Re: World building



On Thu, 28 Jun 2007, Marcel Beaudoin wrote:

So I have decided to take the plunge and (attempt to) create my own world.

I figured that I would start by making the world first, then go down to
continents, countries, etc.

Is this a good/bad/ridiculous way to do this??

It's what I did 25 years ago.

I started with a world map... more of a sketch really... and then zoomed in on a few areas.

Then I picked one of those and zoomed in again, down to 50 miles a hex/square. This is a convenient scale for a "campaign area" because it's approximately "movement scale" (1 sqaure per day) for PCs on horseback. At this scale you can place all the major features you want in a low to moderate level game all on a single *** of paper. Over the last 25 years, I now have a combined "campaign area" (areas detailed enough that I'm comfortable running off the cuff play in them) covering about 10 or 15 connected 50 mile square maps... But one is enough to start.

Then I picked several "locales" and developed them. One was the city/town I intended them to use as a base. Several others were the areas around intended adventure sites. These maps I generally did at about 60 feet per square/hex. When I originally did this it was back in the days of 1e/2e when players had much greater mobility per round. Under those rules, I found those sizes to useful for setting up "outdoor" scale encounters. (And frankly, I still do... I don't always carry battles to a detailed 5' grid as presented in the 3e/3.5e rules.)

I often did tighter maps on smaller scales if I anticipated a need for more detailed action in an area. And of course, I did "indoor scale" 5 feet per square maps for all of the important adventure locations.

I like maps, and feel that they can create a lot of implicit background for an adventure. It gives you a good basis for knowing which way the trade caravans run and where the orcs are lurking.

Gene








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