June 1, 2018

Demoland

While I work on the big map, inching towards perfection, I want to create a test case to work through the trade system. This will keep my creative juice flowing. Demoland is such a test case.


The names come from a Markov chain generator I'm working on, based here on a selection of Welsh names. Once I like the results more, I'll put up a full post about it.

These are 20-mile hexes (nominally a day's travel), with an area of ~346 square miles. The total map has 68 hexes (~23,562 square miles). That's roughly the size of West Virginia: a lot of land for people to live in, if they pack right. West Virginia has a population of about 1.8 million, at a density of roughly 77 per square mile. If they were evenly spread out over this area, that'd be around 27 thousand people per hex.

The dashed/light rivers are impassable for trade, either because they are too shallow, or because they drop too quickly, rendering them difficult to safely navigate (such as the segment meeting the main river at Andox). This has the effect of isolating Cadewin, Norys, and Kenor a bit more than the other cities. It's possible that, if trade were thick enough here, that villages could spring up at the point where the rivers become navigable. The river width is only representative of the area it drains, not necessarily its size.

Dark green is largely forested, light green is either cultivated or grassland. That's as specific as I'll get for now. Increasing lightness is higher elevation. The landscape doesn't change terribly dramatically until the river begins to carve a valley in the Malis area.

The drainage basin here gets fairly low, around 500 feet above sea level at the bottom right. However, for ease of calculation, we'll consider it as a closed trade system. If Malis has connections outside the other nine cities here, they aren't interested in trade or travel.

Now, the placement of these settlements might not be ideal, but I've yet to codify the algorithm to pick better locations. So here they are, through freak acts of nature or perhaps oddly placed resources.

The travel network is defined based on modifiers for terrain. This captures the effect of how long it takes to travel through each hex, based on a initial value of 1 day. Grassland is no modifier, through forest is 1.25, upriver is 0.707, and downriver is 0.5. Multiple routes can be defined between each set of points; this is most relevant when traveling upriver, but in more complex networks can capture the effect of, say, a frozen river in winter forcing land travel. Elevation is also accounted for: a change of 4000 feet requires an entire extra day to surmount. Thanks to this, Andox is equidistant from Gerlin and Derl in terms of travel time.


The network has 20 unique connections, but only 9 total point-to-point routes. I feel that very often, heart and soul is poured into world maps, and the ultimate use is as the simple network above: "We travel from Andox to Derl. It takes about a day. The end." Not that we should be spending a crushing amount of time on travel descriptions - but come on! There's an insane amount of gameability. Not only that, but if we as DMs and players treat beautiful maps as mere webs of nodes, then there's no point to spending the time to make them! On the other hand, if the time has been spent, we should think about how we can utilize the new detail set before us (Sunk Cost Fallacy be damned).

I haven't decided who gets what yet. It's an opportunity to tweak the randomized resource generation. Similarly, no population numbers. All will be made clear in time.

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