We're back with week two of Ray Otus' Gygax 75 Challenge. I was supposed to do this last week, but...well, I'm a little embarrassed to admit this as an OSR nerd, but I've never actually bought physical hex paper before, and I had an unexpectedly hard time finding any for this part of the challenge. I could've just done it digitally, I guess, but I really wanted to stick with pencil and paper; it just feels better to me. I ended up getting some hex paper on Monday, though, so we're back in business.
Last week, I laid down the broad concepts of my setting, Halas, listed some sources of inspiration, and put together a little bit of a mood board. Now we start to leave the kind of broad-scope stuff I have an easy time thinking in behind, and have to get down to actual gameable details.
Week 2: Surrounding Area
The goal for this week is to put together a map of the adventure area.
Task 1: Get a sheet of hex paper.
Done.
Task 2-5: Draw the following on it, one item per hex (or more if indicated). Name anything worthy of a name.
- One settlement of a significant size
- Two other settlements (camps, larger or smaller towns, a keep, the unusual home of a fantasy race, etc.)
- One major terrain feature (covering at least three hexes)
- One mysterious site to explore
- One (main) dungeon entrance
Rather than going through these in the suggested order, I'm gonna go about designing my map the way I like, with these as requirements for things that will have to be on it by the end. What follows is basically gonna be my stream of consciousness as I work on this, recorded here in bursts interspersed with the work itself. I initially had some ideas about taking pictures of my paper map in stages and showing you folks the progression, but that's already flown out the window as I'm writing the first part of this post now, so I'm just gonna describe things and then show you the end product.
Step 1: Climate and Landscape
So what kind of vibe do I want the landscape of this region to have? I'm in the mood for something Mediterranean-esque, like Greece or some northern parts of Israel I thought were pretty when I went there once. Hot, dry, rugged mountains and hills, hardy scrub, coniferous forests. Of course, since Halas is on an alien planet, it's not literally a Mediterranean biome--most of the flora and fauna are alien and fictional--but that's the atmosphere I want to channel.
Step 2: Scale
There's some discussion of this in the book. Otus says 1-mile hexes like Gygax suggests are a good choice, and mentions that anything bigger than 6-mile hexes should be discarded outright. I don't like the idea of 1-mile hexes for this project. One of my favorite things in fantasy RPGs is long journeys through trackless wilderness, Lord of the Rings-type stuff; I want travel to be a big part of my games, and for every journey to feel significant, even if it doesn't necessarily get a lot of actual time at the table. Making the adventuring region too small cuts down on the journey element. I also find it makes the world feel sort of cramped; if your starting adventure region is just a few square miles and already contains three settlements, a dungeon, and another mysterious site to explore, that makes me think dungeons and other weird stuff are just absolutely everywhere and every farmer trips over four of them whenever they have to plow a new field. And having villages every couple of miles along the road contributes to making the world feel a lot safer, less wild and mysterious. Not great for the kind of adventures I want here.
Lucky for me, if I'm riffing off Greece for my landscape, that implies a lot less arable land than medieval western Europe, and a much less dense population. Given my hex paper is 23x19 hexes, I decide to go for a 6-mile hex scale. Otus compares a map at that size and scale to roughly 1/3 the size of Ireland. For a starting area meant to accommodate some decent travel, that sounds great to me.
Step 3: Topography
I tend to start my maps by grabbing some convenient bit of Earth and flipping it around. Knowing I want to go for a Mediterranean feel with my landscape, and with the scale of the map in mind, I look at the southern bit of the Peloponnese and go "yeah, that'll work." Flipping it upside down, because I want Halas to be south of its major sea, I draw some coastlines that generally mimic the shape: three mountainous peninsulas with more land to the south and southwest. Mountain ranges go in about the same places, and then I add some rivers where they look good. That takes care of terrain features covering at least 3 hexes, since most of the region is highly mountainous.
Diversion: Names and the Beginnings of Panic
Thinking about what to call this region, I decide on the name Atreia. I'm not much of a conlanger; usually I name stuff by picking a real language and sticking some phonemes together to make something that sounds the same. For the language of Halas, I want to evoke the same sort of vibe as The Dying Earth, where the names tend to sound sort-of English but very much like fantasy gibberish; I'm not really sure what to call that sound, but that's my goal here. Atreia sounds Greek, but I still feel intuitively like it fits with the vibe.
This is about where I start to get overwhelmed by all the work I feel like I need to do. Now that I have to start thinking about things like where settlements and dungeon entrances go, I feel like I have to work out all the history of everything in detail--why is this city here at this spot? How old is it? What makes it unique? Who rules it? What's the backstory of the dungeon? And my brain starts going down all these rabbit holes that don't lead to anything important for a game, and I get paralyzed and frustrated.
To help resist these impulses, I'm gonna change gears and try to work as closely as possible to the spirit of Otus' challenge: I'm just gonna plonk down the required features in spots that seem to make sense, give them names, and leave the rest to fill in later as much as possible. It hurts me in a physical way, but I think it'll be healing.
Step 4: Settlements, the Dungeon, and a Mysterious Site
The major city of Atreia is Kyther. That's a name I've had in my head for a city in Halas for a while, so might as well use it here. Kyther goes at the mouth of the biggest river, in the northwestern part of the region, on the biggest peninsula. Again, I'm deliberately not working out everything about Kyther right now--that's week 4 of the challenge--but I can't resist coming up with a few details. Kyther has an urban population of about 6,000; it's not a bustling metropolis, but I'm designing Atreia as a "tutorial region" to introduce new players to the setting, so not throwing them right into the grand capital of one of the Deathless Lords feels appropriate. Kyther is ruled by one Duke Lacus, a vassal to one of the Deathless; I don't have much of him beyond a name yet. Knowing how big the city is, I can get a sense of how much farmland it needs around it (a lot, apparently), so I fill in most of the non-mountainous land on the big peninsula with fields surrounding the city. I guess Kyther is where it is because that's where most of the arable land in Atreia happens to be.
Next, I want a small hamlet somewhere. The fishing town of Velm goes on the tip of the easternmost peninsula, at the mouth of the other big river. I think if I were running a campaign with a newbie group that would benefit from a more structured intro to the game than just "here's your sandbox, go play," I'd have them start as villagers from Velm, throw them into a small tutorial dungeon near home, and then offer them the rest of Atreia to explore afterward if they survive; they could head to Kyther as a hub for bigger and better adventures.
Traveling overland without having to climb over any mountains, these two settlements are about a week's journey apart on foot. I draw a road connecting them by what looks like the easiest route, and then place another settlement along it: Teya's Rest, which I decide I want to be basically just a big inn and a few farms, a stopover on the way to the city.
Now I need a dungeon. I like the idea of an isolated spot up in the mountains outside Kyther. I pick a spot at the head of the western river and draw a marker for a site I decide on the spot to call the Temple of Worms. It's gonna be a cult lair, home to the worshipers of a daemon that puts symbiotic worms in people to grant them everlasting life at a terrible price. (Note: daemons in Halas are ancient AIs capricious tutelary spirits rather than incarnations of evil. Some are actually quite helpful, but they're always dangerous to deal with.)
Last up is "one mysterious site to explore." This I struggle with for a while, but eventually come up with something I like. Any good ancient hypertech science fantasy setting has to have giant mechs; I drop the inert remains of one on the eastern coast of Atreia, watching over the ocean. "The Dawn Watcher." No one nearby knows its true nature, of course; as far as they're concerned, it's just an old statue someone built on a mountainside. Could an intrepid group of adventurers reactivate it somehow? If so, they'd gain control of an incredibly powerful weapon.
Last Details and the Finished Product
I add one more road going southwest from Teya's Rest, toward where I imagine the wider world will eventually be for PCs to venture out into. I fill in some of the wild areas that aren't too hilly with forest. I add a couple of major islands off the peninsulas, and name some of the more important features that I haven't already.
And here we are:
I feel good about this. It might be a bit empty at this scale, but I think that's okay; it leaves me room to fill in more little villages and dungeons and mysterious sites and whatnot as I come up with them. Like, the Shield (the big island, if the picture isn't clear enough to read) should definitely have something on it, shouldn't it? Why isn't anybody shown as living there? Questions for later. That already feels like progress for me; normally I'd be freaking out about all the things that aren't completely explained, feeling like the map wasn't "done" enough to be playable.
For extra credit, the challenge suggests coming up with a random encounter table. I did want to do that, but I ran out of time this week. Ah well, more for later.
Next week, I take on a task I've never managed in all my gaming career: creating my own dungeon completely from scratch.
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