My weekly game at the uni has gone on unabated for something more than a year now, which has not happened since the eighties for me. The non-negotiable commitment to that hobby task, a commitment which, if broken, has immediate consequences, directly, in my social life, has been a wonderful thing for me. Basically, whatever real-world crap has been going on in my life, I have just turned up every Monday night and run the bloody game anyway. This has taught me two things: 1) I am a good at-table dm, who can improvise his way through poor preparation or the surprises dropped on me by perverse players with a degree of aplomb. 2) Everything is going to be fine.
:)
So, apologies, friends, for being absent. It is nice to see you all still at it- despite my own unblogging, I visit you all most days, and you have been in my thoughts here and there. I make no commitment to become an uber-blogger again- my duties as a DM forbid such follies. I am starting, after all a SECOND weekly game, for the players who want to play in my Monday night game, but can't seeing as it already has 7 players. The new game is Thursday nights, Classic B/X D&D, Castle Greyhawk. Along with several fine fellows, the new group has, I believe, 3 female players at this point, which is a nice change at our gaming club. Here are my new detail maps for use around the Free City:
Oh- and we might be organizing a convention in Wollongong, if the powers that be can be convinced! How snazzy is that?
Having just fallen back into being a weekly DM (other than a once every 2-4 weeks DM), I can safely say that it safely trumps being a good blogger. Glad to see you kicking.
ReplyDeleteAnd that is simply an awesome map.
Fabulous maps, man. Fabulous.
ReplyDeleteThankyou guys. In my view putting together a good overland map, hand-made, really helps immerse me in the setting as a DM. It is a slow process, during which I get to know my way around the district, almost like becoming a local. Well worth the hours put in...
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How big are the hexes on that paper, and where did you get it?
ReplyDeleteWell, the big hexes are the 30 mile hexes represented on the original Darlene maps of the Flanaess. The hexes on the hex paper for the first map are 15mm across (pretty easy to get), with the larger hexes hand drawn in over the top- if you study the way the hexes line up you can see how that works. The second map, for the closest view around the Free City, uses for its base hexes (I believe it is) the hexgrid from the Wilderlands of High Fantasy set, so the tiny hexes are 7mm on a side. I then superimposed by the method described above a set of larger hexes, and then another set of larger hexes again. So the small hexes on that map are 1.875 miles across, the middle scale ones 7.5 miles across, and the big ones 30 miles across. :)
DeleteHow did you decide where to place the villages and smaller towns? I had a bit of a problem with that when running Greyhawk myself.
ReplyDeleteActually, I still do.
Well, basically it was, in the end, somewhat arbitrary. I had put a fair bit of thought into some realistic method for determining settlement placement based on Central Place Theory, which states that in an otherwise featureless plains area, a larger town or city will dominate an area with smaller secondary settlements placed at reasonable intervals surrounding it. That is altered here by the hills to the north, the Selintan River to the west, and so on. Ultimately I decided to stop fussing and fudge it based on my assumptions above- so the mining towns in the hills got relatively few satellite villages (I wanted some as new locales to stop in at en route elsewhere, or as adventure starting points), while the Free City got quite a number of supporting villages, hamlets and then farmholds. Strictly speaking based on Central Place Theory I should have added an extra town or two in the plain SE of Greyhawk, but that seemed to be pushing the divergence from canon too far.
ReplyDeleteNotice in the scaled out map, the villages got no names- a space issue. when I had the room on the zoomed in map, they got their names- and if I were to do another even closer zoom I would then name the at present unnamed farmholds and thorps.
Those maps are awesome! I can imagine those took a lot of time make.
ReplyDeleteThankyou kind sir! They did, but were well worth the effort!
ReplyDeleteMaps any general (or gamer) would give almost anything to possess a copy of.... I can honestly say that my jaw dropped for a little bit there. The only other thing I can say is (predictably, I fear) what chance of copies and do you have more?
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