19th Level

In preparation for a Hyperborea campaign using Astonishing Swordsmen & Sorcerers of Hyperborea  I've been working on getting a more detailed map. I've a bit of lead time as we'll be doing character generation and then some adventuring in Khromarium but at some point I'd like to unleash a bit of hexcrawling. AS&SH has a very nice fold-out map and the upcoming version will have a color one. However, the scale is a bit too small, at 24 miles per hex, to truly facilitate hexcrawling. Most examples of that go for a 6 miles per hex scale. The new version of Hexographer, also named Worldographer, is currently in Beta. I recently purchased a beta of it and have been making use of it to develop my own hex map of Hyperborea. While I generally prefer mapping using Campaign Cartographer 3, Worldographer works very nicely for hex maps. A nice feature of it is it allows for 2 lower levels under the main one. It labels the three layers World, Continent, and Kingdom. ...

I am currently working my way through Mary Beard's SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome. She covers Rome from its legendary founding to the point where all free people of the Empire were granted citizenship. She closely examines the legends of very early Rome such as the founding by Romulus and Remus, the Regal period, and the early Republic. For all of these periods we have no contemporary written history, being forced to rely on archaeological evidence - any written histories of those periods were written centuries later. What I found striking was her description of warfare in the period around the end of the monarchy. She wrote: Military activity is another good case in point. Here geography alone should give us pause. We need simply look at the location of these heroic battles: they were all fought within a radius of about 12 miles of the city of Rome. Despite the style in which they are recounted, as if they were mini-versions of Rome against Hannibal, they were probably ...

Tull from "The Gunslinger" by Stephen King; Art by Michael Whelan Games like Dungeon Crawl Classics make the suggestion that one should strive for a smaller scale world - a world where the way to find out what is in the next valley is to go to that next valley. Maybe there's travelers who can give you some hints of what is out there if you're lucky, but if you want to be sure, you need to go there. I'm a big fan of works like A Song of Ice and Fire  which deals with large nation-states, battles for the throne, long distance travel, worldwide threats and organizations. That's pretty far in the opposite direction. I got to thinking what are some examples of works that focus on a smaller world. Worlds where when you go into a new village it feels different, with a whole new set of traditions. It's been a while since I read Jack Vance's Dying Earth series but that is one inspiration that came to mind quickly. It's also something you see in his...