All Wizards Are Bastards

AWAB Mapping and "Hex"filling

I asked my players about interest in a new game some months back and real life happened, and now I have a new schedule so it's time to BUCKLE DOWN and start prepping so I can feed them some content.

What Are We Playing?

I am SO. FUCKING. OVER. complicated rules. So we're going to be playing a 2400 hack (probably unmodified 1400 to begin, but I can't resist butchering so I don't expect that to stay the case for long) that requires very little bandwidth. All I have to do is determine the risk of any given action, and that's pretty straightforward.

In terms of what type of content I want to run, I intend to run OSR-style dungeon crawling to begin with, to give the players a chance to connect with the setting organically and begin plotting their own courses.

To that end:

Questions of Scale

There has been so much digital ink spilt over the question of how big your maps should be and how the map should interface with travel and blah blah blah. It's a lot. In fairness, there are lots of REALLY GOOD articles supporting various different viewpoints, but like I said - I'm tired of shit being complicated. So I made a little map template that I'ma use. Tada! I can print these are work and doodle on them and then clean them up later.

The little squares are 3mi x 3mi, making the big ones (what I'm tentatively calling counties) 24mi x 24mi. In the interest of keeping things easy, traveling one small square takes an hour, and the party can travel 8h in a day (so 8 squares). If the scale of the campaign ever grows to encompass more than a few of the big squares, we can zoom travel out to that level, and just count days.

Filling "hexes"

Obviously I use squares but the procedures for filling hexes should translate with no issue.

The brilliant Mr. Mann, author of Blue Mountain, shared with me on the Gay OSR Discord the resources he uses to hexfill:

So I've got some reading to do, but I've at least committed myself to action by posting this blogpost (and given myself a basic framework to start with). I'll continue to post as I go and perhaps I'll collect everything like Mann did with Blue Mountain and throw it on itch for anyone interested.