I set out to do Hexcrawl25 and made some poor decisions. Happily, these have revealed themselves in the first half of January rather than mid-year. I chose to scale up, which was a poor choice, revealed upon actual contact with a table, and so I have adjusted to scale down.
For... reasons I can no-longer recall, all my work on my campaign world so far is mapped with 10 mile hexes. This is not *entirely* useless but it is not great. I have done too much work with things at 10 mile to start changing things now - the campaign map for my home campaign is in 10 mile hexes, I am committed at this point. I used the following settings in Azgaar to get this; in the Style tab, selected the Grid element and set the scale to 0.1333 for 10 mile hexes.
I previously figured since the challenge was 24 mile / 6 mile, I would scale up to 40 mile / 10 mile - which you can see in the images below. Since taking this to table, I realise I have massively overshot and instead will be going 10 mile / 2.5 mile; our adventures will now take place in what would be hex A below and all those 10-mile sub-hexes within it are going to get broken down into 2.5 mile hexe.
I am happy enough with 2.5 mile hexes as close enough to the 3mile hex that is what you can walk in an hour and how far you can see. What is interesting is that zooming down that direction knocks out lots of the big regional shifts in religion/culture/nations.
I grabbed screen-shots of my Azgaars for the area I wanted with a bit of care - fullscreen, overlaid exactly - then fiddled with the full region template until it all lined up. I did this all in powerpoint and then just pushed and pulled different layers forward and back. This is clumsy as hell compared to layer manipulation in a dedicated photo editor but good enough to get by.
First layer where we find some interesting stuff is the cultures layer - the Uruk/Drake cultural boundary runs right through hex A, neat, I can use this.
Second layer where we have interesting stuff is the biomes - hex A manages to have some hilly bogs, forested hillss and low lying wetlands. Plenty of variety to work with there.
If we zoom out though we are way off the borders to the next realms. Hex A is close enough to get rumours and effects but still a few days hike to the borderlands in any direction.
Religions are the same locally - we miss the Kirianshallee cult in Hex A, though it is just to the south East so maybe reasonable to have its influence turn up.
Having done even a bit of work at this level of 'zoom' has been worthwhile in give a sense of the region, who and what is lurking about. I guess it will also serve if the players make a run for the horizon.
There is potential to shuffle around the hex grid to pick a different bit of the map - or just different hexes within the grid - that highlight other interesting splits and differences on the layers above but it becomes a trade-off of which ones to keep in, which to miss.
When I took it to the table I rapidly found a) I needed a tighter zoom and b) shuffling through the different scales became confusing as hell in short order. The below image, from what was actually used at table, are hexes A3 and a bit of A10.
Maintaining good indexing - A, A3, A3.4 - is something to get rigorous with otherwise you burn time shuffling through papers wondering why things do not match up.
Azgaars does not give more granular terrain imagery as you zoom in further which is good - you can always use the same features to locate things no matter how zoomed in you are - but it means that while it can give the maps above, it is not so much help with the step down to 2.5 mile sub-hexes. To me, this is fine, we have gotten a good amount of information at a decent regional zoom, the next level down should be the detail I am defining myself.
All told, I think Azgaars serves well as the 'whole world' mapping piece while leaving enough room for you to twiddle the details or get creative on the sub-hex scale. I have tried smaller hexes in the past but zooming in to that level tends not to be a level smaller than the scale at which interesting changes happen on the level of the layers above (biomes, culture, religion, realm boundaries).
Good to get started with for a hex crawl project, definitely leaves room to layer in your own ideas.
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