Saturday, July 18, 2020

Europe, Asia, & North Africa 6mi Hex maps.


After much searching, I've found a great hexmap of Eurasia and North Africa:


All credit for the original goes to ADMC/Ville Makkonen. From his map, I generated the map below. 


However, the size of this map brings hexographer to a slog, and it's also way beyond the scope of the territory necessary for a hex crawl. So, I further divided this map into smaller countries and regions, as you can see below.







The maps will need a lot of love and labor, but hopefully one of these provides a jumping off point for some of you to create a new campaign!

.hxm files:

https://mega.nz/file/vahBTJ5Q#-ySP01LfAOfYhsuY2LreyArQ2W1v-cR508YjChzHuuA

Worth noting:
The orignal map's hexes had a scale of about 27 miles, but I treated them simply as 24 mile hexes. The child map is assumed to be 6 mile hexes. It seemed more worthwhile to have a simple to use map rather than one of greater accuracy.

The maps have a lot of lines on them. This is because I use ACKS and wanted to outline the rough territories that would serve as the various domains of the world. You can delete them in hexographer, or you can open the .hxm file with notepad and delete every line of text that starts, "line    political", which only takes a minute. If you want to keep the lines, I'll elaborate on their meaning.

  • Blue- Duchy Borders
  • Purple-Principality Borders
  • Lavender - Kingdom Borders
  • Thin Red - Language Border (I also treat these as Kingdom Borders)
  • Thick Red - Religious Border
The Language and religious borders are based on the work done in the original map. The creator made additional maps, which I used to draw the major borderlines. You can read his explanation in the link posted.



Finally, you will notice some oddities and errors with the maps. Chiefly, most of the text labels have shifted away from their corresponding cities. Overwelmingly, they are a few hexes Southwest of where they should be. This is just an artifact of generating the child map; I suspect it's due to the text being fixed to pixel locations while the hexes are their own objects, and something in the scale conversion shifts them incorrectly. Anyhow, it will be a minor nuisance and I apologize for the inconvenience. Additionally, Germany and Scandinavia have a lot of odd characters in their names. It seems like Hexographer processes umlauts differently than it used to, or at least thats my assumption.

I think that about covers it. Oh, except for the fact that theres no Britain map in the file. That's becuase this guy has already made a map far better than one that would be generated from the ADMC map

Cheers!





5 comments:

  1. This is so incredibly useful for understanding the application of the ACKS rules against a real-world map. I really appreciate this post. I hope you share any other development against the map in the future.

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    Replies
    1. Thanks! Depending on the campaign my players choose next, I might do some more. I have been working on a map of the great lakes region as well.

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  2. This is incredible work, very impressive, so glad I found this!
    However, I'm a little confused. The first map you posted, mymap.png doesn't seem to be in the .rar file. When opened in hexographer or worldographer, the one labelled mymap.hxm seems to just be of Eastern Europe? Am I doing something wrong?
    Thank you so much for the amazing work!

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    Replies
    1. Sorry for not responding sooner, I don't think I have notifications on. The computer I posted this on is out of commission (waiting on it being refurbished). Mymap is the default file name, and lazy old me sometimes didn't give my projects descriptive names. Looks like I just grabbed the wrong one in the mega file. I will see if I can make a new version of that image this weekend and update the post.

      Delete
    2. Sorry for not responding sooner, I don't think I have notifications on. The computer I posted this on is out of commission (waiting on it being refurbished). Mymap is the default file name, and lazy old me sometimes didn't give my projects descriptive names. Looks like I just grabbed the wrong one in the mega file. I will see if I can make a new version of that image this weekend and update the post.

      Delete