The Seven-Sided Die

I needed some hex paper for the game I’m setting up. Autarch even has some 6-mile hex paper that’s custom-designed for their particular campaign-creation guidelines. I, however, am Very Particular as my wife well knows, and using four different types of hex paper that uses 24 minor hexes to one major hex on one sheet and then 4 minor hexes to 1 major hex on another and then uses rectangles and hexes together on yet another sheet is just silly. [1]

(Actually, Autarch’s hex sheets are very nice sheets and I’d recommend trying them for anyone who likes hexes.)

I wanted one sheet for any scale I could think of. I liked the logic laid out in In Praise of the 6 Mile Hex, and I’ve got some skill with the drawing functions of ConTeXt, so I made some hex paper with 12 minor hexes to 1 major. With these sheets I can scale up or down in 12ths, giving me 6-mile hexes for my core scale, ½-mile hexes for detailed maps, and 72-mile hexes for large regional maps. I doubt I’ll bother with a continental scale for this campaign, but 864-mile hexes should handle that fine if I do.

Download it here:

• 12-to-1 Hex Paper

I discovered Dyson Logos’ inspiring side-view dungeon map tutorial a couple of days ago. Since then I’ve been experimenting with the style and I find it suits me really well.

I started by doodling from memory an old dungeon I ran years ago for D&D 3.5 and shook out some of the kinks in the style and started making it look good. I found that the real key to making it look good, as he points out in the tutorial, is to go over the lines that separate solid ground from air a second time to darken them. It’s such a simple thing, but when you slow down to make the tracing accurate it transforms shaky, amateurish lines into confident, polished ones.

The sample at right is a work-in-progress so the crosshatching hasn’t been finished, but it gives a good idea of how nice the results look even when it’s incomplete [1]. The crosshatching gives it a great finished look, and isn’t nearly as hard as I anticipated. The trick I’ve found is to slow down enough to make the lines evenly spaced and parallel – getting the orientation just right is much less important.

I’m still finding it hard to conceptualise the layout before committing it to ink and I’m still running into room shapes and details that look better in my head than when executed on paper, but practice is very quickly paying off. I’m learning what sort of shapes look good and which convey information well much faster than I would have thought, so the exercise is having a very encouraging effort/payoff curve.

I have to say that I’ve never been good at drawing a straight line without a ruler, and yet look at how nice those lines look! This sample is only the second map I’ve done since reading the tutorial. I don’t consider myself to be very artistically skilled, so if I can do this, so can you!

I haven’t tried it in pencil yet, but I think pen is the way to practice. Drawing in ink is forcing me to think about what I’m doing rather than rushing something onto the page just to kill the abhorrent blankness.

For more map awesomeness go read through the rest of his mapping blog, the (hilariously misnamed) A Character For Every Game. And if that only whets your appetite for maps in this line style (side-view and otherwise), there’s always Tony Dowler’s Year of the Dungeon. Now that I’ve shown myself that I can do this at all, I’ve got a stack of index cards that are earmarked for drawing Dowler-style microdungeons for even more practice. I’m determined to have a hexcrawl that is well-stocked with my own subterranean creations among the One Page Dungeons and published megadungeons I’ll be using.

Do you love maps? (Of course you do!)

Do you love to draw maps? (Who doesn’t?!)

Do you love to just look at pretty, pretty maps? (Let us take this as a relatively safe assumption!)

Then get yourself over to Jon Roberts’ Fantastic Maps blog and feast your eyes, read some tips, and satisfy that itch in your fingers to draw some of your own.

That is all.