Tags
Actual Play, Fantasy, Hex, Hex Crawl, Hex Map, Maps, Neoclassical Geek Revival, NGR
I’m currently playing in a Neoclassical Geek Revival campaign run by Zzarchov Kowolski. This is our third campaign in this setting – the first was set well over a thousand years ago in an iron age campaign as two different PC groups attempted to make tribes out of our clans (by merging three clans together) and then make a kingdom of our tribes (by merging three tribes together).
During that campaign we discovered that it wasn’t a traditional iron age fantasy campaign… the whole thing is set on a variation of Larry Niven’s Ringworld (Pak and all), invaded by 40k gods and eldar (when CROM [Computerized Ringworld Orbital Maintenance] disabled an eldar craftworld within the ring’s orbit), and breached by Earthlings (and the Cthulhu mythos) when the corporations from the Fallout universe showed up and breached the ring using dark rituals from Dunwich Borers LLC. There’s other stuff in the mix too (lots of Doom references, and this particular campaign has a number of He-Man references too).
This particular campaign started as our expedition to pursue the Eldar across the oceans towards the rim crashed in unknown lands. So we had to establish a small base of operations for the survivors of the crew and explorers, and begin exploring the lands we had accidentally discovered. Here we are 5 years (20 sessions) later – out of game the GM stated that we’ve explored only a fraction of the map (probably about 20 to 25% or so).
Dyson's Dodecahedron 
That’s awesome. I haven’t thought of RIngworld in years. I am planing to run a fantasy game soon…. hmmmmmm.
That sounds like one fantastic campaign.
That sounds awesome. And I find one portion of that coastline both disconcerting and curious … there’s just something slightly suspicious about it … 🙂
I’ll echo others here…that sounds like a pretty amazing campaign.
After decades of running games at convention, I can’t stand to listen to play-by-plays of individual games anymore. But THIS kind of high-level overview… I love this stuff. This is the kind of stuff I wish had been saved from the early days of RPGs, stuff like the high-level play-by-play of the home campaigns of Don Turnbull (of White Dwarf) or Len Lakofka or whomever.
Also, shout out for Ringworld. I need to dig out my old Ringworld box set from Chaosium and bask in the nostalgia again.
I really wish I had the tools to draw a map like this on my ipad or something. I have been looking high and low for hex grid templates to use in procreate or other layered drawing apps, or other software that will help me get at least a blank space with a hex grid, to no avail.
I just love the look of this and the idea of running a hexcrawl like this, with all sorts of different universes and things inspiring the setting. I have always loved Ringworld as a setting (shame Microsoft claimed the tech as their own, in a way), and think a campaign that flips things on its head is brilliant.
I keep thinking of how I would approach something similar and what sources of inspiration I would use. My mind always goes to a Multiverse setting, but I love the idea of bringing everything together into one universe, rather than doors flipping about to everywhere and everywhen (though that’s pretty cool, too, just haven’t been able to do it to my satisfaction, yet).
Can ProCreate (or other drawing apps) take a PDF as a base layer? There are a few ‘hex paper generators’ that output a PDF with a hex grid, intended for printing, but that might be a solution? Otherwise, I think GIMP can render a hex grid, that might be possible to import into another tool?
Thanks, Simon. I couldn’t figure out how to do it in procreate, but I imagine some other app can.
I was able to create a grid and export it as a PNG which procreate did import as a layer, but I guess it was too small. Didn’t think of using GIMP, but I will try it, thank you!
Does ProCreate allow for you to use fonts?
This hex grid was done using the HexPaperPro font on a layer.
It does, thank you, Dyson! I was able to import the font and type out an “A” page and it all looked pretty great. I still have a long way to go in terms of making the art look nice, but it at least works so I can play around with it.
As an aside to anyone else that might want to try something similar without using a hex font, you can probably find or create a hex grid and also import it as a layer if you’re able to adjust the sizing properly.
Thanks again, Dyson!