Month: November 2023

Making custom hex grid sheets for drawing hexmaps

I always had a lot of fun converting existing gridless maps into hex maps in GIMP, and I really like the way they look at the end. But trying to design a map that looks interesting and pretty in GIMP or Photoshop is just a joyless chore in general and only gets worse if you try working on a hex grid. While it’s nice that you can erase anything you draw without smudging, the process of using an eraser in software always takes way too long and too many steps. It’s just not been working for me.

So I decided to make an investment in time and money to get myself some nice big sheets of hex grid paper that I can free hand draw on with pencil. It’s always been much easier and faster to just sketch and erase outline until I get the shapes into an arrangement that I like. I can then scan the final map that I like and put it through my hex map conversion process like I did with my other hexmaps.

After some searching and asking around for the best way to do this, I got a recommendation for Free Online Graph Paper / Hexagonal. This is a really neat tool. It allows you to set custom dimensions for whatever paper you want to print on, size of the hexes, size of a blank border, and strength of the lines. It then exports the file as a pdf, which I believe stores the grid in vectors instead of pixels, so it will remain sharp regardless of how much you zoom it.

The default setting for line width is 0.7 mm, which I thought sounded a bit chunky. So I made a file with line with 0.7, 0.5, and 0.3 mm each, with the dimensions of A2 sheets which we use in Germany, and took them to a printer. I had one sheet printed of each of them, and liking the 0.5 mm best had a bunch more of those printed as well.

I really like the way they came out. (Which doesn’t come out so well in my photo.) I think 0.5 mm lines will work best for the way I want to use these. But when making maps to use at the table, either for GM notes or as a player handout, and you want to use it to track the exact position of the party as it travels, I think 0.7 mm might be better visible. Especially when you color in different areas.

The only downside with the whole approach is that the price the printer was asking for a simple printer paper print in A2 size was ridiculous. Yes, they want to make their money back on that printer that can handle oversized paper and probably do much fancier things than just grayscale on printer paper. But 4€ per sheet is ridiculous. But if you’re going to make these on regular A4 sheets on your home printer, this method is probably as cheap a way to get nice custom hex grid paper as it gets.

Another Creation Myth

I had a pretty nice story for the origin of primordials, demons, and fey and the different realms of reality in Kaendor three months back, but since then I’ve once again changed my stance on the inclusion of demons. There are a few cool ideas I have for demons, but overall they just don’t have the kind of integration into the larger existing worldbuilding that primordials and fey have. I also feel that having three groups of supernatural beings is diluting the distinguishing boundaries between them and unloads too many overlapping concepts on players who are meant to figure things out largely for themselves. Demons are also heavily associated with Evil and Hell, which are both concepts that don’t really appear in the big picture of Kaendor.

So for the third time now, I believe, I decided that the setting should not have demons at all. Most of the ideas I have for them can quite well be given to either the primordials or the fey, and the remaining ones really don’t need to be jammed into a setting that does not actually need them. But that also means that the old creation story no longer makes any sense. Here’s a new one I also really like.

In the primordial age, the world was all water and darkness. It was the world of the Primordials, who ruled the lightless depths for uncountable aeons. This changed with the arrivial of fire. It is not known how fire came to be, but stars appeared in the eternal blackness of the Void and drove back the darkness around them. Their light and warmth drove the Primordials into the deepest seas and lowest reaches of the earth, or into the eternal emptiness of the void. Where the light of the stars reached the surface of the earth and the sea, its energy brought forth the first elemental spirits, as it did those of the air.

When the darkness was driven away by the radiance of the stars, shards of the sun fell down onto the earth and burried themselves many miles deep into the ground. From these shards emanate the streams of lava that sometimes rise back to the surface, and they gave life to all the fire elementals that roam the world, and many of the spirits of the deeper earth as well. The smallest of these sun shards have cooled down in the aeons that have passed since these earliest days, and have solidified into veins of copper.

The elementals were the first of a new form of life that came to spread throughout the lands touched by the lights of the stars. From them came many other spirits, as well as the ancestors of the earliest plants and animals.