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.

Hobby Update, February 2020

Hi All,

Sorry to have been absent from the bloggisphere for so long, it was not my intention but life sometimes gets in the way. My hobby, such as it is, has become more of a background thing as I am trying to manage my son and his growing teen angst about things.

One of the hardest things about parenthood has been feeling unable to effectively help my children overcome the issues of what I see as my worst traits. Wanting my kids to feel better about themselves than I ever did/do. But anyway, as one of my friends put it "life is managed failure." It sounded more uplifting when he said it.

Enough with the downer part.

While I haven't done a whole lot, I have played a few sessions of WFRP. Our game master has his own blog, It always rains in Nuln, and wrote a nice piece talking about our party of deceased characters from when I joined the group that is still currently playing. You can read it here.

If you are interested in hearing our scintillating live play you can find it here. Just look for the Thousand Thrones.

I am still collecting bits and pieces of my Skaven force, trying to fill the odd gaps in what I will loosely call a collection. I also found the Skavenblight Scramblers models I'd buried and partially forgotten about, so I'll be adding them to the queue. If only I could find my Ratskins, year of the Rat queue would be complete.

I've also gotten a fire under my ass to get back to my Mighty Empires campaign. I know, I know, I've been talking about this for years. I made some progress on my map but realized it was at the wrong scale after finding and reading trough (again?) Charles Grant's Wargame Campaigns. I'm still trying to trace my old hex map into Worldographer and got it pretty well sorted before I realized it wouldn't work at the scale I built it at. I almost shelved it again, but I'm going to keep on plugging away now that I have a pretty clear picture of the path forward. I'll try and share that more moving forward.

As for actual paint on miniatures, I'm not sure what the hold up really is. I'm really struggling with feeling like I have the time and space to get cracking. Last years effort to move the hobby and try to be more engaged with the family while doing so didn't really work. I got the lighting in the garage sorted, but it is still a horrible mess in there. I'm still trying to dig things out.

I've also been thinking about trying different techniques to help me get a little faster in putting out models. If I can't lower the indecisiveness time, I can at least make the actual painting go smoother.

Anyhow. I'll try to do better and also get back to reading and commenting on other hobby blogs.

Paint 'em if you got 'em.

Peace out!