Prepping for Gary Con XVIII and especially my game, and had planned to post a bit more about the combat round, attacks and damage when I realized that how these things where written on the character sheets where anything but clear. So I re did the character sheets, and here is a link to an updated zip file (8.7MB): https://annabmeyer.com/Downloads/rules/Gary%20Con%202026%20-%20Characters%20%26%20Spells%20v3.zip
Sorry about the late confusion, but I wanted things to be as good a possible. The zip-file includes spells and backstories as well.
Design Thoughts
I first designed Hawk Tales to use 5E like math and mechanics, but use damage increase instead of piling on multiple attacks. That part worked really well in my playtests, the drawback was that 5E comes with really high numbers. Damage per round could well be into the 200's and Hit Points of creatures had to follow suit. Hit Points are front stacked a lot more in Hawk Tales, Con and Size gives a creature a boost at 1st level, and a smaller amount is added per additional level.
First level characters often starts out with 20 to 30 HP and might reach 150 or so at level 20. This means the games becomes deadlier as you level up and go up against more powerful opponents. Equipment and magic makes up for this to some degree, but that is situational and becomes a logistic issue to some degree. Beatings and boosting spells run out.
Instead I wanted to bring the numbers down to something more old school but keep the mechanics, and if possible streamline it a bit further. So I standardized normal damage instead of rolling it and only crits requires damage rolls. This makes crits more special, and I contemplating adding other special effects to crits as well.
Armor doesn't normally makes a creature harder to hit, only magic and some natural armor does that. This means that the hit rate is higher than D&D and I'm aiming for a hit rate around 75% against an equal enemy. Crits are also more common, due to skills and magic both usually increase the crit range.
Using Armor Hardness and Minimum and beatings is way to make armor more diverse, essential and not having it should make the world scary. Prowess also makes you harder to hit, it provides a bonus to your Defense Roll, in full when you see the attack coming and can avoid it, but half of even for attacks you are not aware of. This is to reflect that those skilled at combat know hot to act and place themselves at all times.
The "grindiest" combat we have had in the playtests have been lower level play when damage is low and little skill involved, few crits and not much special damage. We will see how well this fares in the long run, and with these adjustments it might be a bit too much.
Hawk Tales is aimed to be a medium gritty system, but with lots of aspects to it. A definite learning curve, but one that comes gradually as you level up not all at once.
Attacks
When making a weapon (or magic attack that requires targeting) make a d20 roll an add your To Hit modifier and if it is higher than the Targets AC. If you hit the attacks does at least 1 point of damage (unless the target has True Immunity).
If the Attack was successful it inflicts its listed damage plus half of what you beat the target AC with. This is gravy on top of listed damage and create some variation without complicating things too much I hope. It is also more dynamic including both a lot of luck, and the dynamic the skill of the attacker as well as the nature of the defender in a single formula that stays the same. Attacks that hits doesn't require a damage roll, you inflict the damage listed for your attack, plus half the overflow from the Hit Roll.
Critical Hits are a chance to deal a lot more damage, first you inflict the full overflow, and then roll an exploding damage dice per Damage Die used, and add normal damage as well (see example below). This means that weapons withs mall damage dice, easier does more crit damage. This is per design, I wanted skilled attackers to do more reliable high numbers, but lucky rookies can strike deep occasionally.
Special damage is not increased by critting but added to it. Crits can be devastatingly lethal by skilled and/or powerful creatures with a but of luck (or unluck) which is why I included beatings, the ability to let armor or shields take the brunt of a crit turning it into a normal hit.
Attack Example
What I have changed are how attacks are written up on the sheets. Here is an example and explanation, using Ertin's attacks since they are more complex. First his Longsword:
Keen Radiant Longsword +2 reach 5 To Hit: +12 Damage: 6 +9 slashing +1d12 radiant Crit: 15 xd12+15
First is the name and type of weapon, in this case a Keen Longsword with a +2 magic enhancement. Next is reach and range (when used by Ertin) in this case reach 5ft. To Hit +12 is what you add to the d20 Hit Roll.
Damage is listed as 6 +9 slashing which means each Damage Dice does 6 points of slashing damage on a normal hit plus 9 points in Str, Magic and Specialization bonus. Ertin has a Prowess of 3 which means he can use them all against a single enemy doing 6 x 3 = 18 points of damage plus 9 for the other bonuses (which don't get multiplied by Damage Dice). Half the overflow from your Hit roll is added as well.
The +1d12 radiant is special damage that some weapons and attacks can come with, like sneak, snipe or smite for example. This damage is not multiplied by damage dice (or crit), and might come with its own restrictions, like only once a round, use Exertion or something else.
Crit covers critical range, the first number 15 in this case, means a natural 15 or higher on the hit roll means a hit. This is the highest crit range for most creatures, and proves that Erin is a very accomplished swordsman wielding a keen sword giving him an even better edge in combat. He is also very good with Battleaxes as well, but that is another story.
Next, xd12 means that when critting roll an exploding d12 (per damage die used) and then add the +15 to the damage. Remember to add the full overflow to a crit as well.
Action Economy
Hawk Tales uses a single action economy round with a few twists and caveats. A creature can take an action and move up to its rate each round. The action can be an attack or something else during its turn, or a reaction to something outside of its turn. Attacks are a form of Action and if you have high Prowess you can attack more than one enemy during your turn.
Reactions means you can make attacks in a number of instances, like if an enemy moves into your threat range and you have a weapon ready. Leaving a creatures threat range also gives opportunity for a reaction like in D&D, if you do anything except only move. Attacking is riskier in Hawk Tales, choose the time to do so wisely.
Acting and Reacting in the same round is possible, but will cost you a point of Exertion. Exertion is the main meta-currency regulating how much cool stuff your character can do. It can also be sacrificed as a way to gain an extra Death Save that doesn't give you permanent loss of Pre (and gain of Cor) in case you fail it.
Spells Casting Times can be expressed as an Action, an Attack, a Round or longer. This means that spells with CT of an Attack can be cast multiple times per round.
Gary Con is soon here again, and I’m going to run a game again this year, part of my Greyhawk campaign and set in Shield Lands in the first week of 599 CY. The party is a group of seasoned veterans of Shield Lands led by Onzek a 10 level tough half-orc. This will be the first mid to high level playtest using the 2nd Alpha version of my Hawk Tales rules. I’ve run two previous in-person sessions with lower level characters. They went reasonably well but now it’s up for the real test, higher level play. The new version of Hawk Tales has lower numbers for a more streamlined play with less number crunching. Instead of damage reaching into a hundred or more and major monsters having many hundreds of hit points, the totals are reined in considerably. Less hit points, less damage, but very similar mechanics.
You can download the zip file with character sheets, backgrounds and spells here (9.5MB): https://annabmeyer.com/Downloads/rules/Gary%20Con%202026%20-%20Characters%20%26%20Spells.zip
When you compare the characters in this party to D&D (of any edition) there are some things that stand out as obviously different, and a lot of details that function differently.
No Class
Hawk Tales FRP rules don’t use classes but use levels. This means that characters are usually more versatile and less “iconic”, but they can be. If you want to play a very specialized character who concentrate on a few key things, that is one way you can play, but more generalist characters are equally viable. This party has Onzek who is sneaky combat generalist. Ertin is a holy warrior who packs a punch and can take a lot of punishment and still stand, like a paladin who sacrificed some of his powers to be a better fighter. Bruenor is a war-priest who is used to serve and survive on the frontlines. Bramor is a skillful Tritherion faithful who can both fight well and use divine magic. Aru is an Arcane caster used to serve in battle. Omilla is an old-faith warrior-druid.
The idea behind the no-class concept is that character’s capabilities would be guided by the players and story as things unfold, so characters’ focus can evolve and change as the campaign progresses way more than most class-based systems allow for. Your characters have in-game jobs, titles and accomplishments that chapes mechanics, not the other way around. Setting and story before rules, mechanics are a supporting feature, not the prime part of the game.
Nine Abilities
Next obvious change in HTFRP are the three extra abilities, Comeliness, Presence and Corruption, the metaphysical abilities. They guide and shape the fortunes of a character throughout their career, and functions differently depending on what kind of creature you play. Humans, and in this party a Half-Orc all have Souls so they use Presence for Death Saves, a failed Death Save can mean a permanent loss of Pre, and when you run out your character enters the afterlife. You gain Pre when leveling up, so it’s resource and risk management throughout a character’s adventuring life. Loss of Pre is one of several ways you can “gain” Cor, which makes it harder in some ways but opens new possibilities as well. Comeliness is less important for humans but can hide high Cor, for Elves Com is a key ability shaping them and other similar creatures in various ways.
Essence
This is what type of force that powers the existence of a creature, and in this party, they are all Soul-based. This gives them benefits like flexibility, natural healing and resistance to summoning magic for example. Drawbacks are limited senses, need to rest and sleep, and aging away towards death much faster than some other types of creatures. There are 18 different Essences in the game so far, from Soul, Spirit (fey, elves and such) to Thrall, Spawn, Dark Soul, Dark Anima, Simulacra and the really scary Residuun that powers ghosts and similar nasties.
Essences are a way to differentiate how monsters and npc’s functions mechanically and provide both bigger challenges and thematically aid worldbuilding and storytelling. Undead creatures can become dangerous by using their opponents’ suffering to fuel their existence, giving them a huge advantage in encounters. On the other hand, they don’t heal and regain strength by rest and healing magic.
Skills & Saves
Skills are kind of “multi-step” and become increasingly important as you level up. First at low level it’s only Ability Modifiers you need worry about; your Proficiency Bonus are low or even 0 so no help to boost your check results. As you level up and your Proficiency Bonus increases you should consider which of the four base skills you want to become Proficient in, meaning add your Proficiency Bonus to your roll.
The four base skills are Athletics (for all physical activities), Influence (for all attempts to get other creatures to do what you want), Insight (to discover and understand your surroundings), and Tinker (to manipulate things). Each of these skills can be combined with different Abilities for various types of checks. Athletics Dex is used for balancing, Athletics Str for climbing and Athletics Con for endurance for example. Influence Wis can be used to persuade a stubborn mount, Influence Cha to charm someone to tell you secrets, Influence Str to intimidate an enemy to flee.
Two other aspects of skills can be used to give you increased chance to succeed on difficult checks. Expertise and Lore. Expertise are more narrow fields of knowledge, like Evasion, Animal Handling, Swim, Grappling, Tracking and a lot of other things. Expertise comes in +2 increments and can be learned during downtime as well as adventuring. Some Expertise like Arcana or Religion are key for spellcasting.
Lore are general knowledge and experience like about a city, country or a faction you have delt with and comes in +1 increments, and characters gain it as free benefit from adventuring or through their background.
Skill checks are written like this: Athletics (Evasion) Dex DC 16
A check made to avoid falling for example, using Dex trying to beat 16 on a d20, and if you are proficient in Athletics you get to add your Proficiency Bonus, and if you are an Evasion expert you can add that bonus as well. This means that everyone can try everything, but as the DC increases more in the form of Proficiency and expertise is needed to succeed. This system is simple in the beginning, and flexible as the game progresses.
Saving throws use skills mechanics as well. Avoiding a firewall use the example above, avoid getting poisoned could use Con instead of Dex for example. Frighten someone could be Influence (Deception) Wis DC 15 as a Saving Throw. A more magical version might use Cha instead of Wis, lots of possibilities.
Prowess
Works as a way to measure the Marchal capabilities of a creature, meaning how good it performs in battle. It improves Initiative modifier, how many attacks you can do and your Defensive ability both in how good your Defense rolls are and how many enemies you can effectively face at the same time. A hapless villager with Prowess 1 can reasonably duel with one opponent, a seasoned fighter with Prowess 5 can face five of them and still actively defend himself. Some monsters have even higher Prowess and can be formidable opponents in ways beyond mere mortal men.
This mechanic forces a bit more tactical thinking and decision making compared to normal D&D. Fight out in the open against a superior number of enemies can be dangerous regardless of individual strength.
Armor & Shields
Protection is a key bit of the needs to survive in battle. Armor doesn’t normally make you harder to hit (magical and natural exceptions exist), it reduces damage using tow mechanics Hardness and Minimum that works in tandem but can be a bit confusing at first. Hardness is as it sounds, it reduces damage a certain amount like Ring Mail with a Hardness of 20 and Minimum of 3. This means that attacks that hits but don’t inflict more than 20 still inflict 3 points of damage, and make most combat risky even against less skilled enemies, especially in large numbers.
Crits are more common in HTFRP, skilled combatants can crit on NAT15 on higher making them potentially very dangerous. This is where Beatings comes into play, Armor and Shields have a certain amount of Beatings, which means you can let your armor or shield take the Crit and convert it to a normal hit. When your beatings are used up your armor will be less useful doubling its minimum and render shields useless. They can be repaired during downtime or using mending magic, but it takes time and can expose you.
Attacks
Your Prowess and Proficiency both plays into how well you can use weapons. Proficiency and Specialization set your To Hit Bonus. Specialization also increases the damage die your weapon uses making a thug skilled in daggers as deadly (or way worse) than the man at arms wielding a greatsword. Prowess dictates how many attacks you can do each round, from 1 to 5 depending on Prowess (for humans and other with a max Prowess of 5). To simplify things you only roll To Hit once per opponent you trying to hit, and the more attacks you have the more damage you can inflicts. Damage is determined by how many “Damage Dice” you want to allocate to each enemy, if you have higher Prowess.
Example of an attack: Longsword reach 5 To Hit: +4, Damage: 6 slashing Crit: 20 +dx8
A shortsword +2 that can reach 5 feet, your To Hit Bonus is +4 and Damage on a normal hit is 6 slashing, and Crits are made on a NAT20 and inflicting an exploding d8 for extra damage. This means that unskilled attackers using Daggers do little damage but have a higher chance to explode, which is by design, they can get lucky more often, skilled thugs know how to reliably dole out more damage.
This is not the whole story when it comes to damage though, attacks that don’t crit are listed to only do average damage (no roll needed) plus Str and magic bonuses. This is to speed up the game not having to roll lots of damage dice that needs to be added together. Instead, I’m trying out an “Overflow” mechanic, meaning you can use what you rolled above what you needed to hit to do damage. Half of the overflow on a normal hit and all the overflow on a crit. This combination means that damage is a combination of weapon type, skill, luck and how good your opponent is using a single roll. It has worked well when I have tested it, but I’m not completely sold on it yet, the streamlining might have gone a bit too far. Rolling dice might be more fun than what the efficiency gains are. This will be first full session to test it on higher level play. It speeds up the game significantly and it is something I can handle, and the numbers stay within 20 or less most of the time, with the potential to reach into the high 40’s in the most extreme cases. The good is that the numbers are low when the enemies are well matched regardless of their level.
Another aspect I use is that players roll most rolls, especially in combat. Instead of enemies rolling to hit, players roll Defense Rolls which makes a GM’s job much easier, and keeps players busy much more of the time.
When you roll a NAT20 in combat (or other form of duress) you get a boon that you can use later to keep going or boost a roll. When you roll a NAT1 you gain extra XP from 50 - 100 depending on. Which means roll 1’s often and you level up faster. Characters learn from their mistakes and get energized by their successes.
These were a few notes on characters and their features. I’ll post more leading up to Gary Con, like Actions, spellcasting and more.
The session at Gary Con will feature the party getting a mission to scout on the fringes flanking the main force that are going on the offensive into Iuzian territory. It will be a session with exploration, some mystery components, history and setting lore, and of course combat. There have been reports of Bonehearts, and a previous patrol haven’t reported back…
The party consists of experienced characters who are well equipped, skilled and capable. The Shield Lands awaits!!
Thank you so much for the reception of the first volume of banners, I've received so much good feedback. Here comes the next batch of banners, flags and pennants!
I'm going over the list of existing shields alphabetically from now on, with some exceptions like the Olmans which I have other plans for, more on that later.
First out in this batch is Abbarra (or Kor), of the Bandit Kingdoms.
The Adri Marchlands
And an venerable one, the Principality of Ahlissa, with roots into old times.
With a more modern pennant using the colors of the heraldry, sporting a full three parts befitting a fully recognized realm.
And the United Kingdom of Ahlissa showing of with a properly pompous and pristine banner.
and a full three tiered pennant to go with it.
Old Prelacy of Almor's banner have hopefully been saved, and kept safe somewhere waiting for a time when it can be flown again.
and here is the pennant.
Its Nyrondian descendant, the Protectorate of Almor have a newly created banner as well.
with a pennant to go with it.
Here comes Altimira for Jay "LordGosumba" Scott's campaign.
The Duchy of Artonsamay of the Bandit Kingdoms have a fairly simple one, being one of the less warlike of the Bandit realms.
Atirr despite being an old realm of the Great Kingdom, have kept their modesty and kept up with the contemporary Aerdy taste in banners. Simple but fancy.
Auldet, the little town in the southern Shield Lands I created for my campaign used to fly this banner on top of its keep. After the Iuzian takeover it somehow managed to survive in a tattered state hidden away in a basement among a loyal family risking their life trying to preserve the old ways.
a pennant for the town has never been known to exist.
Next up is Badwall, one of the free towns of the Wild Coast. The example here is a still surviving banner brought to Greyhawk during the war.
and its pennant.
The Bannermen of the Glorioles Army, Dwarven sturdy design.
Bissel's straight forward design, a marshal symbol to gather around on the battlefield no more no less.
but a full three part pennant.
Old venerable Blackmoor, haven't had a real need for a proper banner for some time. Archbaron Bestmo is holding on the the flag from the days of the Great Kingdom presence up here. The old flag is sewn onto a piece of rugged canvas so it can be displayed on the courtroom wall.
and an equally old pennant.
Another old place is Blacksplinter, with is Cranden Vampire Prince showing off the fact he has ruled this place for centuries, under the same banner the whole time.
and the pennant.
and last for this batch the Bleeding Moon Gnolls of the Pomarj.
and their "pennant".
You can download all of them in a zip file (28.3MB) here: https://annabmeyer.com/Downloads/Banners/Banners%20Vol2.zip
Some of you have noticed, just like I did, that EasyZoom is no longer hosting any images. The service is no longer being offered, for free or paid, as they have now fully pivoted to be medical imaging company. This was sad, EasyZoom was a really useful service that I used for over a decade hosting several large maps.
There are alternatives, before I found EasyZoom I dabbled with https://openseadragon.github.io/#plugins OpenSeadragon is very powerful, open source and comes with lots of cool plugins making it even more powerful. The downside is that it requires tinkering with JavaScript, so I took the lazy approach and used EasyZoom. Now it is back to use OpenSeadragon, QGIS Geoserver, Leaflet maps and other tools to create online maps. It will require way more investment in time and effort but the possibilities are big so in the end its probably worth it.
Still too soon for me to have figured on how to best solve this. I'm in the early stages of setting up a QGIS GeoServer, but that is a different beast providing way more features in the future. Short term solutions are harder, most tools requires programming and manual hosting which is a project in itself. I'm going to see if I can find other paid solutions to fill the gap, there must be a bit of demand for hosting large images on the web.
I'm sorry for the inconvenience, it was a very useful site.
Long time coming, I've been determined to create banners and similar signage of war for my Greyhawk campaign. It took a long time foe me to get the skills to how to do it effectively. Just like with heraldry I wanted to be able to create a range of templates that can be tweaked and re-used to speed up the creation of a whole range of these things for various countries, rules, factions etc.
Thanks to clipart, photoshop mojo, and a bit of AI art I have created over more than 30 templates that I can use for banners and pennants used on battlefields and to show the colors in other circumstances as well. So with these you can put your players (or characters) knowledge of heraldry to the test again.
First out is the Shield Lands, of course.
and the pennant:
In the Shield Lands there might still be a chance to see the banner of the County of Walworth at times.
and its smaller sibling:
Its mightier neighbor Furyondy has a bit more pompous version as befits a more powerful realm.
and the pennant, which is also more elaborate:
and king Belvor's banner:
and the kings guard's pennants:
And to popular demand in my Twitch stream last night, the Principality of Highlands in the North Kingdom:
and their pennant:
and a test with a more sinister one, the Orc Empire of the Pomarj:
and a smaller version:
and to round of this initial small batch, the Cockatrice Riders:
and their pennant:
You can get them all here in a zip file (6.8MB): https://annabmeyer.com/Downloads/Banners/Banners%201.zip
I hope you like them, because I want to make more of them. It is a great side project that can be done in small increments between my main undertakings.
There will be an update on my main patreon project soon, I'm evaluating which way to go with it, and there might be good news on that front soon...
Back home from nearly a week with snow and a bit of cold but lots of fun at Philadelphia Area Gaming Expo 3 it is time to get back to work again. This time for something really D&D and Greyhawk classic, that I have put off until I felt I could do it well. The heraldry of Acererak, 4 different shields in 14 different versions and formats.
First his personal logo, that my guess is his personal guard would have used. Below in the Oeridian heater shield version, as per Greyhawk tradition.
and an aged version, he was active over a millennia ag after all.
And for those of you, like me who would like to see him as an old flan wizard, here are flan versions of his shields. First as it looked in its original form.
and aged.
I can imagine that gaping back mouth not being a hole, but providing some other form of magical effect on these shields... 😉
Acererak was also revered by a group knows as the Conventicle of Acererak, so I made shields for that group as well. I based this design on the helmet of Acererak as he appeared in various 5E products. First in heater shield variant.
and aged.
and flan version.
and aged.
and here is a link to a zip file with these images, plus simple PNG and SVG versions as well:
https://annabmeyer.com/Downloads/Heraldry/Acererak%20heraldry.zip
Thank you again for your support!
Time again to wrap up another year and trying to peer forward into what’s coming in the next. A year ago, I looked forward to attending more conventions and had fears that I would only be able to attend two due to budget restrictions. Thankfully I was wrong, thanks to the support of Patreon members and generous invitations I made it to PAGE, Gary Con, Bergin Man and Gamehole Con. It is such a treat to spend time with gamers, run games and attend and run seminars, and this year I’ve ran games at all the conventions I attended in addition to a lot of online sessions. Online conventions like Virtual Greyhawk Con are also a treat 2026 looks even more promising with a possible five conventions
My Patreon had its second overhaul in 2024. I’ve ben on Patreon since 2017 and only overhauled it once and that was back in 2019 when changed from being a generic cartography Patreon, to one focused way more on Greyhawk and letting the technique behind my cartography playing more of a supporting role. The growth has been slow but steady, which I’m very grateful for, you keep supporting me by making my type of long projects possible.
The now venerable Greyhawk maps will see one last hurrah in 2026, a series of maps for printing. My plan is a series of 24 x 36 inch maps covering the Flanaess and Hepmonaland. The 1:200,000 series of maps I did this year was geared towards digital use, this new series will have larger symbols and text labels to be legible when printed at the correct size, and 24 x36 inch is a good compromise I think, it can be printed at almost any print shop at reasonable rates. Larger prints become both way more expensive and it is harder to find printers that can handle them properly.
After this it is time to retire these old maps and concentrate work on creating a new generation. Never could I have guessed how much use would come out of my old Bryce based maps back in the 1990’s when I started work on them. I’ve improved them almost every year with additions and corrections, added Hepmonaland and took half a year to go over the terrain in Photoshop to improve the garish 90’s colors. I didn’t have color corrected screens back then, and not much knowledge in how to use Photoshop either for that matter. But it gave the old map a new lease of life and its still being used by thousands of players, DM’s, appearing in fanzines and in products on DM’s guild.
Last year I wrote about software troubles and frustrations, and they are still here and World Machine 3 have been my go-to tool for most of this year. Now at the end of 2025 there is finally a new era emerging with new versions of both World Machine and Gaea planned to be released in 2026. Gaea 3 is looking especially promising with lots of goodies I’ve been wanting for a long time, god-mode, meandering rivers and massive parallel computing as well as vector displacement, which the new world Machine has as well. God-Mode is Gaea’s name for massive, tiled worlds which seems to be an improvement to how WM has handled large builds so far. Together with reivers and the ability to process vastly more data effectively means doing things faster with batter results. New code base has finally let the CPU and GPU work on that they do best at the same time while using better memory management.
Game engines like Unreal shows similar progress with much improved handling of really large landscapes full of vegetation and other object, even many billions of them. 30 years ago, I gambled that Moore’s Law would save me, making it possible to create my first generation Greyhawk maps. Now I’m making a similar gamble to do it all over again but in much more detail. Back then it was raw processing power improvements that carried the day, this time I’m foreseeing more of a combination of increased processing power paired with more memory, but crucially better software is where a lot of improved will come from this time.
I will finish the Shield Lands and its surroundings using World Machine, both in a commission version for the new Melf’s Guide and in public version for you guys. In the meantime I will test the new versions, which I will have early access to, and hopefully they offer enough improvement that a new approach going forward is warranted. That doesn’t mean what I’ve done so far is in vain, it will be imported back into Gaea (or what the new version of WM will be called, if that is what I will be using) and improved upon. For the first time in a decade, I’m really hopeful that a new generation of tolls is coming!
This is a long overdue project that I started in 2025, and then it got sidelined a bit when I got commissioned to both work on the maps for the Melf’s Guide and Gamehole Publishing map for their organized play campaign. I had to drop something and Sources what got to be temporarily shelved. I want to emphasize temporarily; it is a very useful exercise for me to go over every label on the current map and find out how it got there. A big part in my goal to improve what I do!
Just like the world at large, which is in a lot of change, our beloved hobby is too. From a new regime at WotC to the fact that TTRPG’s have now firmly expanded into the mainstream to another aspect that is shaping it, and I’m thinking of the fact that the hobby is now half a century old and we have gamers of every age group. Roleplaying was once a thing that young nerds did, now it is a thing anyone can do, and that shows in diversity in what games are being played, how they are being played and by who. I see this as a huge strength that proves how great a thing collective cooperative story telling is.
A new regime at WotC happens every decade or so, last time it happened we go a pivot to digital, One D&D the death of the settings and investor fever dreams. What will happen this time is too early to tell but a few hints are emerging. WotC’s interest in community seems to be coming back, and after a decade of crunch with rules being the focus of their business, my guess is that fluff, the stories and the IP behind it might have a renaissance. Another force behind this transformation that I have talked about before is that when you digitize rules, changing them brings out cost rather than income, and reprogram D&D Beyond with new feats doesn’t bring in a lot of new revenue, it costs money.
A long term prediction I have around this is that WotC is going to pivot towards becoming a platform operator, like becoming the Steam of the TTRPG world, where you want to go to publish your games and content, regardless of game system. We are nowhere near that happening yet, but if you want to grow big and bring in a large amount of steady revenue, be the platform and let others do the work and siphon money off that. DM’s guilds success shows a bit of this, and WotC doesn’t own it, at least not yet. For this to happen another shift in mindset need to happen, for WotC to see themselves as a main custodian of the TTRPG world and realizing they can earn more by growing the overall size of it. I’m not sure this is a good thing, it is probably mixed. It is something I keep a look out for.
When it comes to Greyhawk, we are now back in the limelight again after more than two decades on the sidelines. How long that will be and what will come of it is too early to tell, Greyhawk’s role in the new DMG was to use it as a base for homebrewing. I liked that and its guest appearance along with the opening up of DM’s guild might have been the whole plan. It seems that Greyhawk was more popular than first expected, so the plan shifted to milk some more out it and Adventure’s Leage moved to Greyhawk at least for a while.
As a Greyhawk fan and creator, I’m both pleased and worried about this. For so long I’ve been working away in the shadows using the old material creating a library of resources for Greyhawk fans to use with that material. With a range of new stuff coming out there are both opportunities, my maps and heraldry are in a lot of stuff being published on DM’s guild, and more is in the making some with my direct involvement. On one side, this is super cool and a dream come true; I’m a full time Greyhawk creator. The other side of the coin is that commission work is working with others cutting corners to meet deadlines and designing by committee, less time to immerse myself deep into in my projects for as long as needed to make the best I can make. Working with others on projects is a good thing which I need to get better at, and have a lot to learn from, but I need to balance it to not burnout and maintaining inspiration.
5th Edition D&D have had a fantastically successful decade, but I think its days as the hegemon of the hobby are numbered for two reasons. It is no longer the new cool thing and a lot of players who played it because it was new and cool will move on, a lot of them to something completely different not roleplaying related. Others who have fallen in love with the hobby will try other games, new and old to see what they like the most, this will fuel both the OSR movement for a while longer as well as support a lot of new games. 5E will survive and become a permanent part of our hobby and D&D, but it will not be the undisputed leader for much longer is my prediction.
I made the decision to change the Creative Commons license from CC -BY -NC -SA to CC -BY meaning you can use my Greyhawk stuff for anything including commercial publishing, the only thing required are to refer to me as the source. My reasons for this are that D&D SRD are now published under this license, and even more importantly I wanted my stuff to be usable on DM’s Guild with no hassle. This goes hand in hand with how I see my role as a creator, a resource provider, providing resources to be used as they are or altered to improve in other people’s games, streams or published content.
This approach is important as an alternative to the commercialization being found everywhere, subscriptions and paywalls are everywhere. As a liberal I’m a believer in capitalism, but there are different ways to go about things. Relying on donations is also a great way to keep overhead low, no sales costs, advertising takes care of itself, piracy is not a thing I need to worry that much about. When I have sent messages to seller on Esty and Amazon who sells prints of my maps and heraldry to please include the part where my name and url are mentioned, the stop selling my maps.
This ties into physical stuff, prints and merch, something I have done my best to stay out due to the costs and time involved. I had a collaboration with Noble Dwarf to prints maps and heraldry, which was hopeful but never took off. Mainly my fault since it was a bit premature, my maps where not well suited for prints and I should have insisted on them to hold off until I had the right maps to be printed. What we got was prints reduced in size and even edited to substandard quality to fit a certain print size. This has been a consistent struggle between me and printers, and I know a fair bit about how printing is done. It was my first job back when I started gaming, and I even jumped in and helped a friend of mine here in SoCal who owns and runs a printing company.
Enough complaining, let’s look forward and try to improve things! My current map is not a good fit for printing, and that is something I’m going to try and fix in 2026 with a new series of maps for print. The question then becomes how to organize prints, one way is to just provide the pdf’s and let folks take care of the rest, or should I try and find a printing partner that can handle prints and the logistics around it. This is not a money thing for me; I don’t expect to earn anything but on the other hand I don’t have the time or money to handle it myself. I’m very open to ideas on how to best do this.
I’ve printed a few T-shirts with my logo that I wear at conventions, and I often get the question of where they can get one. My answer used to be Noble Dwarf who printed a some, but now they seem to have gone defunct so now I need to have another solution. Something more stable and which gives me a bit more control since it is my logo on stuff. This is also a task for 2026.
Getting my stuff to you guys effectively is an ongoing struggle, big files are not what the Internet was built to handle. Download managers make it possible, but it is an annoyance that they are needed. Notion is in many ways a better content delivery platform, for now at least. It was not really bult to distribute big files, but it works well, things are searchable and it handles downloading rather well. My skeptical nature tells me Notion work so well because they are still in the phase of building a userbase, which means offer a premium experience to attract more users. Sooner or later, they will have hit their limits and then their mission will be to squeeze a profit out of each user and then bandwidth will be at a premium, but for a while longer I think it can be a useful service to manage my content.
The next GIS project after my print version of my old maps will be to set up a test Geoserver. The first step will be to convert an old desktop of mine into a Linux server and run a Geoserver on it to test out the tech. The end goal is to provide a kind of Greyhawk version of OpenStreetMap, the ability to use my Greyhawk related maps in a browser and directly in QGIS without having to download massive files. Again a base service intended to be built upon, for DM’s to make their own maps on top of. I want to use it inside my Obsidian.md campaign vault as a map that I can place pins and markers on while adventuring.
As an alternative to streaming the data, I want to set up a cloud service for those of you who want access to all the raw data, heightmaps, mask textures and so on. This is terabytes of data so it can’t be openly distributed on the internet. It will be a select set of my Patreons who are on my top tier who will get access to this service, the kitchen sink! I’m looking into what service to use for this, a strong candidate is Syncthing but there are others, paid or open source.
My little side hobby turned out to be very popular, and so far, I have done 471 shields and symbols. Recreated all the exiting Greyhawk heraldry I have found and then added a bunch of my own design to the collection. There are still more to do, Iuzian henchmen, various actors and factions from Ivid the Undying. My take on Furyondy is in the making with all its baronies, in my Furyondy the provinces have been reconstituted into proper earldoms, counties and arch-baronies, each of them consisting of several baronies.
Heraldry is fun and can be done in hours, for the most part. At times I found myself going down a rabbit hole, only to realize I spent pouring over old Greyhawk notes for hours trying to find out more about Gorsend or something.
Another side hobby that have taken on a life way bigger than I initially imagined. It grew out of my habit house ruling 3rd Edition and Pathfinder 1st Edition for nearly 20 years, and when D&D Next, Level Up A5E and PF2 was coming out started to realize that it was time for me to take the plunge and start creating a version of fantasy role playing rules that would work well at my table. The rise of 5E and it becoming Creative Commons made me decide to use 5E and A5E as the base to work from, to keep compatibility.
Now years later and after nearly 100 sessions of play online and at conventions, a system standing on its own has emerged. Nuanced, slightly tactical, multilayered, player managed and surprisingly fast paced even at high level. This are the positives I take from the first Alpha version played over the last two years. Pain points are high numbers that should be brought down for even faster play, and more streamlined way to handle armor and its hardness. Reducing the effort needed to handles the things opens up for more damage and drain types, and plans for an tier of epic play. I want rules that handles everything from humble beginnings as villagers struggling to handle everyday life, to arch mages and champions of righteousness able to take on the powers of the world and beyond.
30 levels of progression and the Divine Tiers for those with even higher ambitions. The Divine tiers are mostly intended as a way to handle how powerful beings are created and how they interact with the world, but nothing stopping a GM to allow that for players to use as well. In my campaign I intend to use that to handle the powers of religious factions, sect and their patron powers, both collectively and individually. This is where Domain and Pact magic comes from, so as player characters grow in power and rely on this power they are part of the system, I want the GM to have tools to use when playing that out.
My plan for next year is to start running playtest session using Alpha 2 version of the rules, first out will be PAGE in two weeks. Later this spring I want to make a first public version of the playtest rules available in markdown and simple pdf. Not the full rules, but low and mid-level play hopefully up to 10th level. The main thing to limit this are spells, it takes a lot of time to re-edit spells and currently I have 345 spells to go over. Key bits are things like healing and resurrection which I have tweaked quite a bit from the first playtests when I wrote the current versions. Monsters are another important bit that takes a lot of time, currently I have about 40 monsters and generic NPC’s that I have used so far whose statblocks need to be updated. Making monsters is fun but time consuming but seeing them in action in the next play session makes it all worth it.
Never thought I would be into game design, but after playing for over 40 years I now know what I need for my games and have the experience to try and create that tool set. I don’t think Hawk Tales FRP will be a widespread success, I’m designing it to be a good ruleset for the type of games I want to run, gritty sandboxes with long term play and lots of world interactions. Rules that know their place, in the background making things keep happening and guides the action, provide options and inspiration. Not by being fancy and cool, but by just making it happen.
Working on my own rule set has forced me to analyze my own play, and what I want out of it, very rewarding. Thank you all who have participated in playtesting and giving me feedback and advice!
My mapping streams on Fridays, co-hosting on the Lord Gosumba channel are a great way to reach out and interact with you guys, it takes a few hours every week, and it is well worth it, it is both community building and advertising at the same time. I’m going to have more private streams and workshops in 2026, so keep a lookout for those.
Thank You!
Thank you so much for your continuing support, it means everything to me. I wish you all a Happy New Year!
I added Hepmonaland to my now old map of the World of Greyhawk in 2018 which was all done using Photoshop. The last bits of terrain using Bryce 3D was added in 2013, even though I have updated it every year since, the map is now old and in need of a replacement, not more cosmetic updates. It has been my main mission to do this for over a decade, trying to figure out what is possible and how to best go about it. It needs to be fully 3D, highly detailed, and have all the data needed for GIS, game engines and so on. A decade ago World Machine had been recently released; I saw its potential and started my quest to learn to use it. A decade of experimenting, trial and error and a long slog to try and get it to create the vast expanses of realistic landscapes I craved. I was ready to give up many times, both due to the complexity trying to overcome all the issues I encountered, and the render times involved. In the beginning it took me over 24 hours to render a 16K area on the computer I had back then, today, thanks to both better software and hardware it takes a bit over an hour.
During this decade I’ve mapped Midgard for Kobold Press which forced me to get stuff done within a certain time, and I where determined to move from Bryce with the Midgard project. For a year I lived with Southlands learning World Machine, and after a restart 8 months in I scrambled and got a decent continent done at the end of the year. Look closer at it though and there are no small rivers, just the major ones that are not much more than lack of land creating more sea level. For the main parts of Midgard, I refined my technique a bit, but it was still very basic getting stuff done in time. I knew I wanted more for my next set of Greyhawk maps, proper lakes and rivers, and real 3D terrain.
The greatest hurdle to overcome was lakes and rivers, to make them flow naturally and forming drainage basins like real rivers. It has taken me thousands of hours to get it to work, but eventually I figured out workarounds that produced a more than good enough result. The key was to break down the effort into stages and then set up a workflow to manage data sets, masks and templates to make sure quality and efficiency could be maintained throughout a multi-year project to map the World of Greyhawk. The last five years I’ve used Shield Lands in my campaign as a testbed to see what works and how to get it done effectively. The results have been great, but with lots of work, over time I have figured out how to do things in a smarter way which gives me the results with a bit less work. I’ve also, thanks to your support, been able to upgrade my hardware. So now I’m using two powerful desktop computers, both capable of rendering effectively, which means I can work on my main machine, and let my side machine render in the background. I have a third older desktop that I’m using for streaming, email and such, which will be replaced by a new laptop. I’ve ordered a Framework 16 which will come in December. It will be powerful enough to load and preview even the largest of files, so I can show more than screenshots at conventions.
I start with loading my current Flanaess map into World Machine, as a guide. Still prefer WM3 for this stage it is reliable and able to provide stable previews but will use both WM4 and Gaea for special terrain creation that can then be imported back into WM3 and placed in the terrain. World Machine is still the best when it comes to large area terrain creation, but Gaea is closing in there might be a reason to shift to it for this step too in the future.
Key bit here is to set up multiple parallel chains of fractals, various filters and erosion nodes, blend them together, make tweaks when needed and add extra erosion here and there to increate variation and realism. I’m including lakes and rivers in the previews at this stage to make sure that the terrain is leveled in the right way to match existing maps, but no rivers will be included in the resulting Stage 1 heightmap. For this stage I realized (after a lot of trying) that tiled renders didn’t work so I was limited to 16K (16,384 x 16,384 pixels) in size and making it cover a bit over 100 miles gives me roughly 100 feet per pixel. Not perfect but good enough detail for a base heightmap that can then be further refined later. When I have rendered an area, I’m importing it back in World Machine when doing the neighboring areas to try and make them fit together. This means I might have to go back and forth and re-render, import back, adjust and re-render again until they fit together. It is a process with some pitfalls but I’m getting better at it and have now covered a sizable part of the Flanaess from Furyondy to the Griff Mountains
When the base heightmap is done it is time to use the power of World Machine 4 and import several base height maps covering an area over 500 x 500 miles. This makes it possible to do a tiled render that is 64K in total which is a great base for local area and settlement maps with a much higher level of detail. Keeping records of exact location of these areas, file and directory naming schemes are vital, often half a dozen renders or more are needed to get a good enough result, so version marked files and routines for where to put things are needed, as well as purging the leftovers to fee-up hard drive space. Each 16K area render is around 6GB, and now I have 26 of these areas either done or well under way, with all the renders done a bit over 300 GB for Stage 1.
Even with my best efforts in step 1, the different Base Heightmap are not going to fit together perfectly, so before full resolution tiled render two steps of error correction and refinements are needed. Blurring, using fractals to add new terrain features to hide the ugly bits, erode again, and in some cases just lower the terrain to adjust coastlines are the tricks needed at this stage. If nothing else works, Photoshop editing of the heightmap is the last resort. After a day or two of work a dozen or so 16K areas have been successfully blended into a single heightmap, more than 500 x 500 miles ready for the next crucial step, water.
This is a very interesting part of map making when the landscape starts to come alive, with lakes, rivers and coastlines. It is also very frustrating, rivers have a tendency of flowing in direction you don’t want, and lakes rarely form where the source maps have them, so tweaking the terrain might be necessary. In extreme cases it might be needed to go back to Step 1 and redesign an area again from scratch, but most of the time all that is needed are slight tweaks here and there to get things right. When I’m happy with the preview I set up exports for all the masks, sea mask, lakes rivers, a separate height map for water depth and a simple colored weight map that can be used later to help with texturing.
At this stage it is time to extract and edit all the data, height masks created so far and then generate all the additional masks needed for texturing and detailed maps that I want to create using this base data, because it is only a collection of height data and masks at this stage. I set up additional erosion devices of various types like coastal, water and wind based, not to change the terrain but to use the data from them to generate flow, wear, soil and deposition masks. This will guide texturing by providing data for placement of vegetation, fallen boulders, bare rock and more.
Now it’s time to take a closer look at the edges and overlapping areas of each of the full resolution tiles, this time it is mainly lakes rivers that are of interest. The tiling makes lakes that cover more than a single tile often run into problems with shifting surfaces that need some TLC to establish the correct even surface height and extents. Importing all the data into a new WM4 file makes it possible to see the terrain in 3D to make sure it looks right. Rivers often have similar issues across tile borders which also need to be blended, either in WM or by painting on the masks using Photoshop. Very similar to the correction of Step 2 but less drastic since at this stage I’m working with already rendered heightmaps, not fiddly fractals.
A special case are rivers that flow down steep highlands and escarpments, which World Machine always makes flow down along the slope of the cutting into it evenly the whole way. Sometimes this is natural and the right thing, but in places water would erode it into the slop in a more step-like fashion forming a waterfall. This needs to be done manually using WM and at times Photoshop, which makes rivers look way more natural.
When all the errors have been fixed and the data extracted in the forms of height- and depth maps and masks, it is time to bring in the colors. This is my favorite part when tings truly come to “life”. It is difficult and often takes several attempts, but trial and error that are setbacks at first often leads to new discoveries that can be used later for different areas. The colors of a world are closely tied to its climate, geology and the creatures living there, so when you have a set up for one tile, it neighbors can use the same setup, just feed the different in-data and then do small tweaks to compensate for latitude, closeness to large bodies of water, rain shadows and other local conditions.
To be sure I render a lot of texture variants each, for rock, water, flatlands, highlands that each cover everything. Then I use the mask data in Photoshop together with the powerful blend modes, opacity and further tweaks of color, light, contrast and more. To work with textures in Photoshop makes it possible to work in real time at full resolution, which is powerful. When things don’t work out a bit of manual editing here and there is always needed, and even preferred, it makes things look more varied and artistic, which in my opinion improves beyond what fractals and procedural can achieve on their own.
This base map and its data will serve as my new base to work from. Whether it is coastlines and major rivers for a simple spread map, or all of it for a city map, it will be very useful to keep consistency and speed up the result. I’m striving to use standardized data formats as much as possible so what I’ve created now can be useful for a very long time and in many different ways, in Photoshop GIS, on the web, a VTT, to be printed and in game engines.
My goal is to keep Greyhawk the best mapped fantasy setting in the world, we are not there yet. Both Midgard, Middle Earth and Forgotten Realms are competing for this title and in some ways ahead of Greyhawk, but there is hope that we can change that in 2026 and 2027. With your help it can happen, and this blog post goes over the process a bit. I’m working hard on a part of the Flanaess for the Melf’s Guide which will be a first use of this effort, whish is a dream commission to work, but still only a minor part of this project that I plan to work on for the next five year. Then I hope that the base map of Oerth is available for everyone who wants to download and use it.
There will be deep dives into each of the stages here in future posts, and if you want to see it in action. Well action is to push it, it’s more like watching paint dry, but if that doesn’t deter you please stop by my Twitch Channel https://www.twitch.tv/anna_b_meyer on Friday evening @6pm PST.
Thank you again for all your support!!
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