If you’re wanting to scratch build a world, you could do way worse than installing these two programs and playing around with them. It worked well and the campaign, while it ran, was a success. A little elbow grease turned something that looks like this: So a spot of Dwarf Fortress badlands became a more traditional badlands hex. So I use 1 tile tunnels at first to save time. The trick is that expanding 1 tile tunnels into 3 tile tunnels usually doesn't screw up the geometry of your fort. What it allowed me to do was create a layer of Dwarf Fortress map, which I then put hexes on. From this room another hallway leads to another larger square room which will become a crossroads with 3 separate exits to different areas of the fort but now workshops are in this room. It’s a Java mapping program, used to make hex maps. The trick here was a program called Hexographer (now called Worldographer). I needed hexes and art which would be recognizable to any of my players. It even spits out place names, if you’re inclined to pay attention to themĭwarf Fortress is in ASCII, a roguelike gone mad. Tarn Adams, the game’s creator, coded the thing right down to what layers of rock would appear where. This means mountains are where they should be, rivers flow the right ways, and deserts appear where it would be driest. As part of its efforts at realism, the game randomly generates a big world on as realistic lines as it can muster. What was germane to my mapmaking exercise was Dwarf Fortress’ world generation. It’s been in alpha for 16 years and will never hit a release candidate that also doesn’t matter. Stockpile and workflow design is, perhaps, the third most important thing you need to do in your fortress, after keeping dwarves fed and protected. Your colony of dwarves loves, fights, starves, barfs, and dies (mostly dies) according to painstakingly accurate depictions of physics. Efficient stockpile design is one of the most critical aspects of overall fortress efficiency. The game’s premise is that of any other city builder, but the reality is that its creators aimed to make a hyper-realistic simulation of dwarf life. If you’re not familiar with it, Dwarf Fortress is a PC game which is, by turns, one of the most complicated games ever made and a work of outsider art. The answer came from an unlikely place: the now venerable (and free) Dwarf Fortress. Mountains, forests, and rivers behave certain ways in reality and getting those features correct on a fantasy map takes a lot of effort. In any event, making believable world maps is hard. I needed a sense of the unknown, where danger is around every corner, but I’m perpetually short of time, or bad at managing what I have, so sketching detailed maps was out of the question. I didn’t want to revisit familiar worlds like Greyhawk or the Forgotten Realms. I set about acquiring a big collection of dungeons, so that way I had things ready to go when my party searched a specific hex or lingered too long in a given town. I used Labyrinth Lord, a recut of the Moldvay Basic D&D set, and I wanted the campaign to be the groggiest of grognard: a massive hexcrawl, dotted with dungeons. A few years ago, I got the idea to do a truly old school Dungeons & Dragons game.
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