First off being that instead of it being a 24 mile hexes/6 mile sub-hexes, I'll be using a 40 mile-10 mile because my campaign world was already hexed to 10-mile hexes. Rather than subdivide I wuill just block up to a bigger 'regional' hex at 40 miles.
Next I want to use this to feed a West Marches type campaign fairly shortly so this is going to get put into service pretty quickly. I may be accelerating parts of this quite a bit.
Then what I am basically planning to do is cookie cutter a chunk out of an existing block of the world that exists from Azgaars Fantasy Map Generator and use that.
This is replacing the draw a map, hex it up, identify your like sub-hex elements approach. What I will do instead is use the biome, culture, nation, and religion filters on the existing campaign world to provide the seeds for the hex-elements. Hex-creation by interpolation, if you will.
For the macro hexes I think the nation borders and biomes and terrain will be the major informing part of that, with then kind of step down by nation for where the borders are, where the conflicts are. Beneath that will be the culture layer and the religion layer. For the most likely location I may use, the religion layer is mostly a monoculture with a little intrusion in one part. The key interesting flashpoint is a cultural line that runs across the entire area.
There is effectively a major background campaign event that's been going on that is I'm going to leverage for this. So already there are quite a lot of balls in motion within the world that should allow me to populate the major hexes relatively rapidly.
The sub-hexes and the details of specific locations will be the meat and potatoes of this actual project.
All this will be the basis to run a kind of Westmarchy campaign so another source of inputs for this is going to be a session zero with the players to get a list of what they want in so that I can then incorporate it.
Another input is salting the place with pre-generated content:
- Pull in the sites from Knock Magazine, basically everything I have from the Merry Mushmen
- In theory, Dolmenwood should turn up at some point, so I'll try and feed that in.
- If there is an urban location, I was thinking of dropping in Cities of Sorcery from Art of the Genre.
- Drop in Rappan Athuk somewhere as a mega dungeon that if people feel like going after that.
- For over the borders on one side, Adventures from Shadow of the Demon Lord.
Those are the sort of external sources that I'm going to attempt to find homes for, and then beyond that, the Tome of Adventure design is now sitting cheerfully here beside me, so that will give a potential thing to use.
Between that and Worlds Without Number, and the old classics like the D30 Sandbox Companion, there is no shortage of generators sitting around here behind me, so I am pretty confident that this will work and serve as a testbed for different blocks of location generators.
That is the theory - let us see how this survives contact with reality. Kudos to Maatlock for getting this rolling.
Some resources I plan to use:
Maatlock's Tavern GitHub with overlays (where I got the hex/subhex frame above)
Azgaars Fantasy Map Generator
Hex Kit
d30 Sandbox Companion
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