Hex based maps out there?
 

Anyone know of any good hex based maps?

Re: Hex based maps out there?
 

I have always been partial to the World of Greyhawk map.

Dungeon magazine (current issue #116) will, over the next few issues, be presenting a new large Version of the World of Greyhawk map as a series of four poster-sized maps (issues #117-120).

That aside, lots of board wargames use hex maps. One source is Strategy & Tactics magazine, by Decision Games (see here).

Each issue has an historical game, and many of these have hex maps.

Re: Hex based maps out there?
 

Of course if you find a good image of a hex map then we can talk about turning it into a dominions playable map.

Re: Hex based maps out there?
 

Columbia games produces several game, for example Wizard Kings, which have good hex-maps. Wizard Kings have 12 geomorpic maps which can be linked in any way, for an example (see here). Of course, there might be copyright issues, so I don't know if it is a viable suggestion...

Personally I use the HexMapper program when I need to do hexmaps for some campaign settings (be they worlds for different RPG's or campaign enviroments for miniature games (like DBM or Warhammer for example). The HexMapper program can be downloaded from here.

Re: Hex based maps out there?
 

There was a good old RPG in the early eighties called Powers and Perils.

It was a game of tables and numbers (as was common these days) but it also contained mythological stuff from celtic, sumerian and semitic traditions. The game contained many good innovations and still feels fresh at certain points. It has indeed played a role in the forming of the world of Dominions and if you search through the game you will probably find things, beasts, spells and mythological references that you will recognize.

Avalon Hill released a world modul calle Perilious Lands. I have been toying with the idea of scanning the maps of that world. AH is a hex-company and this world is also a hex-world. I accidentally found the map two days ago scanned and ready.

http://powers.charsys.com/
http://powers.charsys.com/Images/map.jpg

The second link is the map. It's 7.6 MB. The map is made out of 23 pieces IIRC, and the seems are not entirely seemless.

Re: Hex based maps out there?
 

Sadly we won't see much more games from AH, since Hasbro bought it. It has done many good games.

Wizard Kings has damn good map for dominion if you put them toghether (I had that game, sadly in Italy it's not anymore sold).

Re: Hex based maps out there?
 

Did it have a map generator? Im just POSITIVE that Ive seen some games with generators that offered to export the maps to a common graphic format. Im tempted to put a floopy drive back in one of my old computers and dig the boxes out of the garage to try and find one.

Re: Hex based maps out there?
 

Wizard Kings is a tabletop game of Columbia Games.
The hexes are pretty big, with good graphic.
The maps are 12 sheets that could be assembled in many ways so one game could be different from another one.

The job should be in scannerizing the maps one by one and then assemble them with a graphic program.

Re: Hex based maps out there?
 

It is not sold anymore anywhere (unless old stock is left) except directly from Columbia Games ( www.columbiagames.com ). That has been CG's policy for a while. With the euro-dollar ratio being what it has been for this year it is actually quite a lot cheaper to buy directly from CG to Europe than what it was when the games were available in shops.

There is a Wizard Kings mapmaker available from Columbia Games (http://www.columbiagames.com/resourc...t/mapkit.shtml ), with which it is possible to make those nice geomorphic maps, *if* one has the skills and a program that can handle .eps files (I have neither...).

CG also has the the Ultimate hex-map for a fantasy setting, the map of their immensly thoroughly documented Harn. Unfortunately I think the map is waaay too big for Dominions (70x50=3500 hexes), but one could of course use one of the smaller islands (like Melderyn) from that map.

Then there is of course War of the Rings boardgame, which has an awful map for modern standards, but it is a hex-map of Middle Earth http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/image...es/biggrin.gif A map can be saved from the Cyberboard box for that game, the box is available from http://matrix.dumpshock.com/tzeentch...n/playaids.htm
Personally I'd suggest making the map a bit more beutiful with the HexMapper program or some other painting software http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/smile.gif

Re: Hex based maps out there?
 

Wow! I thought I was the only non-undead person who still remembered that one. It was, I thought, one of the most elegant RPG systems around; that and Dragonquest (3rd or 4th edition) had beautiful character generation systems, magic systems, and combat - the only contemporary that included fatigue in place of D&D style HPs was Runequest, and later Fantasy Hero (by the Champions people). FH was flawed because the system was designed for comic book heroes, so you had to work too hard to die, or even kill.

I had a P&P game going in the 80s, but most of my friends / players, bloody jarheads, wanted D&D for fantasy, and Champions for superhero style games.

Hmmm. Wonder if the other ABQ gamers care for PnP games - it'd be nice to get an RPG group going again.

(Oh - to the person who mentioned Harn - very nice, encyclopedic world setting - it went incredibly well with ICE's Rolemaster system as I recall. Other settings I remember fondly were Haven (city based map/campaign setting) and, mmm, CityState of the Invincible Overlord. Wow! Judges Guild is apparently back! http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/laugh.gif

Re: Hex based maps out there?
 

These WizardsKings maps seem actually very interesting and promising to me to make small wrap-around maps, which I am desperately missing! Cool, this might get me into map-making!

A question though: Cities could be handled like in Cradle, but how about modelling those roads? And what about water provinces and adjacencies accross water boundaries? This could require breaking up the hex-layout, no?

Re: Hex based maps out there?
 

I remember Powers & Perils too, though I never got into that. My favorite is RuneQuest. No superheroes in that game. I remember Rolemaster too. I consider it nigh unplayable. The best thing about it is that the crit tables make for fun reading.

I recently discovered that many of ICE's products are now available Online as PDFs. I bought Spacemaster out of curiosity, and was sorely disappointed. It's pretty sad when you turn to the section covering space combat and it tells you to buy their award winning Silent Death board game.

Re: Hex based maps out there?
 

> Cainehill said:

> Wow! I thought I was the only non-undead person who still remembered that one.

I might be undead http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

> It was, I thought, one of the most elegant RPG systems around; that and Dragonquest (3rd or 4th edition) had beautiful character generation systems, magic systems, and combat - the only contemporary that included fatigue in place of D&D style HPs was Runequest, and later Fantasy Hero (by the Champions people). FH was flawed because the system was designed for comic book heroes, so you had to work too hard to die, or even kill.

> I had a P&P game going in the 80s, but most of my friends / players, bloody jarheads, wanted D&D for fantasy, and Champions for superhero style games.

I return to P&P every other year or so. Playing a short and good old fantasy campaing that doesn't involve years of planning (such as ars magica requires) is very rewarding. The possible power of the player characters combined with a mythological touch to the world make P&P an ideal game for high fantasy campaigns (god-borns, heroes and world-savers).

> Hmmm. Wonder if the other ABQ gamers care for PnP games - it'd be nice to get an RPG group going again.

Luckily I have one (two actually).

> (Oh - to the person who mentioned Harn - very nice, encyclopedic world setting - it went incredibly well with ICE's Rolemaster system as I recall. Other settings I remember fondly were Haven (city based map/campaign setting) and, mmm, CityState of the Invincible Overlord. Wow! Judges Guild is apparently back! http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/laugh.gif

Harn was a good game, but we rarely played it. The maps are very nice, but the villages have rather silly names.

Re: Hex based maps out there?
 

Harn *is* a good game, it is still developed and new products for the world do come out constantly http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif Altough Harn in itself is of course not a game, just a fantasy setting suitable to any system (altough the Harnmaster rules do exist with which one can play low-fantasy RPG's).

Re: Hex based maps out there?
 

The best part of the harn world is the low-fantasy setting. Very refreshing after a high fantasy P&P campaign.

Re: Hex based maps out there?
 

I guess I think of Dominions as more of a Palladium or maybe Chaosium game system flavor. Feeblemind is Sanity==0, right? %-) And the endurance/fatigue similarity is a good observation Cainehill, but let's not _completely_ hijack the thread into old game systems nostalgia.

I have really come to like the non-hex maps more and more. There are lots of hex strategy/wargame maps and they all seem to look artificial to me, even e.g. wesnoth. Guess that doesn't help Blacksilver much either...

This is where I have seem a good list of links to tools for "amateur" map and landscape generation. Many are freely distributable or open source:

http://www.hut.fi/~vesanto/link.useful/maps/maps.html


Sill

Re: Hex based maps out there?
 

That's a great map link! Too bad there are so many broken links on it now.

PvK