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Name every feature on the map - every hex where you dropped a die. Rivers flow towards bodies of water they sometimes merge as they near the coast, but they rarely diverge after merging. Looking at our map, the first two things I want to know is why two villages and a town are so close together and why most of the adventure sites are in the bottom half.Īdd some rivers and/or other bodies of water. Instead, make up reasons why they are how they are and jot those reasons down in Word. The map you have isn’t going to be logical, but don’t correct weird things, like clumps of villages, unless you absolutely have to. The rest all happens in Hexographer or Word. You can be mean and let the number equal the level of the dungeon, but it’s better to use it as a vague representation of danger level.Īdd villages, towns, city, and adventure sites to Hexographer.Īdd the die numbers to your Word file. Higher number, larger city.ĭrop 10d20 for dungeons and adventure sites. Higher number means higher population.ĭrop 1d8 for your city. Higher number means higher population.ĭrop 3d6 for towns. The landscape stage is done - it’s time for points of interest.ĭrop 6d4 for villages. So if there’s a one-hex forest area in (say) 0804 and the die reads 7, write 0804 in the Word file and put a 7 under it so you’ll remember how dense that forest is.Ĭlear the box lid of dice. Everything else is open terrain (grassland).īefore you remove all the dice, write the hex numbers in your Word file and note the die numbers. Connect areas of forest and mountains if you like. The higher the number, the denser the forest.Īdd those elements to your Hexographer map, with each die’s location corresponding to a hex (just eyeball it). At a minimum each die represents a hex of mountains join them up if it feels right.ĭrop 6d10 for forests. The bigger the number showing on each die, the taller those mountains are. It doesn’t matter if they bump each other into new positions.ĭrop 4d12 for mountains. During a stage, leave all the dice in place as you drop new ones. There are two stages: landscape and points of interest. Grab some dice and match die types to the elements you want on your map. I explicitly ignored realistic population figures and all that stuff because in general it just doesn’t matter during the game. I decided what I wanted in it based on what felt right about the sort of region I wanted - generically medieval, temperate climate, not wilderness but not too populated either. For this example, I’ll map a starting region for a fantasy hexcrawl. If you don’t have any of those, grab a blank sheet of 8.5×11 paper and plan to re-drop dice that fly off the paper.ĭecide what you’re mapping. Grab the lid of an 8.5×11 box set and set it down sideways, open side up. Open a Word file or text file or whatever you like to write in on the computer. Assume 6-mile hexes, giving you an area of about 3,100 square miles.
#Civ 5 hex map maker free#
(The free version is fantastic the paid version is entirely worth it.) Create a new map 11 hexes wide and 8 hexes tall. It’s got rough edges you’ll need to sand off according to your own GMing style and preferences, and this is intentional. That’s enough proof in my personal pudding to make it worth sharing here. I’ve used it to create the map for a hexcrawl campaign, and I like the results.
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Should the river bend west here, or stay on its southerly course? Could there really be two towns so close together? Is that forest one hex too large? It’s maddening and it prevents me from getting anything done, so this process is intended to short circuit that by forcing me to adapt to randomness (which is fun in its own right). I find that when I create maps I overthink everything. It’s deliberately a lazy, quick, flexible system. There’s no reason you couldn’t fiddle with this in all sorts of ways to produce maps for larger/smaller regions, other genres, or even other kinds of maps entirely. I had fantasy hexcrawls in mind when I wrote this, and the map I’ve created using this method is for that sort of game. Building on the idea of die drop tables and tools elsewhere, I came up with a simple approach to quickly generating a region: the drop map.