My Map Quest.

Hi All,

I know, this map thing.

Let's just refresh in our minds what we're talking about.

Here's the scan and rebuild of the Mighty Empires tile map that I made with my gaming buddy almost 30 years ago.

This was my hand drawn interpretation that I colored in. I made lots of xeroxes of the base map and we used it for a play by mail campaign.

As I have shown, many many times on this blog, I've been trying to input this into Worldographer and get a usable hex map that I can drill down into. So I did this.

This is just one section of the the whole map that I input into the program. You can see I'm using the trace underlay feature and doing 4 hexes to one from the paper map. My idea was to make a Kingdom level map, where each hex is about 6miles. One day of travel for a large army across wilderness. Actually 6 miles is a measurement from Adventure, Conqueror, King and it correlates fairly well with 5 mile breakdown from Charles S Grant's Wargame Campaigns. The problem is that the major cities were way too close together at this scale.

After faffing about with trying to copy this map into one up a layer of size, I gave up and bit the bullet. I decided to redo the map from scratch increasing the scale of my paper map hex by 4. So 16 6mile hexes instead of 4 per paper map hex.

I almost didn't do it, I have a long history of getting frustrated with making this map, but I let my stubbornness take over. Originally I had dreaded having to go back in, hex by hex for a 208 hex square map instead of the original 52. Then I realized there was a paint bucket function. Duh!

So, still a fair amount of work, but much quicker at the moment.

Not bad. I filled in all the Grassland and three colors of ocean. Just did it here and there when I had time during the week. The plan is to fill in all the basic terrain types. Plains, Forests, Hills, Mountains and then massage the individual hexes as I drill down into the individual political divisions.

I also finally started putting together my unit of Skaven Slaves. I'll post more on that another time.

Thanks for looking.

Back to map making and world building

Hi All,

We're back in the middle of Cross Country season and my daughter has started doing more extracurricular stuff as well, but is not quite ready to drive herself. So I somehow haven't had the time to sit down and blog.

Hobby stuff has been happening, but it's been a fair amount of noodling around with not much completed to show for it.

I thought I would share how my mapping of my old Mighty Empires campaign world has progressed. Like a lot of things in life, I find myself waffling about and abandoning and re-engaging in projects all the time.

Above is the map with reduced opacity so that I can trace the coastline and see where the terrain goes. Below is the opaque version which does a better job of hiding the polygons I'm using to trace the coast.

If you have been following my map saga, you may remember I have been struggling with how to scale the Mighty Empires map and make it part of a larger world map. I thought that Worldographer was the answer, and then ran into difficulties that I couldn't get my head around.

I then saw another software on Kickstarter that looked cool and plumped down a chunk of change for that. Of course now the bug was back and I reopened Worldographer and started noodling around with it. After a few calculations, and many failures, I think I figured out a scheme. I got on the forums and worked out a little of the things I needed to understand better to work around.

I am currently redoing the coastline, fixing which hexes are land and sea and then adding a polygon to make the coastline. My rule of thumb is the hex has to be at least half land for it to be a land hex. I then make either a land or a sea polygon to make the coast. I will probably adjust the shapes of the other terrain with polygons to make them less angular as I progress. I also need to adjust the terrain a little bit and play with the hex stats, such as elevation.

I ran the auto generated coast tool on it, but I am deleting most of those polygons so that I can match my original map.

Anyway, yadda yadda. Blah, blah.

Thanks for looking.

PS - Each hex is 6 miles, bath tubbing the size of Mighty Empires I think. I went with the convention of 4 sub hexes per large hex. So going up to the Region level will give me 24 mile hexes, Continent will be 96 miles, World 384 miles.

Mapping Progress

Hi All,

Just wanted to share some minor progress I've made in mapping of late.

I think you'll all recall my Mighty Empires campaign.

Monfel is the area I want to map more closely to give more fluff to the Bretonnian army I've been making for the OWAC.

One of the main issues I was having was how to get my head around the scale. Mighty Empires makes things seem pretty big and I thought that maybe each ME tile represented 250 - 300 miles if we think about an army moving approximately 10 mile per day. This makes these territories absolutely huge. The Adventurer Conqueror King system is based around 24 and 6 mile hexes so I was trying to figure out how to glom on to that.

I finally figured it out. Each one of my Mighty Empires hexes would be 96 miles, four 24 mile hexex across. It then dovetails neatly with the ACKS 4 to 1 hex map. Of course they didn't have the hexes oriented the way I wanted, so I had to make the above hex grid after much trial and error.

I had to blow up my original hand drawn map about 400% to get it to roughly fit my new grid. I'm trying out some things , hence the notations, but I think I'll leave the terrain as is and only start adding sub hex features on the next level down.

I intend to use Welsh Pipers guide to help with that some. I used Omni Calculator to help me get my head around the area of a 96 mile across hex. This list of Countries by land area is also helpful in collecting ones thoughts.

Anyway, that's all for now.

Thanks for looking.

Back to the drawing board - Mighty Empires Campaign Map

Hi All,

Sorry for not posting regularly. Life and stuff. As is usual for me this time of year, I realize how lazy I've been the past year and get grouchy about all the projects I've let slip through my fingers. Both hobby and real life.

But anyway, this post is to tell you about the action I'm going to take to fix that.

Mighty Empires

That's right, I said it. Again. I've always had a thing for sweeping campaigns.Of course I've also had very scattered and grandiose ideas about them that ended up falling apart because I couldn't stay focused long enough to work it all out.

Linlandia

So you may recall the campaign I started with my gaming buddy from High School. I still hate the name, but he won the battle that got to pick it, so there it is. We set it up as a way to stay in touch after I went off to college and it ended up fizzling after a year or so. But I have two binders full of stuff for it and you may recall that I found a lot of the letters and paperwork from that campaign.

Maps

I have several maps of the campaign lets see where it all started.

This one was reconstructed from my hand sketched map of our tile placement. I then scanned in my tiles and placed them into a hex grid in GIMP. It was a royal pain in the ass.

Here is the sketch version. I made many copies of this so we could show changes in territory easily.

Lastly, here's the "fancy" hand drawn version I made as a present for my friend and to rekindle interest in the campaign. It didn't really work. But it was fun to make.

Next Steps

I hear you saying "I see what you've done in the past, what are you going to do to actually get this project moving?"

Welsh Piper

Welsh Piper is one of those sites I've found and forgotten about multiple times. It has great resources for hex mapping and a great program for calculating Fantasy populations. So I'm going to be printing out his hex templates and figuring how to scale my map into  his templates.

Scaling

The main problem is what scale are the Mighty Empires tiles. In the original game the time scale is supposed to be one season, and banners move one hex. Years ago I read "The Logistics of Alexander's Army" (I think that was the title) and 10 miles a day march for an army seems stuck in my brain. I think I fudged about a months worth of travelling in one season, so roughly 280 miles. I then dropped that to 250 to make it easier to divide by five, because that's how the Welsh Piper templates are set up. Of course the Welsh Piper mega hexes are 125 miles, so I will figure out if I want to just make my map scale 125 or translate my one hex into two in Welsh Piper.

Hexographer or Hand

The ultimate goal is to create this map in Hexographer, but I've found it difficult to get started or manage the aforementioned scaling issues so I'm going to do it by hand with colored pencils. Oldchool style.

The Plan

I'm going to print out templates and copies of the maps and start hand drawing the new maps over the Christmas break. As I get going I'll fill you in on how it's progressing and ultimately how you can get involved if you want to participate in the ultimate battle of good versus evil.

Thanks to Airborne Grove of Give Em Lead for re-re-kindling the idea for this and Bulldog Lopez of  He of Three Names for reminding me that I can use headings in a post.

Workbench, Welcome and reviving old projects

Hi All,

  I've been puttering around a bit the last week or so, but I just haven't had the blogging mojo. I meant to post to the Paint Table Staurday G+ group but decided that by Monday it was just too late. I'll try to post there this upcoming Saturday.

  On the workbench right now is this:

Terrible lighting, sorry. The Burnt Umber primed are 20mm Ratmen. The Black primed are (foreground) 20mm Bugbears, (next back) 20mm Ogres, (smack in the middle all the way back) 28mm Reaper Barbarian dude, (with skin painted) 28mm Gunthor from Black Scorpion (I think).

In the bucket for cleaning we have all my current Sci-Fi figures. These are the Colony 87 figures plus the Oldhammer 2015 special figure and a Judge Dredd Psi Judge. I'm waiting on those Foundry RT figures. I also supposedly have the Space Raiders Kickstarter coming at some point, but I forget what the hold up is.

Welcome to Suber of the very nice blog Oldschool Workshop. He's got some nicely painted figures and a great comic book project he's thinking about rebooting. Go check him out.

Speaking of reviving old projects, I dug out my old Mighty Empires campaign and retyped the journal so that I can sex it up into comic book or other presentable format.

  The thought is to try and recall what was going on and fast forward 20 some odd years in game time to be a source of scenarios for me and possibly others to play out in this alternate Warhammer world. I brought in a lot of AD&D Deities & Demigods fluff for the Orcs and had them be the main threat to humankind instead of Chaos. One thing I've noticed is that my 24 year old self seemed to like run on sentences, a lot.

Cheers everyone. Off to the gym tonight.

What's in a name?

Or how I came up with the name of my leader for the Nemroth Campaign.

I believe I have mentioned my interest in name generators before. I like the one from the Mighty Empires rule book. As I mentioned here you can get some fun names, but it also returns a lot of gibberish that is not s pleasing to the ear.

So aside from the Mighty Empires table, where is an aspiring Orc Warlord to go? In a google search there were a number that turned up.

Fantasy Name Generator turned up Abbas, Sugigoth, Xothkug, Yashnarz, Kogan, Sbghat, Ughash, Zarhbub, Bandagh, Uram. Not horrible but some are a little weird. This site also apparently has names for the World of Warcraft (Urthanurgul Deathbleeder, Kamkada Bonetaker, Guldarrosh Gorecrusher, Lumada Bloodaxe) and Elder Scrolls (Gadgnak gro-Huban, Magush gro-Dulbag, Shaznag gro-Ufthduk, Shagrn gro-Shakgham).