Over a decade ago I wrote a post about using
Heroic/Homeric/Bronze Age/Mycenaean Greece as a setting for
Barbarians of Lemuria. Well, I was thinking about Ancient Greece again this morning and I got to wondering how big a map hex map of equivalent size would be. If you total up the area of the Peloponnese, Attica, Boeotia and Euboea it comes out to around 11,340 sq/m¹. If you put that in terms of a 6 mile hex map, that is an 18x18 hex map! That's not a large map compared to some hexcrawls and sandboxes.
Someone,
I'm not quite sure who, also did a 6 mile hex map of Greece, the Aegean and Western Turkey. The entire map is 99x81 hexes. Smaller if you shave off some of the sea hexes on the western and southern edges of the map.
There is soooo much history and mythology crammed into this area that it boggles my mind. It could be a giant playground for a game. A GM could take just a portion of it, such as one of the four areas I mentioned above, because it's still crammed with potential.
In Classical times this area contained Athens and Sparta and the consequences of their rivalry and machinations. There was also the important cities of Corinth and Thebes to round out the four biggies. Olympia and its games were located there. Many battles were fought in this area and much diplomacy was conducted. If you go back to the Bronze Age/Mythological era you can add so much more. Mycenae, Argos, Pylos and Megara. Many of the mythical beasts roamed its wilds, too.
This changes my perspective on how big a map has to be to be effective. I've always liked the idea of Chicagowiz's "Just Three Hexes" campaign starter and this, in a way, reinforces that.
¹ All numbers are approximate and for demonstration purposes only
One of the advantages of a smaller-scale hex map is smaller hexes. A 6-mile hex is well and good, but has very little granularity, travel is mostly just picking a direction or "searching the hex". The smaller the hexes the more the players can see the contours of the land, judge their position from landmarks and angles, choose which features to explore, pick their path, etc. I've seen 1/4 mile hex maps in which the players can presumably see for 12 hexes in every open direction, and of course you can go all the way down to the "wilderness as dungeon" scale like Keep on the Borderland's 100 yard squares, though for practical reasons I wouldn't want to go below 1/2 or 1 mile for a proper wilderness crawl.
ReplyDeleteFascinating! That's a really good thing to have in the back of your head when mapping. It's so easy to get carried away. Remember the Wilderlands maps?!!!
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