Swords & Wizardry Light - Forum

Sunday, March 24, 2013

Played With Hexographer This Evening and Here's The Results


Not bad for screwing around with a program and not reading how to make it work ;)

I like the way it came out. I'm thinking the island in the lower center would be where the party would start out. It limits their ability to go all screwy on me before they level up a bit.

I need to add a crapload of locations, populations, sites of interest and the like but it's a damn good start for less than 2 hrs work.

I may also change around some of the terrain, but that's neither here nor there at the moment - I need something to work from and I'm surprised at how quickly it came together.

Definitely for the Crypts & Things Campaign, so any empires are in decline. I see it more city-states and less nations, but who knows as it get's fleshed out.

I'm going to give Hexographer "Two Thumbs Up!", because if it can make my mapping look decent, it's got to be an amazing program ;)

I'm leaning towards 6 miles per hex, which makes the initial island roughly 15-20 miles wide and 65 miles long. Decent sized area to adventure in I think. A "sandbox with walls" for the early levels.

9 comments:

  1. Nice work on the coastlines particularly.

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  2. Looks great, and a excellent idea to put them on the island.

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  3. Looks awesome, reminds me of some of the old Judge's Guild maps. Cool work! I think I may have to look at that program.

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    1. @Padre - you can use the online version for free. it's like testdriving the real thing ;)

      I hope your Palm Sunday Mass went well. It's always a bit long, but very nice on this end :)

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  4. Did you put this together from scratch, modify a Hexographer-generated map, or follow some random creation method (such as one linked in your previous sandbox post in the comments)?

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    1. I modified a Hexographer generated map - must have generated nearly 20 before i found one that "almost looked right" and then changed between a 1/4 and a 1/3 of the hexes to fit the vision

      this started out more as an experiment to play with the program and then i suddenly found a map i really liked

      still open for revisions, as nothing is set until the players encounter it or explore it ;)

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  5. Surprised to see people still trying it for the first time! It is meant to hit the sweet spot for people who can't draw, and don't know/want to spend time learning Photoshop or something nearly as complex. We get to that spot by making it easy to create maps of a few styles instead of trying to do everything and therefore reproducing something like Photoshop. And then we graft on some features that help with games. (Like the notes functionality in the pro version or the sharing feature to help w/online games.)

    It really is hopefully dirt simple--my 7 & 4.5 year olds play with it, and they actually started using it a year and a half ago. But there are a bunch of things you can do with it that are kinda hidden. Look for the Greyhawk Grognard's Greyhawk maps in the Darlene style for example. Look for the PDF manual link near the top of the hexographer.com page.

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  6. Erik,

    When you say a hex is 6 miles across, does that mean that the distance from the center point of one hex to center point of an adjacent hex is 6 miles?

    If so, then the radius of the hex (the distance from the center point to the vertex, and also the length of each side) is around 3.46 miles. The distance between opposite vertices is around 7 miles. Furthermore, the area of each hex is around 31.2 square miles.

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    1. center to center - and those are good numbers to have

      3.5 miles per side (rounded) works well

      thanks!

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