October was a hectic month with the Virtual Greyhawk Con 6 and then Gamehole Con, and after I got home Con Crud got me really bad. Recovering from the worst flu I’ve had in decades, but after over a week of feeling terrible I’m back at my desk again able to concentrate and get things done.

In my seminars I showed a few sneak peaks of the new generations Greyhawk maps in the making. The first stage, terrain construction and render are the most time consuming I’m proud to report that I’ve now covered way more than I hoped. Shield Lands, Horned Society, Lands of Iuz and large parts of Furyondy and the Bandit Kingdoms are also moving into the second phase.  Better computer and software updates have made it possible to work on several thousands of square miles at the time in this first phase, even using a tiled approach covering over 30,000 square miles. Thanks to your support I’ve now been able to do this for years, gaining experience and knowledge of how to tackle thorny issues like lakes and river systems spanning continents.

Creating a new “base terrain map” of the Flanaess, and potentially the whole planet at 100 feet per pixel is now a realistic project that I’m able to finish within a few thousand hours of work, like a year or so of work for stage one, heigh map and mask for things like water depth and other date needed for further refinement and texturing. I’ve taken large areas Shiel Lands that I’ve been using for my own campaign through all the stages of development to final map to confirm the base data is good enough to get the result I’m striving for. Tested both 100 and 5 feet per pixel, with great results. Especially the 5 feet per pixel is a versatile resolution usable for everything from battle maps and up.

I’m very tempted to go the “porta potty” route and enhance all the maps to this resolution. It is more work, but far from 20 times more work, and finding the right tool and workflow is key. This is where I think Gaea can fit in being superior in erosion detail and texturing, but it is a field rapidly developing with procedural tools able to do this very efficiently very soon. Vector displacement adds another dimension to this, literary, no longer limiting what I do to heightmaps only. Heightmaps work really well for large area maps, but when you move closer and you want to include things like overhangs, caves and even things like trees, this will make that possible with procedural power behind it.

The good part of this is that I can keep working on a solid heightmaps as a start of this process and use then for either (or both) approaches later. So, I will develop as much as I can of heightmaps and mask data covering the whole planet in the next couple of years, and in the meantime also figure out best approaches for the next phase of development. This might be different for different areas, higher resolution maps for the Flanaess, and lower for the rest of the planet, and maybe even higher resolution that 5 feet for areas of special interest. The next version of World Machine offers some tantalizing opportunities, as do Gaea, Blender, World Creator and Unreal, I’m keeping an eye on what is coming and it’s looking promising.

GIS

Now that the first GIS based maps are done, the 1:2,000,000 Digital Edition, it is time to start work on a Print Edition. I’m not sure what scale will work best for print, but I’m planning to shoot for a 24x36 inches format. It is a standard format available at almost every print shop in the country (and beyond), usable in size. There are a lot of things to work out, like overlap, icon and font sizes, and more. I will make a test area 8,5 x 11 that we can print on a normal printer to see what works best, then use the same settings for the print maps. A large overview setting map would be nice too, but there wee have size and cost issues and I must find a new printing partner that can reliably print large stuff at a reasonable price.

Now that I’m feeling better again it’s time to have a GIS seminar focusing on how to use a Geopackage to make your own versions of the map. I’m going to propose dates very soon; I just need to coordinate with a couple of people who expressed interest in this to make sure they can participate.

Hawk Tales

I ran a u number of sessions at VGHC6, Gamehole Con and before at all levels from low to really high and learned a lot, both good and bad. I was a bit worried by the high-level session with characters 15th – 18th level, most rule systems slow downplay to a crawl at this level. I’m very pleased to say that wasn’t the case in our game, which made me very happy. There are still issues, like Armor and how it’s using hardness to reduce damage, this leads to a lot of calculations. I’m reworking Hardness to make it simple with increments of 5.

Missile weapons are another area that will receive an overhaul to make bows, composite bows and crossbows, both more interesting, distinctive, useful and hopefully not too overpowered. More on that soon.

Filling in the gaps in the rules I haven’t covered yet, with things like Encumbrance. I intend to use a slot system and I’m working out the math on that now, setting up spreadsheets to see where I want its limits to be. Wealth and crafting are another area I haven’t developed yet. Crafting is a key aspect for long term play, so it is an important part as well, and often overlooked.