So I see on the map that the PCs are in a Grasslands hex, then I roll on the weighted table and happen to get a Secondary result. For example: Grasslands: Primary = Grasslands, Secondary = Forest, Tertiary = Water (lake/river/sea). Play a little Dwarf Fortress, too.The tables I have created so far for random terrain is based on the terrain of the hex the PCs are currently in, each Hex has a listed Primary, Secondary, and Tertiary terrain that the surrounding hexes can be with a weighted distribution to determine which Primary, Secondary, Tertiary terrain will be adjacent. If you’re wanting to scratch build a world, you could do way worse than installing these two programs and playing around with them. It worked well and the campaign, while it ran, was a success. A little elbow grease turned something that looks like this:
So a spot of Dwarf Fortress badlands became a more traditional badlands hex. What it allowed me to do was create a layer of Dwarf Fortress map, which I then put hexes on. It’s a Java mapping program, used to make hex maps. The trick here was a program called Hexographer (now called Worldographer). I needed hexes and art which would be recognizable to any of my players. It even spits out place names, if you’re inclined to pay attention to themĭwarf Fortress is in ASCII, a roguelike gone mad. Tarn Adams, the game’s creator, coded the thing right down to what layers of rock would appear where. This means mountains are where they should be, rivers flow the right ways, and deserts appear where it would be driest. As part of its efforts at realism, the game randomly generates a big world on as realistic lines as it can muster. What was germane to my mapmaking exercise was Dwarf Fortress’ world generation. It’s been in alpha for 16 years and will never hit a release candidate that also doesn’t matter. Your colony of dwarves loves, fights, starves, barfs, and dies (mostly dies) according to painstakingly accurate depictions of physics. The game’s premise is that of any other city builder, but the reality is that its creators aimed to make a hyper-realistic simulation of dwarf life.
If you’re not familiar with it, Dwarf Fortress is a PC game which is, by turns, one of the most complicated games ever made and a work of outsider art. The answer came from an unlikely place: the now venerable (and free) Dwarf Fortress. Mountains, forests, and rivers behave certain ways in reality and getting those features correct on a fantasy map takes a lot of effort. In any event, making believable world maps is hard. I needed a sense of the unknown, where danger is around every corner, but I’m perpetually short of time, or bad at managing what I have, so sketching detailed maps was out of the question. I didn’t want to revisit familiar worlds like Greyhawk or the Forgotten Realms. I set about acquiring a big collection of dungeons, so that way I had things ready to go when my party searched a specific hex or lingered too long in a given town. I used Labyrinth Lord, a recut of the Moldvay Basic D&D set, and I wanted the campaign to be the groggiest of grognard: a massive hexcrawl, dotted with dungeons. A few years ago, I got the idea to do a truly old school Dungeons & Dragons game.