Hexcrawls and Maps and Problems

I spend a lot of time looking at maps. They’re the sort of thing that every module jumps to include and every would-be world builder immediately grabs pen and paper to scratch out, desperate to claim their spot among the greatest fantasy cartographers of faux history.

Part of my arrival to the OSR was realizing that 90% of the prep I was doing just wasn’t fun and most of that not fun arose around making maps. One of the key things that’s shifted in how I prep for my games over the last 2 or 3 years has been abandoning the idea of creating these sprawling world maps with geopolitical and geographical data on them.

But, in the course of burning the mapmaking bridge, I run into a problem. How does one create and visualize a larger world outside of the small region of play that players start in? Surely, as time goes on, the lens of focus a group of players has on the world will expand, pulling out to encompass the region of play and bursting the seams of the tiny (or worse, mostly empty) hexcrawl included in the B/X retroclone module I’ve decided to run. Running up against the boundaries of a play space isn’t fun in any context, no less one in which those boundaries are literally imaginary.

So, as a lazy man, I got to work thinking up a way to preserve the boundaries without breaking the narrative or ruining the illusion of adventuring in a logically consistent space with a living, breathing, and, most importantly, reactive world.

And from my quixotic daydreams came the Spokelands.

The Spokelands: A First Pass

The cliff notes version of the Spokelands are as follows:

• Axle is the center of the world and the greatest city mankind has ever been kept out of.

• the rest of the world radiates outward (like spokes on a wheel, if you hadn’t caught on) in a long chain of land masses separated by Dark Mist, an arbitrarily present substance which is like 60 years of asbestos exposure condensed into one breath. Traveling through this stuff is next to impossible.

• travel between these land masses only happens through portals. There isn’t much consistency between the land masses, but they’ve all got portals to get to their neighbors. Somewhere, anyway.

It’s this last one that lets me slip out of the nasty business of drawing world maps, and frankly it solves a lot of problems with that sort of thing. No longer do I need to scrub a module’s deities from their thrones and pencil in my own. The land masses and the people on them don’t have to have any religious continuity relative to the others, nor do they need to fit together in a geographically consistent manner. They can react and be reacted upon through portals and they are still part of a cohesive world, albeit one that’s a little harder to navigate beyond the regional level. Instead of a map, I can just do a tidy little point based doodle that takes all of 30 seconds and conveys all of the information a traditional map would have.

There are a couple of other benefits, but I don’t think need to be expounded on at this point, since I actually want to start talking about my setting and the first module I’m writing in it!

Until next time,

L.M.