Heartlands, Borderlands, Hinterlands
For the Antarctic Adventure Jam I'm working on keying ~950 hexes.
I've been hand-stocking (a departure from my usual approach) and have taken this as an opportunity to test different procedures (so far, Luke Gearing's WUTC procedure and Occultronics' B/X-inspired stocking procedure).
Both procedures are solid and I don't really have a preference so far, but I find that treating the overworld like a dungeon doesn't quite work at larger scales. Real landscapes are spatially auto-correlated, so certain features (especially settlements) should be clustered in some locations, sparse in others. Zoomed out, uniformly random stocking looks like white noise:
On the other hand, realistic landscapes aren't necessarily fun; D&D is a wild-west frontier game (i.e. a specific type of landscape), and the best dungeon-style stocking procedures hit an optimal mix of danger & intrigue, with islands of safety. Many campaigns posit a distant 'off-map' civilization, but I'd like to be able to represent such things on my map.
How to reconcile verisimilitude & gameplay? Though in the past I've been prone to overcooked proc-gen tinkering, I've lately found it helpful to divide a map into regions (using natural borders or clustered features) that get stocked for a different kind of gameplay. Three basic categories are sufficient to capture core fantasy world tropes: Heartlands, Borderlands, & Hinterlands.
Heartlands
"Heartlands" are populous, settled, and 'civilized'. They should be situated in open terrain with arable land, ideally around navigable rivers. The primary adventure mode in Heartlands is political -- the dungeons with treasure are beneath the citadels of powerful despots, the dragons have been driven off. Instead of stocking interactive features for low-level treasure hunters, we should be creating something more like a wargame scenario with political stakes: resources, military power, & diplomacy.
To pacify pedantic types who love pointing out how an average 6-mile hex in Medieval Europe actually would have had 51465746 tiny villages, Heartland hexes are all assumed to be a patchwork of farms, pastures, & interstitial woodlands with reasonably well-maintained roads. Stocking could thus look something like this:
- Hand-place major cities -- ideally at the point where ocean-going vessels would have to stop sailing upriver, or at a notable river confluence, or in the heart of lots of agricultural hexes or something.
- For all remaining hexes, roll a d8: 1-2: Minor farm villages (functionally empty) 3-4. Market town 5-6. Resource (1-2. Mining, 3. Unique crop, 4. Training 5. Religious/cultural 6. Magical/weird) 7. Military (castle, fortress, stronghold, etc.) 8. Landmark/weird/lair
- Group (by hand) hexes into polities, with one of the cities from step 1 as capital. Note down resources and see if it implies any interesting trade patterns. Count wealth by tallying how many farm hexes each city has, with resources and market towns counting double.
- Devise a military strength for each city based on wealth and number of forts. (I haven't settled on hard numbers for this yet, but I'm thinking something like 2d4 * sqrt(Wealth + Forts) * 100 soldiers). The point of this step is to know how many hardened barbarian followers the players will need to storm into the throne room.
- Sketch out the diplomatic situation. (Optionally) use your favorite faction system to track & resolve this over time.
Borderlands
These are the classic borderland frontier. Can be any terrain type, though ideally woods, swamps, mountains, or deserts. The primary adventure mode is classic wilderness / dungeon adventure. I like to hand-place castles & use the OD&D castle tables to generate villains and/or patrons, then I fall back on one or both of the procedures linked above to fill it with isolated villages, lairs, and landmarks. Enough said.
Hinterlands
Though not strictly necessary, I like the idea of having a third region type where the primary adventure type is survival. It seems like a common hexcrawl issue is under-using rules for navigation & survival when there's something to encounter or loot in every few hexes. Hinterlands thus bracket out a nice big swath of remote hexes for survival adventures. Instead of dense borderland stocking, just place a handful of really cool, legendary dungeons (Lost city type stuff), or a Fountain of Youth, Waters of Oblivion, Isle of the Dead, etc. There should be few or no settlements, and those that are there should be troublesome rather than a source of free ration replenishment. On the other hand, navigational landmarks should be liberally scattered around (these don't need to be 'interactive' in the usual sense, since their main function is just to help with the navigation minigame). Entering a Hinterland triggers a ration audit, and while exploring food, water, & animal fodder all get tracked, as does chances of getting lost.
Anways, here's a hand-drawn map of my region so far. The two river valleys are the heartlands, the Wilderlands of Ü are a hinterland, and the rest borderlands.
