Creating Maps

[Deleted]

here's something i came up with to help me create a large-scale map quickly. it may be useful for smaller maps too.

Roughing It
first, create a 'rough outline' of the map. using a 8.5x11" sheet of paper, i drew a 4x5 grid so that each square in the grid is about 2". using the following table, i rolled 2d6 to get terrain for each square...

1d6
1 - wetlands
2 - plains
3 - forests
4 - hills
5 - mountains*
6 - deserts #*
* Reroll if the square/space has wetlands
# Reroll if the square/space has forests

so, i ended up with a 4x5 grid of squares with 2 terrain types in each square. then, i created a rectangular grid of hexes so that each of my squares was roughly 1 megahex. this doesn't line-up or fit exactly but that's a good thing, as martha would say

i began filling in the hexes on my real map using the 'rough outline' of the 4x5 square grid. doing this fudging and then tweaking after the map was fully populated took about 30 minutes. the resulting map looked pretty good to me. it still needed rivers but it's not to hard to decide where to put some rivers once you've got the lay of land.

notes
i let 'plains' be the default terrain of all my hexes (blank) and just filled a few hexes with the terrains rolled on the 4x5 grid.

in the process of populating/fudging the 4x5 grid of terrain onto the actual hex map, i usually clumped like terrain from surrounding squares together. using a 2x2 grid example, if all the squares contained mountains, then the mountains of all 4 squares touched each other in the center of the hex map.

[Fenway5]

That's a pretty effective little table. My only concern is jumping form mountains to desert to forest randomly.

Was that an issue?

[Deleted]

i guess it depends on your die rolls. i had one spot that seemed kinda bizarre to me...but what you create with the dice is just a quick rough-draft / outline. when you start filling in your hexes, you can fudge quite a bit by putting plains in between deserts and wetlands, for example. i don't see anything wrong with having a desert hex touch a mountain hex.

basically, the rough-draft / outline is just a kickstart...which is what i seem to need the most. once i filled in my hex map, i went back and did a lot of tweaking. the whole process took me about 45 minutes. it might help show how much fudging i did if i tell you that i turned the 4x5 grid with 2 types of terrain per square into a 12x15 hex map...intended to be a land mass of european size, but i wasn't too sure about that scale when i was finished.

(however, when i was rolling, i think i did reroll deserts if i rolled a forest too. i'll update the original post.)