Sunday, October 23, 2011

Automatic Hex Stocker By Me

Stock 100 hexes at once--complete with landscape details, encounters (some simple, some weird), fortresses, inns, towns and underground complexes. Took a bit. A few of the widgets involved piggyback off what's already in Abulafia.

Hope you like it.

Hit refresh for new hexes.

7 comments:

Roger G-S said...

I forgot about Abulafia. Need to put some of my own stuff on there at some point.

These procedural generators come up with good stuff, especially the fortresses and humanoid tribes. I'm not so sure the landscape descriptions add much though. Probably best to either explicitly have a list of different landscape-dependent features, or make the table landcape-independent.

Zak Sabbath said...

@Roger

If you have a hexmap and every single hex has a number then there's no harm in having random features and possible encounters in each hex, I figure.

And the other generators are all on their own pages, too.

Joshua said...

Excellent!

Anonymous said...

Why did you cluster your hexes in group of 20? Hexes cluster in group of 19 (a central one + six in the first ring + 12 in the second ring). Beside that, except the "empty" locations (which go quite against the "every place must be interesting" rule) it looks awesome to generate hexcrawls.

By the way, Abulafia permits copying pages: I see this as a very, very promising base for a long serie of hexcrawl generators.

Zak Sabbath said...

@tsocjanth

-I did it by 20s because it's easier to do the math if you have hexes that are numbered "6979-9996"for example and have to move between the generator and your map.

As for the "every place must be interesting" rule:
I don't take this to mean "every single day of in-game time the PCs have to find something interesting in their hex". If I made the map like that:

1. no-one would ever be able to get anywhere (between distant cities for example).

2.the world would be so unrealistically dense with novelty that the PCs would never have a reason to choose one direction over another

The "locations must be interesting" rule means: if a GM is bothering to write detail on a place it must be interesting and getting from there to anywhere else must require going through someplace interesting (i.e. at least one hex)--not 27 interesting places. Otherwise there's be no searching or thought involved--you'd just pick a direction and Ta Daaa! something weird that gives you xp!

-As for re-using, yes, I certainly hope people do make their own customized hex generators off this one.

Anonymous said...

Oh, I see. Thanks for the clarification: I'd probably put in "something" to distinguish that featureless piece of terrain, like a hollow tree by the path, to distinguish a forest from a forest from a forest in a bunch of 10 featureless forest hexes, unless it's something wanted. I feel this problem with hexmaps, while not with worlds based on other graph types. I've been wanting to post on it for a while but, meh.

Zak Sabbath said...

well if you do have a list of those somethings please send it to me so i can stick them in the generator. or put them in yourself.