At the end of 2024, Maatlock created a challenge in the spirit of #dungeon23 called #hexcrawl25, in which you produce a campaign “hex flower” for a fantasy roleplaying game by detailing one hex each day of 2025.
I intend to complete this challenge, with the following goals in mind:
- Collaborate with my son. He’s interested in creating monsters and had a good idea for the theme and general premise of the campaign world, so we’ll be going with that.
- Seriously exercise Affinity’s design suite, in order to wean myself from Adobe’s products.
- Unlike dungeon23, do the whole thing digitally, legally using someone else’s art.
- Make something a bit more science fantasy, leaning towards Thundarr roleplaying.
- Use metric hexes, with regional hexes 10km wide, because debates about “proper” hex size exclusively fixate on Imperial measurement systems. (If you do care about these dumb arguments, 10km hexes are nearly identical to 6 mile hexes, but distance is way easier to count.)
My first instinct was to try to use the map editor for Civilization V. Some quick playing around revealed that approach wasn’t going to work. I was prepared for the tool to be buggy and odd (which it is), but what sinks it is display problems. The only way render the map in that Civ V style (which is what I’m after) is to play an actual game, and that adds a bunch of artifacts to the rendering that I don’t want, and as far as I could tell, couldn’t hide with terminal commands. A bigger problem is that there seems to be no way to render in the game without using perspective. That is, Civ V hexes use a perspective renderer, so hexes further away are smaller. This makes assembling a bigger map out of parts challenging. So, scrapped that idea.
Instead, I found a great series of somewhat Civ-like style hex tiles—with a license perfect for this kind of thing—by David Baumgart on itch. He sells several different sets in the same style, and I bought all of them. The hexes are somewhat “isometric” feeling, squished a bit vertically, rather than exact hexes, with details in the foreground meant to overlap the hexes behind (but not using perspective projections). That’s fine with me. I also considered using Big Hexyland, since I already own it, but the way the product is set up makes it more work, and I wasn’t as crazy about the style for this project.
I might post something once or twice during the year about progress, but we will likely just produce this thing mostly silently. I’ll certainly post a recap with lessons learned at the end of the year.
As a proof of concept, I created a really rough plan of a “campaign” level map I might use as a guide. In this challenge, each hex on the map below will be fleshed out by its own regional 19-hex “flower”, so the final “campaign” level map will be significantly more detailed.
