The Godling's Task: Creating an original fantasy world for OSR DnD [part 3]

 

Shaping Seas and Mountains

"The Great Waterfall" by Roberto Nieto

Hello friends! Welcome back to our series. In case you need a reminder, today we will be creating the geographical world for our upcoming Hexcrawl/Oregon Trail campaign: Hard Iron Skies. In the previous post, I went over the inspirations and the intentions I had for this campaign. In this post, we will be getting our hands dirty... in rocks, mud, and salty water. We are going to focus less on art and more on the craft of building a world for a Hexcrawl campaign.

Before I begin, I do want to mention that, aside from my own personal research, a lot of my information comes from Expeditious Retreat Press' fantastic (and NYOP!) guidebook: A Magical Society: Guide to Mapping. It's a great starting place for a project like this one. Also, as I listed in my inspirations on part 2 of this series, Bat In The Attic made a fantastic guide to designing a fantasy sandbox adventure, please check it out.

Now, without further ado, let's get started.

From the very beginning...

Pangaea. Pan means sexy sylvan goat god, but it also means all, everything, the whole shabang. Gaea means lands. All the lands, in one single continent. To create my world, I started here.

The first thig I did was draw some blobs. A lot of great projects start with blobs. 

Here they are. Sorry if they are hard to see. Blobs.

Next, I tore out the blobs, and colored them in pencil. As so:

Then I took those blobs and put them all together to create my world's Pangaea equivalent. This process basically felt like solving a jigsaw puzzle by egregiously cheating. Just cram them however they fit. It's like packing a small car for a long camping trip. 

My Pangaea ended up looking like this:

Those dark spots are potential mountains. The most ancient mountains, that form in our continents at the time of Pangaea.

The next step was moving the plates. I found this neat lil time lapse video showing how the continents moved from Pangaea to our current positions. I just mimicked it, somewhat, using my lil fingers instead of the convection of underground forces. This was the result:

I put in some new dark spots showing where new mountains may be, caused by the collision of the continents as they separated. So now we have old mountains, from the Pangaea times, and new mountains, caused by the movements of separation.

Next, I outlined the continents on Gimp (I do not have Photoshop) and laid a transparent map of our own world over my own planet, just to get an idea of latitude, longitude, and general scale:

Notice I added another little landmass up top. It felt a little empty. 

The next step was wind directions. I won't get too much into the science of it here, the Guide to Mapping I mentioned earlier does a great job with this. To put it simply, because of various thermal factors, the inclination of our planet, and its rotation, the direction of the world's winds follows a convective pattern depending on latitude.

This is going to be important later, when determining climate zones and biomes.

Overlaying this scheme onto our outline, it ended up looking something like this:

Now, I have to pick where to base the Hard Iron Skies campaign. I am looking for a place with extreme temperatures, specifically cold ones. Generally speaking, as a rule of thumb a hemisphere's temperature tends to be more extreme the more landmass is present in the hemisphere (this is the case in our own world, where the northern half of the planet tends to have more extreme temperatures than the southern). 

The reason for this are the different properties of minerals versus water. Water conserves heat more effectively, so in the colder seasons the general temperature stays warmer because of conserved heat. Water also warms up slower than land, therefore in the hot seasons the southern hemisphere tends to remain cooler than its northern counterpart. 

The world we created follows the same pattern as our own. North = more extreme, because it has a higher percentage of surface landmass. So we are gonna go with a northern location for Hard Iron Skies.

I ended up going with this continent, the large landmass to the northwest of our world, which I zoomed in on and re-outlined with more detail:

Here it is! And it's huge. Much too big for the purpose of our campaign (if you notice, underneath you can see some parts of Canada, the USA, and even Mexico), but still, pretty cool.

We need to zoom in further to determine the starting point for our caravan.

I am going to focus on this area:

Enhance! And show some mountains.

I am going to zoom in even further. This peninsula is still large, more or less the size of the Pacific Northwest, plus some parts higher up in Canada.

So I am going to zoom in further, and focus on the southern end of the peninsula, with some attention to the location of major mountains (the gray splotches). Something like this:

As you see, I already put the hex grid over the Territory. It is still large, more or less the same size as the American Pacific Northwest. 

Making a rough estimate, each hex, side to side, is 20 miles. The edges are roughly 12 miles long, and the area of each hex is 346 square miles. Those are big, but not too big. 

Let me explain my thought process with these dimensions. The main crux of Hard Iron Skies is a caravan, and not a military one. These are not travelers with tears of training and tough regimens. These are pilgrims, trekking through a dangerous lands, bringing their few worldly possessions along with them.

To get a better picture of this situation, I did a little bit of research on travel on the silk road. I won't go down the rabbit hole of interesting details I found, I might make a post about that in the future! The important finding is the speed of silk road caravans. On average, a silk road caravan could travel between 10 to 12 miles a day. This means that, in our own game, a dwarven caravan can travel roughly the same speed, thus getting from the center of one hex to the other in approximately 2 days. I can work with that. 

And there we go! We now have the canvas for our Hexcrawl. In the next post, we will determine Biomes and hex features. 

Until then, happy travels.