As I mentioned recently, I'm trying to put together a map for Secrets of sha-Arthan. I've already got a continental outline for the whole world, but my focus at the moment is on a smaller region intended as a "starting area" for new characters and campaigns. Nevertheless, I have several problems and I'm hoping readers might be able to point me in the right direction for solving it.
Here's a portion of the continental scale map of sha-Arthan:
Because it's continental scale, those hexes are very large in size – about 90 miles across. That size is based on two factors: that sha-Arthan is roughly the same size as Earth and the number of hexes used in the continental map. I could, I suppose, redraw the continental outlines and then layer on a small hex grid in order to make each hex smaller, but that's something I can't easily do, given my lack of technical skills. If someone can suggest a relatively easy way to do this, so easy that even an incompetent like myself could do it, most of my problems go away.
Barring that solution, I was intending to break down each 90-mile hex like so:
Done this way, each of the sub-hexes within the 90-mile hexes would be 18 miles across. These 18-mile hexes would be further subdivided into 3.6-mile hexes. Both 18 and 3.6 miles are odd increments, to be sure, but that's what happens if I stick to 90-mile continental hexes. A possible "solution" is to create in-game units of measurements that correspond to 3.6, 18, and 90 miles. On some level, I like that, because it's potentially immersive, but it's also potentially annoying and easy to forget.
Another possibility is to use a different set of divisions for each continental hex. The only reason I went with the five hexes within five hexes set-up above is because I was able to find some templates online. I'm not kidding when I say I am utterly incompetent when it comes to these matters, so it may well be that there are simpler configurations that will serve my purpose – that purpose being breaking down continental scale hexes into small, more manageable ones for use in play.
Any ideas or suggestions you have to share would be appreciated.
May not be the best option but what about switching to 125 miles for the biggest hex? That gives you 25 for the smaller hexes, 5 for the next smallest, and all the way down to 1 miles if you further subdivide. A weird number but maybe smoother overall
ReplyDeleteI thought of that. It's a good solution. My main qualm about it is that 125-mile hexes might be a little too big for my purposes.
DeleteUnderstood - maybe 100 is a good compromise? 100 -> 20 -> 4 -> 0.8. Still fairly clean but less ... obnoxiously large :)
DeleteGo to 125km. That's 78 miles, which isn't far off from 90 miles, and you get Dnaworks' arithmetic.
DeleteMove to kilometers, and you could have 150/30/6 km hexes. 150km is about 93 miles so not too far from your original numbers.
ReplyDeleteWe use six hexes in our grouping hexes in our Black Blade hex pads, James. You can see them in action on my blog at https://grodog.blogspot.com/2020/02/renovating-the-monastery-in-greyhawk-part-1.html and in our Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.705096762986612&type=3.
ReplyDeleteAt a high-level, I don't know that it really matters about what hex grid size you use or the number of hexes you use for grouping, as long as you're consistent and you're happy with the results. We use six hexes as our grouping standard to align with the movement rates in AD&D 1e and with the hex scales for the Wilderlands of High Fantasy and Darlene's World of Greyhawk maps. If you've not looked at how movement rates and your hex sizes interact, that's worth thinking through, too.
There are also a number of online generators you can use to create new hex grid patterns fairly easily, so if you're not happy with what you have, just experiment a bit to determine what works best.
Allan.
I'd say keep the 18-mi hexes but instead of subdividing them into 5 hexes across, just divide them into 3-hexes across, for 6-mile hexes.
ReplyDeleteThat's a good suggestion. Thank you.
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ReplyDeleteAs long as you use the word "league" for your distance measurement, you'll be fine.
This is probably what I would do too. Just refer to the 3.6 mile hexes as a vague "sha-Arthan league" being roughly equivalent to the distance a person could "march" on a flat road in one hour. It could make calculating travel times pretty simple: one hour to cross a plain road hex at ordinary encumbrance, two hours with heavy loads, three hours to cross a swamp hex with a rough trail, etc.
DeleteIf you don't find another template for subdivisions, you could also switch to a 3 > 15 > 75 or 4 > 20 > 100 scale. Both are fairly close to 90 mile hexes at the highest level, but they subdivide nicely. I personally lean toward the 3 mile solution, if only because I enjoy the fact that a single 3 mile hex can take 1 hour to cross in good conditions, which makes movement nice and easy.
ReplyDeleteI suggest you look for "Medieval Demographics in Brief". It's a short document that helped me a little. The author suggest scales of 96 / 24 / 6 / 1.5 miles (1:4) called world/campaign/regional/local scales. They show big cities / towns / castles / villages.
ReplyDeleteI grew up in the Cumberland Valley, heading west from Philadelphia, which was a major conduit for both colonial and western expansion in the US. Every town down this valley is almost exactly 11 miles apart, or, the average daily travel time of a wagon train. Form follows function.
ReplyDeleteStart there.
When I was working on Sovereign, my medieval role-playing boardgame, I wanted to come up with a base unit of distance that could also be used for calculating resource production, and stumbled upon the very old idea of a "Knight's Fee" — the area of land needed to sustain one knight. This was a fungible measurement, considering how rich and fertile the land of a region might be, but was generally considered 1000-5000 acres.
If you assume the high end, you can fit 5000 acres into a hex that is 3.0035 miles across, ie, a 3-mile wide hex, or, awfully close to the much appropriated "league" of yore. https://www.britannica.com/science/league-measurement
Now I grew up in Shiremanstown, a small borough that was exactly 1 mile wide at its longest (I know this for a fact because one day my brother and I slapped on our dad's hiking pedometer and walked from end to end to measure it), and with the farmland surrounding the town, it was easy to image it as the village in the center of a Knight's Fee.
And just like that, I had my scale of both distance and production for the game!