The Great Antarctic Hexcrawl pt. 13 - Year of the Beta
Last January, I resolved that a "Great Antarctic Hexcrawl" would be my big project for the year, and I was 75% successful! The last installment was in September, after which my attention paid to the project tapered off. This was for a few reasons:
- I left for an intense three-week work trip in September and had almost no time for hobbies.
- I started co-refereeing Castle Mordengard, which is necessarily situated in my friend's established setting & has vacuumed up a lot of ideas that might have gone into Antibor.
- I struggled to settle on parameters for the setting & meta-setting, vacillating between gonzo Vancian silliness and a more grounded 'hard science fantasy', and between basing the system-specific elements on OD&D or something more freeform like Cairn.
- I ran out of ideas for nifty GIS & coding projects and hit a point where it only made sense to simply write. Writing is hard.
On the OSR Discord, Gin shared this tweet & kindly gave me a shout-out. The phrase "already did" is generous; I've played around with a dozen iterations of turning Antarctic data into a gameable map but I can't claim to have successfully made it into a setting.
So I've been thinking about the project's future. In the DIY RPG community at large, there's currently a zeitgeist of 'just release your shit & stop waiting for it to be perfect', call it Year of the Beta or Stone Soup, Zungeoneering, or 1e-ism. Having never actually shared out any of my maps or data, I'm taking this as my nudge to do so.
Beta Data
My previous efforts could be generously described as "throwing large fistfuls of undercooked spaghetti at the wall", diverting-yet-dubious detours into simulated erosion, population modeling, unmanageable Obsidian vaults, travel cost analysis, nested random generation, and more. But for this "beta release", I'm sticking to the raw essentials:
- 6 mile hexes
- Simple terrain types (open, mountains, forest, conifer forest, jungle, swamp, desert, & farmland)
- Rivers
No roads, settlements, lairs, dungeons, sci-fantasy arcologies, or xenoformed biota. Just a vanilla pseudo-realistic tabula rasa awaiting your creativity.
The release includes the following files:
Antarctica_hexes.csv&Antarctica_hexes.gpkg: These are the main hex geodata files. Either can be read into a GIS and symbolized with hexagonal markers (e.g. any hexagon asset pack) to create a hexmap. They have the following attributes:fid,id: ID columns, useful for joining to other featuresleft,top,right,bottom: coordinates of the the bounding box of the hex.row_index,col_index: gives the row & column indices of the hex, should be used for keying hexeselev_mean,elev_sd: mean & standard deviation of the terrain elevation covered by the hex. Mountains were assigned as hexes withelev_mean > 1300 & elev_sd > 100orelev_sd > 500.arable_score: an arbitrary index approximating a hex's habitability. Farmland hexes were randomly designated using a 'roll-under' mechanic on this score.Biome_name: the original biome assigned to a hex. (See here).Terrain: a simplified terrain type derived from the biomes, intended to be broadly compatible with most ttrpg hexcrawling rules.X_m,Y_m: the X & Y coordinates of the hex's centroid.
Antarctica_rivers.gpkg: Calculated using elevation & precipitation data. Has aWidthattribute derived from the number of cells draining into a given segment, though it's a bit wonky and still needs some manual adjustment.Antarctica_elevation.tif: This is a 1km resolution raster providing elevation (in meters) for Antarctic terrain after glacial melt & isostatic rebound. Derived from British Antarctic Survey Bedmap 2 data.Antarctica.qgz: QGIS project file with basic symbology to render & label the hexes, plus several example map layouts.Antarctica_maps.zip: Contains seventeen 600x800 mile maps covering the whole continent.Assets.zip: Some basic hex icons pulled from K.M. Alexander's CC0 asset packs. These could be easily replaced with any Hexkit asset pack or similar.
All geodata uses the Antarctic Polar Stereographic coordinate reference system.
I recommend using QGIS (see my tutorial) but if there's interest I can see about exporting this to other formats.
Finally
If anyone ends up using this, please drop me a line on Bluesky or Discord or by leaving a comment on the Itch page! I'd love to see what people come up with, and I'd be happy to provide tech support or revised files. If there's enough interest, I'd also be open to organizing some kind of larger collaborative effort or game jam to properly key the whole thing.