Wednesday, June 19, 2024

Saturday, June 08, 2024

more settings should do this

N. Robin Crossby's Hârn setting included a beautiful poster-sized hexmap that allowed for all the hexcrawlery an adventurer's heart could desire. Here's a thumbnail of the map:


Here's a close-up of one region:
(click for an even bigger view)


This is one of the all-time great fantasy campaign maps, but, like so many such maps, it is ultimately a referee's map.

But Hârn also has a player's map, what it calls the "poetic map" of the realm:


"The map is not the territory," as ol' Al Korzybski used to say. Without a "poetic" map, there's no gap between the world-as-it-is and the PC's view of it. That gap is something the referee can exploit.

Friday, June 07, 2024

gamebook glossaries are weird


From Sprawling Wargames by Paddy Griffith.