Getting started, thinking small

Last time, I uploaded a map of the area we normally think of as constituting what we call "Ancient Greece" - a designation that the people living there may have struggled to understand given that they so rarely thought of themselves as being anything other than rivals until Alexander the Great rolled in and told them all to shut up. After he died, of course, they went back to not thinking of themselves as one nation until the Romans rolled in and told them all to shut up and pay their taxes.

Anyway.

That map is fairly typical of a small campaign map. For comparison, the individual map sheets in Judges Guild's seminal Wilderlands campaign are each about ⅙th the size of the Greek map in area, but there were 18 of them in the full campaign, which comes out at 3 times the area. The famous Darlene Greyhawk maps cover about 10% more than that again. So our "Ancient Greece" campaign is not exceptional but it is a massive geographical area to cover. If you are starting out running a campaign, this sort of thing can be very intimidating. Where to start?

Let's have a look at a smaller map - the one used in the thumbnail above. There's a jpeg of this map scaled so that it will fill an A3 sheet at 300dpi (or A4 at 424dpi).

The hex size on this map is 6 miles face-to-face (the size of the small hexes on the Greek map) and it is a very special map because it is the map I live on. But more than that. It is the map:

• I was born on (hex 0201)
• My parents lived on when I was very small (0101)
• I went to school on (0301)
• I was legally married on (0301 again)
• We had our wedding reception on (0304)
• I had my first programming job on (0101)
• And, as mentioned, we now live on (in a specific hex with almost no other inhabitation, so I'm keeping that to myself)

I have lived and worked away from this map - I recently returned after 10 years in England - but my parents only left it - ever* - for holidays and my grandparents maybe only even did that once or twice.

Since I've spent a lot of time on this map I can tell you something useful about it: those 6m hexes are huge. 

Even with modern motorised transport and decades of living here, there are entire hexes on this map I have never passed through and many places in the hexes I have which I have never seen or visited. This is a map you could explore on foot for a lifetime.

This little map of 22 hexes is in fact big enough for a campaign.

At this point, I suggest you try to make a similar map for where you live now. At A3 size, the scale is 1"=2m, or 1:126720. If you use QGIS and save an area to that scale from the Open Street Map dataset (included) as an image you can import the image into Inkscape and add the hexes with the Inkscape Hex Map Extension. Be aware that the extension currently takes "hex size" to be point-to-point, so you need to give it sizes which are 1.155 times what you would expect to.

Even searching a sea hex takes time.
(It took me about an hour and a half to track this
bloody image down and I'm not sure it was worth it).
Art: Don Simpson's Megaton Man

If you do that then you will immediately see what I can see on this map - finding something the size of, say, a tomb in one of those hexes is going to be bloody hard unless the tomb is Mausolus's or the hex is made of flat glass, or you have magic.

Going back to the post "A Lorry-Load of Sand" from last year, I would guess that most of the hexes on this map would have been forest with the exception of the Ards Peninsula (running south from 0401) which would have been, in ye olden time, forested hills; 0101 would be forested hills and marsh (plus sea). Civilisation/patrolled would have been basically restricted to 0104, 0204, 0205, 0301, 0302, and 0305 (Belfast is a very new city, if you're wondering about that large conurbation in hexes 0101/0102 on the modern map).

If we plug in the details to the sandbox generator and selecting only plains, forest, hills, marsh, and shallow salt sea we get (seed 3645131196):

• 0101 3 forest lairs, 0 marsh, and 1 salt water shallow lair. I've divided the results from the table to reflect the distribution of terrains. All plain wilderness.
• 0102 3 forest lairs, wilderness.
• 0103 I'm classing as patrolled and we get no lairs
• 0104 is densely populated and we get no lairs again.
• 0105 is patrolled and we get 2 forest lairs.
• 0106 is patrolled, 1 forest lair.
• 0201 (hex 7 on the table) is sparsely populated hills (Craigantlet) with no lairs.
• 0202 is wild forest with 2 lairs.
• 0203 is sparsely populated forest with 1 lair.
• 0204 is densely populated and probably plains (Downpatrick area), so no lair.
• 0205 is half populated hills and half patrolled (fishing boats and traders for Dundrum) shallow sea, giving us 1 sea lair (I rounded up).
• 0301 (hex 12) is the area around what will one day be Bangor abbey/monastery and is basically populated hills, with no lairs.
• 0302 is about half and half sea lough and hills, busy enough to count as densely populated. No lairs.
• 0303 is unpopulated low-lying forest, no lairs.
• 0304 is semi-populated and divided between plain and shallow sea. 1 lair on the land.
• 0305 is semi-populated woodland, 1 lair.
• 0306 is shallow sea. Semi-populated by boats trading up and down the coast (and some actual patrols to protect them). One lair.
• 0401 (hex 18) semi-populated sea and hills. One lair in the hills.
• 0402 unpopulated forested hills and patrolled shallow sea. 2 forest lairs (4 indicated, halved), no sea lairs.
• 0403 as 0402 with 1 forest lair.
• 0404 same again but no lairs at all, and finally.
• 0405 open shallow sea with nothing in it.

That's a total of 20 lairs in total.

What are the lairs? Let's develop one of these hexes and see. Things will depend on your mix of acceptable monsters for your campaign, of course, but for hex 0101 four rolls on the DMG temperate tables for forest and salt water gives:

1. Tribesmen (20)
2. Pseudo-dragon (1)
3. Shambling mound (2: 11 HD and 9 HD)
4. Giant shark (1: 11 HD) 

The giant shark doesn't actually lair and technically I should have re-rolled (just as I did for the merchants I rolled for #1) but I decided that perhaps this shark just patrols here a lot. 

Why does it patrol here a lot? Well, maybe those (Celtic) tribesmen are doing something. Let's look at them in detail.

The base 20 is augmented by another 20 women and 20 children, so that's 60 in the tribe. There is also (some of this is rolled, some is a set number from the MM text): two 3rd level fighters, a 4th level fighter, and a 5th level chief. Additionally, two 4th level "druids" under the leadership of an 8th level witchdoctor (also druidic).  There's 20 slaves, but no captives.

They have ivory - probably walrus or perhaps whale products like narwal horns - worth 4,000gp. The village itself is just a bunch of huts; there is no wall of any sort

The slaves will be a mix of tribal taboo-breakers and useful captives from other tribes. 

The 5th level fighter leading them has stats that look like this (from More IV):

Str: 18

Int: 6

Wis: 15, Alignment Neutral

Con: 12, hp 37

Dex: 12, AC 7

Cha: 15

Com: 16

Basically, a charismatic lunkhead. Presumably the witchdoctor is the brains. Let's look at him:

Str: 16

Int: 12

Wis: 17, Alignment LN

Con: 8, hp 50

Dex: 10, AC 7

Cha: 7

Com: 12

Yes - everything you'd want in a leader except no one likes him.

So let's say that they have no normal captives because they worship the giant shark and normally captives get sacrificed to him. Having run out they're on the lookout for someone else to sacrifice. The slaves know that they'll be next if no one else is found, so their reaction dice to strangers will be at -20% in terms of rebelling. The full tribal members will be even worse at -30%. However, they will deliberately hide it.

I've always assumed that the indication of "druidic" casters in tribesmen does not necessarily mean that the casters are strictly druids with druid alignment restrictions, so I would definitely go with a Wicker Man or Burn the Witch feel.

The shambling mounds will be in the marshes where the river flows out into the tidal mudflats - the area which has extensively been reclaimed and modified on the modern map. They - or the remains of their victims - are rich in treasure:

• 1000 cp,
• Jewelry (4): 7000 gp Seal, 3000 gp Chain, 2000 gp Crown, 2000 gp Buckle,
• Scroll of Protection - Electricity, 
• Spell Scroll (Magic User: Transmute Rock to Mud, Mass Charm, Mass Invisibility, Glassteel, Cone of Cold, Rary's Mnemonic Enhancer),
• Bracers of Archery, 
• Potion of Speed

The pseudo-dragon might be an ally against the tribesmen due to its N(G) alignment, but even if a party hears a rumour of such a thing existing how would they find a 1½' long creature in a 6 MILE hex which is, as mentioned previously, bloody huge? They would need magic, of course.

In any case, its treasure consists of gems:

2 x Aquamarine (500 gp), Black Pearl (500 gp), 2 x Bloodstone (50 gp), Blue Quartz (10 gp), Carnelian (50 gp), Deep Blue Spinel (500 gp), Fiery Yellow Corundum (1000 gp), Freshwater Pearl (10 gp), Lapis Lazuli (10 gp), 2 x Red-brown Spinel (100 gp), Tourmaline (100 gp), Turquoise (10 gp), 2 x Zircon (50 gp)  for a total of 3590gp.

So, there it is. A small campaign map into which to place your first dungeon and a hex fleshed out with some tougher opponents for later. Roll up the rest of the encounters, add a few settlements (I'd go with 0204 for the major one) and maybe a patron sending the party on their first expedition.

Get a ring binder or some electronic equivalent (or my Campaign Map Book!) and use a page for each hex, noting down what the PCs do in each which may affect other inhabitants and their views and actions in response.

If you can, once the ball is rolling get someone to role-play the leaders of particularly strong lairs - whether large groups of bandits or individual intelligent monsters. Then you'll get some use out of all those hexes you rolled up and someone else will do some of the work for you!

*Actually, Dad was evacuated during the war off the top of the map, but that was a bit exceptional.