Hexelevation

Putting the lay of land on a hex map.

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I want to make a mountainous setting. I want the topography of the area to count for something that isn’t just difficult terrain. I want the choices that players make about their routes to matter. This is what I came up with - topographic hexmaps.

If you aren’t familiar with hexcrawls, this series by Prismatic Wasteland is good to show you the ropes. I’ve got my own more streamlined ideas about how to run them, let me know if you’d be interested in series on hexcrawls in the comments.

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Inspiration

Let’s look at 2D topographical maps used in hiking/surveying.

Image credit: hikingguy

The lines represent changes in elevation. The closer the lines, the steeper the gradient.

Now, we could make something like this, but it’s a lot of work. It would be too cluttered and be hard to track. My solution is a hex map.

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Topographic Hexmaps

We’re going to put these lines on a hex map (a 10x10 hex grid to be specific), in fact we’re going to put two types of lines, dashed for shallow inclines and solid for steep ones:

Image Credit: Me

I’ve annotated the geographical features - we’ve got a bigger mountain and a smaller one, plus an extended ridge with two levels. We’ll see why this annotation is important soon.

But before that, if you’re interested in hexmaps check out our new line of notebooks! You can order them here.

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✨Click here to get Hexbooks✨

Inversion

We can actually ‘invert’ these features if we want.

Image Credit: Me

Here instead we have some sharp depressions and a valley with a sharp ascent to the south and a more gradual one to the north. The majority of the map is dominated by a connected ridge.

This inversion highlights why noting terrain is important. You need to distinguish between a valley and a ridge by noting the name of the thing on the map.

Travel Rules

Let’s fit this to some travel rules. I like using ‘watches’ for travel: morning, afternoon, evening, and night. It takes a ‘watch’ to go from one hex to another as a baseline. We add that:

• Crossing a dotted line costs an extra watch (2 watches total)

• Crossing a solid line costs 2 extra watches (3 watches total)

You could use a different key system, like coloured lines, if you wanted. You could also have more than two grades of incline. I like it this way though, it avoids overcomplication.

There are other kinds of difficult terrain that can be combined with this approach like swamps and mega dense forest. Maybe this difficult terrain takes an additional watch. Crossing into a swamp through a dotted line then takes 3 watches.

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Wrap up

There you go, a simple way to get topography into hex maps.

You can bolt these onto all kinds of games that use hexmaps, Forbidden Lands, Traveller (for planetary surfaces), or your more classic NSR/OSR games of choice (I’d quite like to use this for a Mork Borg or Into the Odd sandbox myself).

You also can use this for much smaller hexmaps, like hexflowers. I advocated for smaller sandboxes a couple of months back here.

Next week I’ll present some optional rules to add to this, to dial in the feeling of mountain exploration a little more - stuff like climbing.

If you like this article please like and share! Commenting helps out MurkMail a lot and I love chatting with you folks. What do you think of these ‘hexelevation’ maps? Come tell me on the discord.

✨Click here to check out Hexbooks✨

Recommendations

Blog: Chris McDowall presents alternative ‘peasant’ rulers in the context of his game Mystic Bastionland. Subversion of expectations doesn’t always pay off, sometimes it feels cheap, but this strikes me as the opposite. Mystic Bastionland isn’t out yet, but Chris’ game Electric Bastionland is worth a look if you aren’t familiar with his work yet!

YouTube: Dave Thaumavore digs into Hull Breach Vol. 1 for Mothership. Anthologies have existed in the OSR/NSR for a while (the one that comes to my mind is Tomb of a Thousand Doors for Mausritter), but Hull Breach feels like a level up. Dave really puts this one under the microscope to help us understand why it works so well. You can get Hull Breach Vol. 1 here.