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. (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. 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.

Carcosa rpg map