Juggling hex scales between map creation tools (Azgaar, Watabou)

tl;dr: bitter lessons learned of switching between hex-scales on two awesome online tools

Working with different hex-scale maps has turned out to be something of a surprising headache for me so I am going to outline where I got to in the hope of saving someone else the strife. Very short version - there are two magnificent easy-use tools out there that are effectively at two different scales and using them both at the same time took me a while to get my head around. Azgaars fantasy map generator works well with 6 mile hexes, Watabous fantasy city generator works will with 1 mile hexes. It takes a bit to mesh the two so here is my homework on doing it.

First, we have a 1 mile hex dropped over a city from Watabou. Most of my current home campaign to date - 2 years of play - has happened within the city walls of Thenya.

Below is the gridded chunk of the province from Azgaars tool where all the action happens - the scale on the bottom shows we have ~10 mile hexes. Names were overlain using Powerpoint, most of my last-mile map work is done in that.

To figure it all out I needed to actually make the hexes-in-hexes myself - rough edged as this thing ended up being. And I still screwed it up - Azgaars runs in imperial and a bunch of my calculations were in metric so I was puzzling for ages over why when I tried to count hexes between cities, long distances seemed to take too little time.

The sharp edge against which I continuously whacked myself was that just by Thenya a river runs and it can be seen to be the boundary of the 10 mile hexes.

Figuring out the fit of maps while staying true to that was painful. 1/10, do not recommend. To try and get a grip on things I brought Hexkit into play, marking up the boxed area with a view to then zooming down from 6 miles to 1 mile. So we started with this overlay of the 10 mile scale.

Getting the scales and the feel of the scales right between the 1-milers and 10-milers took me quite a while to get a grip on and then multiple rechecks to verify I had not messed something up - because initially I had. I have an entire other zoomed in hex-kit map where I fumbled the scale conversion and have a 1:6 instead of 1:10. This is not my forte, this is why I love tools like Azgaars that just deals with this for me.

I will write it up more clearly another time but the short version is:
1. toggle on grid on the Layers tab, shuffle the other elements toggled on so Grid is towards the bottom of the box, Relief towards the top and the rest of the elements in the order you want them layered.

2. In Style tab set the scale to 0.1333 for 10 mile hexes, zoom to where you want to be and take a screen shot.

3. In the options tab, zoom to a scale that allows you to see 1 mile and 10 mile hexes together - I find 1:60 works.

4. Then back in Style adjust the scale to 0.01333 for 1 mile hexes and grab another screen shot of the same place.

You may not have exact hex alignment between the two shots but you have the same place at the two different scales.

As can be seen, once you zoom down to the 1-mile hexes, Thenya is too far back from the river and a bunch of the detail is slightly off. Unfortunately my map file is corrupted so I can no longer fix things so I just have to work around that.

My big issue was remembering travel times within the different scales - with a horse a straight shot 1 mile hex can be crossed in 1/2 hour along a highway, double that for off-trail. 20 x 1mi hexes in 1 day ~ 2 x 10 mile hexes in 1 day of travel, assuming 10 hours active travelling. These speeds drop significantly as soon as you are stopping to look around or not moving along a good road.

The home campaign is currently in deep winter, with deep snow and ice everywhere imposing a further reduction in speed and shrinking the horizons of what is reachable even further. The practical rule I ended up with was - the party can get across a 1 mile hex in an undistracted hour. For a 10 mile hex you can cover two of them in a days travel at a normal walking pace.

I will do a proper round up in another post of hex-mapping wisdom by better folk than I.