a hedgerow, and the land is flat, making visibility difficult. Travelling across this area would be fraught with tension as, effectively, you would never be able to see more than about 100 yards in any direction at any time, and more often much less.

This is a wooded area in the Forest of Dean, in South Wales. This is, I think, what much of Western Europe would once have resembled - mostly forest, with tracks and roads criss-crossing it, and the occasional glade where trees have been cleared for grazing or firewood. Even though the area is small, it is easy to get lost and even easier to stumble across dangerous wild animals, nefarious forest denizens, and god knows what. The glades would be dangerous to cross, as you would be exposed and plainly visible to onlookers. Naturally, the forest could hide openings to tunnels, ruins, abandoned camps, dead travellers, and so on.

This is Coquet Island, off the coast of North East England. It contains the ruins of a medieval monastery and a lighthouse, and is a refuge for seabirds - there are 18,000 puffins living on it. Clearly, the monastery could be haunted, be the entrance to a dungeon, or whatever else, and the nesting seabirds don't have to be puffins - they could be something more valuable or dangerous.

A Loch, in the Highlands of Scotland. This is rough, barren landscape - not a tree to be seen anywhere, or a scrap of cover except for heather and the folds of the land itself. Here, encounters would take place at a distance, as parties would be able to see each other plainly at great distances. At the same time, adventuring parties cross the area would be completely exposed to, perhaps unexpected, aerial attack. The Loch itself is dark and forboding; does it contain a Watcher in the Waters, the spawn of some ancient god, a forgotten plesiosaur? 

A stretch of open coastline on the island of Tiree. Note the airstrip in the North West - not very D&D. There are some tiny hamlets in the West, but the main attraction is of course the bay: a perfect landing point for vessels. Traders, vikings, colonists, explorers?

This is the Southern edge of Loch Ness, in Scotland. Fort Augustus guards the canal which links Loch Ness to other waters further south and allows boats to travel all the way from Inverness, the only city worthy of the name North of Aberdeen, with Fort William, the other major settlement in the Highlands. Fort Augustus itself is small, but includes notable attractions, not to mention a series of locks which control river traffic on the canal. To the East is the rough coast of Loch Ness itself, forested and dangerous.

This is the true wilds of the Highlands, in Assynt, one of the most sparsely populated areas of Europe. This is harsh, remote, and unforgiving landscape, infested with midges, roamed by wolves, bears and who knows what else. In the South West is a deep forest of primeval Caledonian woodland; in the North East is a river with streams flowing downhill into boggy marshland in the North. Cross this wilderness at your peril.

If 1-mile hexes ever feel too small, or you find yourself leaving them blank on the map, think of this post and refer back to it in your mind, and give yourself a good sound spanking for ever having been so foolish.

It Begins

A boring Monday evening in, a glass of red wine, and a new megadungeon begins to take shape...

Campus Maps are Solid Gold

One of the great unsung treasures of the internet is that university campus maps are readily available and free to use for all of your gaming needs. Check out the one above and click to enlarge: is it a temple complex (the purple buildings) with a village for the mad monks nearby (the blue buildings to the west)? A palace with living quarters for slaves? Ancient ruins? And it is already numbered and coded: all you need to do is replace the text for what each number/letter combination refers to and you're good to go. K4 becomes the temple to the Mad God Jubilex. N6 becomes the dormitory of the household cavalry. E5 becomes the dungeons where virgins are imprisoned prior to sacrifice. D6 becomes the monkey house.

It is ready made mapping heaven.

Authentic Cave Scratchings

Map of Yoon-Suin, scrawled on hotel note/memo pad thing.

Map of Leon

Another Pendragon map. This is the County of Leon.

The Six Counties

A map of Brittany, for the Pendragon campaign I'd like to run. The trees look a bit like mushrooms, I suppose, but you get the idea.

The Hobby of Map Making and Setting Design

At Valley of the Blue Snails, Canecorpus discusses setting design as a hobby. It's something I can identify with. I enjoy role playing and I enjoy setting design, and sometimes I enjoy them entirely separately from one another. In fact I might go so far as to say that I like setting design even more than I like gaming. It's a great way to express creativity, especially if like me you are a terrible artist (regular readers will attest to this) and cursed with a flea-like attention span (precluding novel-writing); moreover I would call it a pure hobby in that there's no way that a setting-designer can possibly be in it for the money. You don't sell stuff like Yoon-suin on its own, at least not in numbers. It's a labour of love, and that's that.

Today I had a godawful hangover and crippling aches and pains from playing football last night, so I spent most of the day making maps. For inspiration I visited the Cartographer's Guild, and from there came across the amazing Sorol, a one-man effort to collect the "accumulated knowledge about the planet [Sorol], its inhabitants, and its history". The creator is not a role player and as far as I can discern just makes it all up for fun. (He makes, quite simply, the best maps of nonexistent places that I've seen.) It's good to know one is not alone, and even better to know that there are people out there with such skill, energy and motivation. It serves as a kick up the backside.

Of course, world creation is a venerable practice. Tolkien originally made up Middle Earth as a hobby and a way of providing a history for his created languages. The tradition continues to this day: one of the most interesting modern examples of world creation, Ill Bethisad, has similar origins. First created as an alternative history to explain the existence of Brithenig (a made-up language based on the premise that Latin in the British Isles did not die out), it is now a highly detailed world all of its own, with several constructed languages and a complicated political structure. Believe you me, if I had the linguistic knowledge I would also be making up languages myself - probably right this moment.

Beats watching TV anyway, right?

Unfinished Map of Mollusc-People States

Scale: 20 miles to a hex

Key

Light Blue - Shallow sea or ocean, or freshwater body
Purple - Coral reef and atolls
Brick-brown - Mangrove mixed with tidal flats
Yellow - Sandy beach
Light Green - Coastal forest
Dark Green - Swamp and mixed tropical forest

Olazabal Subsector

Part of the Traveller sector I'm developing to run with the regular PBeM group. This is the Olazabal subsector, which is one of the areas of space colonized by Basques from old earth. It even has a world called Gernika, named after the famous town whose destruction was immortalized by Picasso. (Other parts of the sector were settled by Koreans and Japanese.) All UWPs and so on were entirely randomly generated, hence the sometimes strange results.



UWPs:




And some notes on the background and a couple of the worlds:

Olazabal subsector

The Olazabal subsector is one of eight subsectors entirely owned by the Euskal Herria - an interstellar confederacy founded by Basque colonists. The Olazabal subsector is considered something of a backwater, but it is one of the longest settled areas of Euskal Herria space and thus has strong emotional ties for most Basques. Its mapping and planetary surveyance was carried out by three explorers - Olazabal, Urzaiz and Arzalluz - who are considered among the greatest of all Basque spacefarers, though they all died some 8,000 years ago.

The Euskal Herria takes a lassez-faire approach to planetary rule, and directly governs only three worlds in all of the twelve subsectors where it has a presence. All the worlds in the Olazabal subsector have complete autonomy and are required only to submit 0.5% of their Gross Domestic Product in taxes to the central authority. However, the Herria brooks no attempt at complete secession and has shown itself willing to attack and occupy worlds which attempt to declare complete independence.

Planet Details

Eyharts

An earth-sized world with an atmosphere of argon and an average temperature well over boiling. It is named after the first Basque in space, who entered earth orbit in 2008. The large population live in subterranean tunnel systems with life support provided by technicians from the Euskara Herria. This is more than worth their while: Eyharts is one of the biggest producers of precious metals in the sector, though its distance from regular communication and trade routes means that freight is infrequent. There are three governments on the planet - one technocracy (the major polity), a military junta, and a slave-owning oligarchy. All three are hostile to one another, though open warfare is infrequent. Eyharts' distance from other systems and the unusual situation in which its inhabitants live has caused eccentric cultural developments: the inhabitants use sex to seal trade agreements and reproduce with cloning.

Santurtzi

Santurtzi is the food-producing hub of the subsector, and the dominant power is a Soviet-style Communist bureaucracy where the population inhabit communal farms. Its huge port, from which many of the surrounding systems are fed, houses the main Euskal Herria consulate in its region of space. Two minor regions of the planet have independence from the Santurtzi state - one is a tiny representative democracy, the other a throwback to hereditary kingship. Trade on Santurtzi is governed by a complex set of rules based on citizens' social class (actual or percieved).

Irun

Irun declared independence from the Euskal Herria twenty years ago; it has since been invaded by the main fleet in the subsector and a naval base set up, amid rumours of massacre and repression. All travel to the system is forbidden and its UWP is based on old and unconfirmable data.

Uzcudun

Uzcudun is a water world, its entire surface one unbroken ocean. Its handful of inhabitants live in raft-like dwellings and have a nomadic existence sailing along age-old lines of migration, though their advanced technology allows them to remain in constant communication. One of their notable traditions is the deliberate blinding of their family elders, in an elaborate ritualistic ceremony. Despite its tiny population Uzcudun has one of the largest space ports in the subsector (built, at considerable expense, on a platform anchored to the ocean floor) and a Euskal Herria consulate; it is a tourist hub for the elite of the entire Euskal sector.

Cabbarus

A poor, rocky world with a climate similar to earth's arctic circle and a small, rabidly xenophobic population living in nomadic clan groups. Cabbarus is also a notable hideout for pirates, smugglers and outcasts, with a Traveller's Aid Society well known to be corrupted beyond all usefulness and a middle-sized but delapidated space port. Over the centuries the Euskal Herria has attempted on several occasions to occupy the planet and install a 'responsible government', but the cost of doing so - in men and resources - has always proved prohibitive, especially given Cabbarus' utter poverty.

[Inspirational Pictures V] Planetary Cartography

Mars, I'm sure you'll agree, is a bit of an attention-seeking bastard when it comes to sci-fi and space opera. The red planet gets all the terraforming and colonisation while the other planets just have to watch from the sidelines. This is a great injustice that must be rectified.


A topography of Venus, complete with a handy colour scheme to make it easy to envisage seas and oceans. From this distance it almost looks like a pleasant place to pay a visit - though of course you can't see the clouds of sulphuric acid howling around its surface.


Titan's gigantic sea. Not composed of water, but of liquid methane. What form of life has it given rise to?


Nobody can see much of Pluto's surface. This is an imaginary map, based on that of Jupiter's moon Ganymede. I love the icy feeling of this image. Like Great Old Ones could be slumbering beneath its translucent surface, or The Thing - waiting for milennia after milennia for a host to inhabit.

Map of the County of Leon

The Western part of the County of Leon, including Brest, the seat of Guimarch of Leon:


I did this using Gimp. Not great, but I think I'm getting a little better with practice. The most onerous task is without doubt the coastline, which I was far too lazy to do a proper job of.

A Hexmap and a Kernel of an Idea

I downloaded and installed a fun little freeware map-making program called Wilderness Mapper the other day, and decided for my first project that I would map out the old Duchy of Brittany, circa 1066 AD. At the time Brittany was a powerful independent polity which had defeated the Kings of France in several wars, and was strongly allied to the (also) independent Duke of Normandy - who would shortly take the English crown. It was still almost entirely Breton-speaking, and so should be more properly rendered the Dugelezh Vreizh. Its vassals included the Counts of Naoned (Nantes, in French), Gwengamp (Guingamp), Kernev (Cournouaille), Poher (Poucher), Roazhon (Rennes), Gwened (Vannes), Leon and Penteur (Penthievre).

The map isn't finished yet and it looks nothing like as good as the ones Alexis posted here. (Alexis is an ornery individual, but his world building entries are nothing short of inspirational.) Nevertheless it took me bloody ages last night to get even to the stage I'm at now. The basic framework is in place now, and the next task is to populate it with villages, hamlets, towns and adventuring locales. Each hex is 4.1 miles across; the dark green is deep forest, while the lighter green is just 'forest'. (In the early Middle Ages, Europe was still almost entirely forested.) You'll notice that the Eastern section is mostly untouched - that's because it's France, not Brittany.


Of course, the history of Brittany needs a bit of D&D-izing. My first impulse was to include elves in the mix somewhere (if elves are going to be based on a real-world culture, it's pretty much always going to be Celtic or Latin types). But elves bore me, and I think I've already written before about doing something different with demihuman races vis-a-vis real world cultures.

No, the people of the Dugelezh Vriezh and its environs are humans and dwarves, and I think it would be an interesting twist to have the dwarves be culturally 'French'. Indeed, the populations of modern day France, Northern Spain and Italy, Slovenia and Romania are all varieties of dwarf; they represent the gothic barbarian races who supplanted the celts in those areas and became latinised during the latter period of the Roman Empire.

Brittany, like Wales, and Galicia and the Basque country in Spain, is an area where humans remain dominant. The population is almost entirely monolingual in Breton, although there is some 'bleed' of dwarven French culture into the nobility, and some intermarriage resulting in a subculture of half-dwarves living on the outskirts of society.

Brittany is covered by thick forest and its population is almost entirely coastal. Inland, roving hunter-gatherer bands of gnolls can still sometimes be a threat, and monsters of various kinds inhabit the deepest and thickest glades. But the main dangers to the Bretons come from overseas - trollish viking raiders from Scandinavia and half-orc pirates who set sail from the southern coast of Wessex. (England is a melting pot mix of orcish Angles, Saxons and Jutes and human celts; interbreeding has resulted in a race which blurs from the fully human to the fully orc - with everything in between represented.) While relatively powerful, the Dugs of Vriezh find themselves threatened from on all sides - as the peace with the dwarven Kings of France is always uneasy.

I'll expand on some places of note in Brittany later.

More on Maps: One I wish I'd come up with...

You come across some interesting things on the net from time to time, don't you? How's about this for a fantasy setting - The Map of Humanity:


I highly recommend you click on it and have a zoom around. Eurocentric, perhaps, but nevertheless an item of crazed genius. I don't quite know what to make of it other than that - other than to say I'm going to straight away put it in my file of "Setting ideas that are just too difficult to envisage pulling off, but which I take out from time to time and gaze at mutely."

(That file also included my abortive attempt to turn Borges' Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Recognition into a campaign setting - more on which I think I'll write at a later date.)

My Map: Let Me Show You It

James at Grognardia posted an endearing map which his 14-year-old self drew for a D&D campaign. I love maps; I love looking at them, drawing them and thinking about them - which I'm sure is a trait I share with 95% of the role playing fraternity - and James' has made me think about sharing one of my own.

Unfortunately, I have none which my 14 year old self drew here with me in Japan. I wish I did. They would be mighty embarrassing to look over now, of course; when I was 13 or 14 I was still very much of the Forest of Death/Mountains of Doom/Desert of Destruction Fighting Fantasy school of place-naming. Nevertheless, it would have been fun to look at a few of the old campaign settings. (There must be a hundred or more in my parents' loft.)

So in lieu of one of my older efforts, here's a very recent one, from a play-by-post game I'm still running. It's a map of Moluche, the seven hobgoblin Kritocracies by the sea, and their surroundings:


This is done with my current favourite method of map creation: taking snapshots from Google Earth and rotating, chopping and variously mutilating them into something workable. The seven Kritocracies are Mapuche, Nguluche, Koniyiin, Koninguun, Pefimi, Peynguun and Peymuun. To the south is a wilderness area dominated by primitive Lizardfolk tribes, and to the South-East the lands of the Duergar. Moluche has been devastated by centuries of internecine strife between the Kritocracies. Much of it is now a desolate wasteland, strewn with the detritus of war - abandoned fortifications and trenches, mass graveyards, and exhausted mines. Only Peymuun, the richest and most powerful, retains its forest cover to any extent.

I wish I could remember where I took the snapshot from. I believe it is somewhere in the Arabian peninsula, rotated at an angle, although I could be wrong.