Without a doubt this is my weakest area of development. For some reason the kingdom scale eludes me. So I recruited some assistance from Rob Conley. He is going to write a more extensive blog about this in the future, but I will tell you what little tidbit helped me the most. Take your map that has all the major terrain marked. Copy it ten times or however many times it works for you. Draw the boundaries of your initial kingdoms, date the map. Then date the next map 50 or 100 years ahead then redraw the boundaries. While you are doing this you can come up with why there are conflicts, where the barbarians are raiding in from or some horrible mass of creatures has devastated the countryside. If you have a war going on just roll a die to determine which side wins. Redraw the lines. Continue to do this until you have a visual history of you current kingdoms.
Now this is a very simplified version of what Rob does. He adds in religious influences, immigration patterns and how many brown cows have spots. But I like the idea of the different versions of the map telling a story.
In most of my campaigns the regions the players tromp through are small in scale. I had a three year game where the players never left the kingdom and mostly stayed in one barony. But this new world mixed in with the old places I've run will be combined. I think having an overview of your world can be great but not essential depending on how you play. I've seen some worlds where it is so expansive that there is little in between the places of interest. Or as Rob calls them the "Howling Vastness of Emptiness".
Next stop on my World Building tour will be Baronies or small principalities which I am much better at creating. Thank you Rob for you advice for this one.
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"The Howling emptiness of the 30 mile hex" is the exact phrase but you got the important gist of it.
ReplyDeleteGood post!
One of the old Ed Greenwood articles in Dragon way back when had similar advice. I used it many years ago for my current campaign world and it does really work nicely. I like the idea that it also gives you "forgotten" kingdoms and the like that really give a lot of apparent depth to the campaign (without tons of work involved). For example, several magic swords in my megadungeon were heirlooms of these ancient kingdoms, now defunct, while the leader of a tribe of sub-human cannibals deep in the dungeon wears the signet ring of an ancient kingdom no longer in existence. I've had a lot of fun (and inspiration) from this method!
ReplyDeleteWow. That gives me a great idea for a new feature of my hex mapping software. (I'll leave the name out because I don't want to seem spammish.) But you could tag the lines for borders as "border 1050-1100AD" and then another as border "1100-1175AD" for example. Then these could be treated like layers and you could turn the layers on and off.
ReplyDeleteThanks a bunch! I throw that in my list of possible new features.
Include transparent shading so you can have shading and borders. Also have it based on layers. For example you use borders for political borders but shading for langauge or ethnic groups.
ReplyDeleteJoe, if you have a product that adds to gaming please mention it or add the link. I like to see what people are doing so please feel free to let us know what you are working on.
ReplyDeleteTim - the software is Hexographer. I didn't want to seem like someone who just posts seemingly to mention his own thing. Sometimes when I post I think I am clearly adding to the discussion so I'm not worried about it. For some reason this time (maybe just my mood) I was slightly worried about that. But thanks for asking!
ReplyDeletehttp://www.inkwellideas.com/roleplaying_tools/hexographer/
I thought it might be Hexographer. BTW, great interview on RPG Circus. Feel free to add anything in the comment section about your program. I've heard all good things about it. And if you have any updates or changes drop me a line and I'll be glad to mention it on my blog.
ReplyDeleteWelleran> That sounds very cool. Forgotten kingdoms and ancient swords, love those.
ReplyDeleteAlso, I meant to mention I'm adding the transparency suggestion to the list. Note that both of these add some complexity to the tool so I'll have to think about how to best mitigate that. (The complexity is that now people may want more control over the ordering of lines and shading, which the tool currently largely simplifies. Lines are drawn in the order you place them so if you want a border over a road and a road over a river, draw them in reverse order. But you don't need to worry about icons being under lines for example.)
ReplyDelete