Making a Fantasy Sandbox: Part III

Part II

The next six steps in Rob's guide:

5. Grab a 8.5 by 11 sheet of hex paper.
6. The scale should be so that it represents a 200 by 150 mile region
7. Draw in mountains
8. Draw in rivers
9. Draw in hills using them to divide the region into distinct river valley
10. Draw in vegetation (swamps, forests, desert, etc)

These steps can be distilled into one instruction: make a cool map on a sheet of hex paper.

Since I'm using Jared Blando's How to Draw Fantasy Art and RPG Maps, I followed along with his step-by-step instead, which covers most of what Rob suggests anyway.

For your hex map, you can draw freehand over the hexes, you can draw a symbol in each hex representing the terrain type, or you can colour code your hex map, using green for forests, blue for water, etc.

Here's a (printer-friendly) numbered blank hex map I made using mkhexgrid:

Rob suggests a region map of roughly 200 by 150 miles, but I had to scale back the number of hexes to make it legible and printer friendly for standard 8.5 x 11 paper. I tried to put as many hexes as I could without making them too small. To account for fewer hexes, I'll be using 6-mile hexes. There are a number of reasons people think the 6-mile hex is superior anyway. Using a 6-mile hex, my region map is now 180 miles x 126 miles.

While drawing in the coast, I roughly followed the contours within the grey box I selected as the campaign region previously. Just treat the "grey box" (i.e. your campaign region) as your full 8.5 x 11 hex page and draw to scale.

I decided to continue with a freehand poetic approach for my region map. You can see I just treated the edge of the hex page as the borders of the grey box:

After drawing in the coast and islands, I just had fun filling in the mountains, lakes, rivers, hills, and forests:

These drawings were done in pencil and scanned using an app on my phone, so there's some smudging and fading, but you get the idea. I overlayed my blank hex map onto my drawing using paint.net. I may have gotten a bit carried away with the details. It would be easier to see the hex numbers and add points of interest if I had made features a little more symbolic with less shading. The trade-off is I'm inspired when I look at the map. C'est la vie.

The scale of your map features doesn't matter too much; it's mostly about what terrain the party encounters where and knowing how many hexes-worth of travel it takes them to reach a destination. Whether you draw big detailed trees or simply colour a hex green, when the party enters that hex, you know they're in forest terrain. Use whatever method inspires you or is easiest.

Next we'll stock the map with settlements, lairs, and ruins in Part IV.

Xeria: Hex Contents Table

The new campaign setting in the works is called Xeria. I'm actually co-creating it with my partner, Leah. The two of us decided we wanted to design a desert-themed hex crawl/sandbox. We printed out a hex template map and started allotting terrain using this awesome guide over at The Welsh Piper. After that, we turned to this awesome guide by Flynn over at his excellent blog, In Like Flynn. To suit our desert theme, we came up with a combined and modified version of the tables provided in both guides and rolled once per hex on the following custom tables.

Hex Filling Table (d6)
1-2. Colour
3. Terrain effect
4. Settlement
5. Lair
6. Adventure

After rolling on the Hex Filling Table, roll again on the indicated subtable.

Terrain (d6)
1. Weather
2. Arcane
3. Divine
4-5. Strange
6. Combine two

Settlement (d6)
1. Waystation/outpost/hut
2. Permanent camp/farm(s)
3. Village/small town
4. Large town/city
5. Monastery/shrine/temple
6. Wise person's abode

The different results indicated by the slashes correspond to the terrain type of the hex being rolled for, eg. waystation (desert), outpost (plains), hut (mountains).

Lair (d6)
1-3. Monster
4-5. Supernatural
6. Humanoids

Adventure (d6)
1-3. Site
4-6. Event

A site is a location, such as a ruin or dungeon. An event is a scene that is triggered when the players first enter the hex, such as coming upon a caravan master with a broken wheel who needs help reaching his destination.

Colour: This is just flavour or fluff and requires only a short description. For example: A tree with dangling nooses used to hang criminals.

We were quite pleased with the results and only occasionally fudged what the table gave us. But that's okay -- the point of the table is to give you ideas and get your imagination going. Also, we already had some cool ideas that we just plunked down into certain hexes instead of rolling for them. 

Note: This table and tables like it are NOT masters to be bowed down to. You don't need to be a slave to them. If another idea pops into your head, use it!   

The reason we decided to modify the tables in the original guides was due to the fact that those tables left roughly 50% of hexes completely empty. This seemed like a waste of space to us and we didn't want our players just trudging around only finding something interesting half of the time. That said, you don't want your hexes too cluttered, either, or exploration will start to lose some of its lustre. Overall it came to a nice balance of fillings for our purposes.