This is for the Maps Blogwagon from Prismatic Wasteland. This is a paean to leveraging randomly generated or procedurally generated maps to get a rough but broad picture of everything. Dice this up, roll them up with various tools - or create them with intentionality - to get yourself a rough a broad rough cut of everything but only detail what you need. For that broad, shallow view Azgaar's Fantasy Map Generator is great - it randomly blocks out a map with a couple of useful layers; cultures, biomes, national boundaries, and religions which interplay to give interesting results. Zoom down to cities and do the same with Watabou City Generator. This is to have a DM side tool to help you be coherent and consistent in your responses to questions from players. In particular when the player's geographic reach massively expands through access to high-level magics. When players start heading for the horizons, having a coarse, broad assessment of what is going on keeps you calm, helps you stay consistent and keeps the players immersed.
Ducal House Example
i wanted to talk about handling maps for the Ducal house game this is one just shy of 150 sessions. There are two big files - "Stats" the giant Excel with all of my world-building rules of thumb and math and demographic math and everything, and a giant PowerPoint called Maps, currently running at 96 slides. Here is where I stuffed all my map work. The original map for the game was done with Azgaar's fantasy maps and after that I took screenshots of various locales using different features to focus in on what was the actual play space.
This file has grown organically through the campaign, initially because there was a strong virtual component to play during the pandemic lock-down but now simply as it is the central reference for (complex) geography. I use this to figure things out then extract the relevant snippets I need for a session - either resketching the hexmap section or just working up a quick sites-and-connectors point-crawl-like schematic for travel.
Going back over it for writing this I am amused that the eras of the campaign are visible, like rings in a tree, as things were added as they became relevant.
Below I run through
1. Content of the maps file
2. Early game: city scale
3. Expanding to regional travel
4. Realms beyond
5. Sum up
1. Content of the maps file
The early game era has a few 'full kingdom' simple maps - no hexes, no detail, just aide-memoire for what is where. I have the calendar pages I took from fantasy calendar generator that I am using for tracking time, then we have the city-content - urban encounter tables, Watabou maps of Thenya (main city) and others. Then the first big block of 'scale work' with hexes and scales and real life comparators so I could properly describe how big things were. The first mapping of great dragon domains is here. Next a block of hex-work, a how-to for Azgaars and getting hex-grids consistently correct plus some 'Hex Kit' work-ups.
The next big section is the regional with all the map work to support the Giant Unrest and what became the Dukes Last Stand arc - figuring out where the giant stronghold were then using 'Hex Kit' to work up the mythical plateau of the giants
After that a lot of beyond-the-border map work to ground the 'War in the North' arc, expanding focus to the adversary nations, their geography and key locations along the conflict line, followed by work-ups for maps around the Stone Giant Kings plot. A bunch of various inspirations for different phases are thrown in behind this - townhouse plans, random standing stone generators and cave maps before we get to the 'whole world' maps I use to deconflict the various campaigns, figure out long-haul travel distances and finally to look at the entire crystal sphere in case they fly off *beyond* the moon.
2. Early game: city scale
For something like the first 60 sessions or so it turned out we stayed within Thenya, the capital, which was a map created with Watabous fantasy map generator. This Thenya map was where we lived for a massive chunk of time. Campaign setup was winter was coming in. There was a dynastic wedding and a question about succession after the ailing Duke. The first wave of map-making was leveraging Watabou city maps, looking at the generated districts, enhancing them with tags from the Infinigrad generators and then blocking out what was in each of these districts. I then later blocked out a grid (1-9, a-h) of squares to locate sites. Not to the specific building but just to give a sense of what is where.
One of the big additional map bits was that about a generation back half of the city had been leveled in a cult conflict and the ruins rebuilt over so I generated a second city map, laid it in underneath, and did a bit of PowerPoint cropping trickery to spot where the streets lost under the city were. These became the major undercity with a few big, quasi-famous lost streets which then formed the basis of undercity escapades.
Most of the rest of the play of this era was supported by hand-drawn maps of the palace and its dungeons which were a collage of historical castle plans, powerpoint boxes and my handwritten notes - not really map-work so excluded from this.
3. Expanding to regional travel
I used these maps for size comparability to try and give the players references for how big the duchy is think Aquitaine, Burgundy, something like that. How large are the Border marches territory? About the size of the Pyrenees - that type of thing. The initial block of hex work was done to figure out travel times and then implementing that hex size (10 mile) in Azgaars.
Then I did some Hex Kit workups - those never really came that useful - working out how, where there ought to be villages. If you do a horse ride and you can do two hexes per day, then every second hex should have a village or roadhouse or the likes. The players went pretty much nowhere until they had a flying boat and so skipped all of that.
The next block of work I had was one of the major situations that was underpinning the campaign of an unrest with the Giants, which then involved blocking out what was in the north, where were the giant strongholds and how did those map against various baronial and other territories. Zooming down from this got the detailed local hex map that was used for quite a lot of that adventuring after they left Thenya for sessions 60 to 80. After that we ended up using the Plateau of Jor Hex Kit and that was another dozen or so sessions in combination with a dungeon, the Temple of Annam.
After that it was back out to the large scale map, bouncing over and back across the north. This was the real long-haul travel part of the campaign, covering quite considerable distances like hundreds of miles. Even with their fast flying boat, the constrained daylight hours of winter meant travel times became meaningful because not every stopping location was a neat 'maximum distance' away. This was probably the most actively map focussed part with the players deciding travel routes and blocking out stop-over timings at various cities across the north.
4. Realms beyond
Further uses of the maps from here for me as a DM was the big zoom-outs to get a sense of how the neighboring realms were stacking up behind the points of contact with the players realm. There was the world map but I had not necessarily been focusing on these things so new things unlocked. Which is a great part of having this whole world generated using Azgaar's. I have not had to deliberately deterministically create the whole thing - but it has always been there, just not examined - which makes it interesting and surprising for me, the DM too.
I did some sub-zooms of various conflict fronts including sites in enemy territory to support some questing, raids and searches - these were dropped onto snips from the big map, using the consistent hex-scale of 10 miles to keep it all coherent and the terrain from Azgaar's as the start point for working up those zones. As recently as the most recent session, despite the maps being on the table on a fairly regular basis, the players went "hang on a minute there is as much of this mountain range north of our border as we have on our side - there are colossal giant ridden mountains all throughout the adversary's domain too" - it means that the world feels fresh, that it feels like knowable, but not yet known.
All told this is a recommendation to cast yourselves into the arms or RNGesus and you will have a blast running a map with depths to be un-packed and un-picked as you come to them. We have gotten years of play out of this.
Another use has been for re-centering on the realms of various factions and using that to get their perception of the locality; who are their nearest neighbours, closest perceived threats and allies, etc. This helps ground their focus and establish who and what will be on their radar - and it may be completely out of alignment with the players, which is fine and good.
For the global map, I got a fun use out of the big zoom out when the players went to a soiree at a major trading guild at the capital and there is a huge mural on the wall that was the map of the world as the guild understood it. The players themselves were looking at it going "hang on there's an entire half of the world here that we've not been seeing" - which was correct; their culture looked across the nearby sea at the distant elven islands, and had their immediate land neighbours over the mountains but ignored whoever was beyond that. It was the equivalent of an Atlantic Basin people finding out that beyond their Mediterranean equivalent there is a whole other like Eurasian-esque continent that culturally you have very little few links with. This was a cool, almost throw-away bit that was only doable since the global map existed and not just my making stuff up that would never see table.
I used the continental hexmaps to check how far can the players actually travel in a day to get a sense of how far could they go if they really tried (see high speed hex crawling).
I did not have these existing maps this would be the point where I think I would have cracked as a DM because if I had been creating maps as we go then suddenly what I needed to create becomes colossal if I am trying to maintain that same standard. I could always just do quantum mapping, whatever they go to find "the encounter" but I would be just hand-waving travel entirely, like a few random encounters on the journey and bish-bosh, here you are. It was a mode switch I could manage it because the whole world map existed. A quick look at the existing maps and I see I need a bit of expertise on these half dozen nations that now fall into how far they can travel, but that is a doable thing.
I am happier looking up pre-generated information and then riffing off that, as opposed to me having to come up with stuff from whole cloth in case they ever go there. This would have been deeply discouraging as the highest probability being they never will see these places. But riffing off stuff that already exists in a very coarse sketch feels like a propotionate amount of effort.
At around about this time, in parallel from the Southern Reaches and Bay of Princes campaigns, I had developed a way to really leveraging the Azgaar's map, looking at the realm boundaries, culture footprint, the dominant religions and the biomes, taking snapshots and then putting them into a little corner to be able to see in a glance the boundaries and overlaps.
What is happening in here? What are the biome changes? Who are the dominant religions rubbing up against each other? Who is the cultural footprint? How are the cultural footprint and the dominant religions not matching? who are the same culture, different religion friction points? Who are the same religion, different culture friction points? All of these things. I found that to be very interesting. A neat little thing
It was not initially useful for this Ducal House campaign because they were mono-realm, religion, culture within their Duchy. But around their borders, using this method, I began to spot friction and flash points along and beyond their borders that then meant when they poked their noses over their own borders I had interesting things ready to go.
And then the final piece of map work that is just cropped up recently has been working out the system, using the methodology that I came up with for my Spelljammer campaigns for blocking out how the system looks. This gives a sense of what are the things that are out there to be found should they decide to fly past the moon off into the depths of Wildspace.
A useful little thing to have in the toolbox, though it is probably not going to come up today or tomorrow, I feel better to have put a little bit of thought into it and not leave it than to be left flat-footed. In particular this revealed a couple of celestial objects that ought to be typically visible in the night sky.
5. Sum up
All of that gives a whistle-stop tour of how the use of maps has evolved through the campaign. I tended to look at the big map and then work out a point-crawly summary with random tables to cover the journey, assuming the players are going to just fly over most of it but keeping that sense of what is down there for if they get to it.
The cities, despite huge amounts of time being spent there, have always been point-crawly. Journeys mostly just cost time, go-to-place-do-thing, and just rattling around between loosely defined locations. There are the Temple Quarter, the Magical University, the Noble Quarter, etc but exactly which house is down the street from who has never been locked in.
The big map gets use for planning journeys on an actual hex by hex basis. Those journeys then tend to play out with the hexes just marking time for encounter checks because they are flying over things. The adventure happens when they land and the maps are just used to pick where they will break their journeys.
Where there has been hex by hex detailed searching like the Plateau of Jor and or in the Lands of the Dead even then play has tended to be 'descend into the hex from above, poke at some stuff before back up to fly away again'. The ability to fly strongly affects the way that maps have been used - becoming a large-scale navigation aid rather than terrain to be quested through.
Had I not used Azgaars fantasy maps, I would probably been in despair once the ability to fly faster was achieved - but because I randomly generated the entire world and then bolted in everything underneath, it has actually been relatively stress free. Asgard's fantasy maps. Use it. Love it. They're just the business.
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