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Dungeons & Dragons, Fantasy, Hex, Hex Map, Labyrinth Lord, Maps, OSR, Outdoor, Regional, RPG, Urban
This post is one of a series presenting the hexmaps of Baraloba and the areas around it. You can see the rest of the set here: [Baraloba and Environs].
A few months ago I picked up “The Works” from Squarehex. It included a lot of cool mapping papers and the one that caught my imagination are the A5 sized “MegaHex” mapping pages. Each has a big ass hex at the top half of the page (subdivided into a lot of smaller hexes), and the lower half is lined paper to write stuff about the hex in question.
So I started experimenting with the format, deciding to use each megahex as a six mile hex, making each small hex 0.4 miles across. Still a bit tight for drawing urban areas, but great for showing what can be found in a single six mile hex.
This particular hex, for instance, would appear as a single village marker on most hex maps, but here we see it detailed over the much larger hex.
6 Mile Hex – Baraloba and Environs
Baraloba is actually two mid-sized towns – New Baraloba and Upper Baraloba (at one time they were just Baraloba and New Baraloba, but New Baraloba’s trade road location has meant that it has more traffic and growth than the original town, and is well on the way to fully eclipsing it).
Upper Baraloba is a fishing and farming village that sees occasional river trade along the Hewbank river where it joins with a tributary that runs past New Baraloba after coming down from the Eagle Hills.
New Baraloba is also a farming community with a few more options for trade because of their position on the ford of the local trade road. Looming behind the town, seemingly half sunken into a farmer’s fields, is an old watch tower of immense size, built by hill giants several hundred years ago and now more a curiosity and waypoint than a fortification. It was used for years to mark where to leave the trade road to find the mines in the Eagle Hills.
Northwest of both villages is the Honeyed Forest – a forest known for the masses of bees that live within it and the giant flowers that are said to grow there a few hours walk deeper into the trees from the villages.
Dyson's Dodecahedron 
I picked that up as well, about a year ago, and I love the way it lets you pull the whole thing together. I would love to see you do a whole series of these hexes someday (maybe in a new book?) with a “wilderland-ish” theme to them — sort of like a major upgrade to the “little hexes” campaign outline they sent out as part of the package!
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That should be New Baraloba and Lower Baraloba, surely?
Upper Baraloba is obviously mostly on a rise while the entirety of New Baraloba is at the same level as the river.
It wouldn’t have to be much, just enough for it to be the one on a hill.
C’mon guys. “Upper” is a fairly common usage in river town naming which suggests the town is further “up river.”
Yes it is, I’m just going for a No Prize for explaining why the downriver one is called ‘Upper’.
Good point — the description of the two towns in the text confuse the hell out of me, apparently! But if New Baraloba was founded AFTER Upper Baraloba, what was Upper Baraloba “upper” to? Is there a “Lower Baraloba” off map to the east down river from Upper Baraloba?
Oh, man, this is awesome and makes me want to get the paper. Now that would be a fun long-term project, just taking a small hex map and zooming in on at least some of the busier hexes!
I like these. I encountered your maps on Pinterest, and enjoyed them, and tried making a few of my own. (http://andrewbwatt.com/2015/06/18/multiple-avenues-game-mapping/ to see). But my own favor has long been for outdoor maps; now I’m going to have to try my hand at hex-mapping!
If I may, as a new commenter, dump a few thoughts? I think that ‘we’ as gamers have a tendency to forget the role of rivers as both ‘highways’ and as ‘side paths’. Yet to people with only muscle and animal power, that’s a godsend. Streams of this sort are likely to have house-steads all down the ‘northwest’ side between Upper and New Baraloba — because all those half-mile-ish hexes have easy access to water and roadway, which means that goods can be transported to water easily; one harvest’s worth of food could easily be moved to market or to granaries in either direction. There’s space in that 2 and a half miles-ish of road to have a tiny-tiny cluster of houses which you’ve already got.
But then there’s space for another 3 or four outlying farms — Also, the forest-clearing that made the farmland would have also provided a good many logs to build a log-road or causeway through some of that swampland; and that swampland would be a good place to grow rye (cf. Salem Witch Trials and the possible role of Ergot poisoning).
There’s also this really cool bit. That place where the stream near the mines comes down to the main river course? There’s another place for a community there, Baraloba Landing, where metal ore from those mines used to be loaded onto shallow-draft barges, and taken downriver to Upper Baraloba. It’s the lack of this trade that has caused New Baraloba to eclipse the old town center, I suspect. 🙂
One of the things that I LOVE about your maps, both the underground ones and these hex maps, is the number of potential adventures sitting in them. Yes, there’s always room for encounters. But there’s also a very small story sitting here, too, largely perfect for low-level characters:
The mines have been inactive for nearly 30 years, and the New town has eclipsed the old town. The adventurers, all children and grandchildren of miners, have grown up hearing stories about the curse of the mines, the cave-in, and the glittering blue-yellow eyes in the darkness. They decide to try to end the curse. Meanwhile, members of the town guard of New Baraloba hear of their course of action, and decide it’s not a good idea to let them go stirring up troubles that might endanger trade on the newer road. Eventually, however, they have to make common cause together as the outlying farms (which I’ve imagined) get attacked, and also various people in the rye-farming communities (or even who’ve been drinking too much mead made from honey from swamp flowers) come down with terrible symptoms that are obviously the result of malicious magic….
I created a version of this map (http://i.imgur.com/pQIKRCj.jpg) using a new mapping tool currently in alpha from Fantastic Maps (https://plus.google.com/u/0/+Fantasticmaps/posts)