Friday, March 11, 2011

A Map for a Swords & Sorcery Campaign

During my idle time today I worked up a map for a swords & sorcery style campaign.  I envision the culture as being reminiscent of Mesopotamia with some light sprinklings of other cultures from the Ancient Near East.  As always I used a modified version of Welsh Piper's Hex Based Campaign Design System, with some heavy fudging.

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I wanted to make sure that I could have quite a few city-states that were politically dis-unified.  For this I needed multiple rivers.  Egypt was largely politically unified due to the Nile.  Mesopotamia on the other hand had two large rivers and a few smaller ones that allowed for a higher level of independence among the city-states.  Granted they occasionally unified, such as under Sargon, but in general they remained separate.  Since I wanted a similar poltical and cultural situation, I more or less based my map off of Mesopotamia.

click to embiggen

I stocked the map using Welsh Piper's system with some modifications that allowed me to more or less pick where certain items should be placed.  I then estimated how long a days walk was from the city state (about three hexes) and made the arable area within that span into farmland.

Some final notes: the scale is 10 miles to a hex, and I forgot to change the island in the NW into a jungle before exporting the first png image.  This is also my first time trying to make a more smooth coastline.  I think it worked out pretty well. Hope you like it.

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