Arnold Böcklin’s Isle of the Dead

Conspectus: Resting on warm but brooding seas, the Idle of the Dead is a palimpsest of ruins. Many different civilizations have in the past settled on the Isle. The wilderness is haunted by the hidden realms of Faerie, visible only to those with the second sight. The Isle is scattered with abandoned colonies, restless dead, ghost towns, and the cast-off outposts of past inhuman visitors. The fragile but tenacious settlements of recent colonists cling to the coasts and ply the shallow seas. Spirits and wizard kings have set themselves up as petty gods demanding worship and tribute.

The primary visual inspiration is obviously Böcklin’s piece above, but I’ll post more images in the future. I don’t want to clutter this post up too much. Here is information about some of the past inhabitants.

The Monument Builders. Their works are crude but of immense scale. No one knows anything else about them.

The Old Empire. This was a civilization of tremendous advancement. They built wonders of engineering including bridges, aqueducts, soaring towers, and cities beneath the ground. Little is known about the society of the Old Empire. In fact, it is unknown whether it even was an empire. It is assumed to have been an empire due to the vast extent and uniformity of obviously related ruins. It is so old that nothing is known of its history or rulers, and few artifacts other than the architecture itself has survived. Many Old Empire structures have been repurposed by later settlers.

The Visitors. These ruins are obviously not of human origin and sometimes contain strange devices. Sages differ on whether the remnants of the Visitors came before or after the Old Empire.

The Hundred Kingdoms. The beginning of written history as far as most scholars are concerned. For the most part, the kingdoms did not extend to the Isle, though there are ruins of small outposts, perhaps the homes of heretics or outcasts. Other islands, and of course the mainland to the east, are the primary sources of Hundred Kingdoms ruins. The religion of the Kingdoms held that past the western seas lay the land of the dead. Some believe this is the origin of the name Isle of the Dead.

The Great Empire. The Great Empire arose on the mainland to the east when the Hundred Kingdoms were unified.

The First Expedition. During the zenith of the Great Empire, armies and settlers were sent in all the directions of the compass to explore and subdue. This was the first of two waves of colonization, and was a direct political extension of the metropole. Not much is known about these earlier colonies because after several generations contact was lost. The legend is that they rebelled against the homeland and so were cursed by the gods. That was 500 years ago.

The Second Expedition. Founded approximately two hundred years ago, the Second Expedition followed in the disastrous footsteps of the First. Unlike the First Expedition, the Second was led by adventurers and frontierspeople. At this time, the Great Empire was in a more inward-looking mood. When the settlers arrived, all they found were ruins and ghost towns. Initially, the colonies flourished, and spread around the edges of the Isle. Trade and commerce with the homeland was strong, but over time fewer and fewer ships returned until there was no contact. It has been two generations since the last successful voyages, and many assume the Great Empire has either suffered some disaster or disintegrated once more into feuding kingdoms.

The point of this detail is not to have an extensive history, but to allow me to differentiate between different types of ruins, and to create meaningful connections between them. I am trying to avoid engaging in world building for its own sake, so if something doesn’t add to the experience of the game as game, I don’t want to spend (much) time on it. I’m trying to build from the bottom up as much as possible, but I find I still need some level of thematic framework before I can begin creating domains and points of interest on the map.

As I have been detailing this setting, many things have surprised me. For example, the degree of Mediterranean influence. I wasn’t really planning that to begin with. And the influence of the sea. I guess I will need to become more familiar with nautical rules.

Before I can proceed further with my Adventurer Conqueror King System setting, I need some actual geography. Note that I’m a “learns best by teaching” kind of guy, so don’t take any of this as gospel. This is just a record of what ended up working for me. I would love to hear about different methods that work for other people.

I was playing around with generating random terrain with Hexographer, and one of the areas that stuck with me was this island:

So I decided to use this fragment as a portion of my 24 mile per hex “campaign level” map and my first region. It’s 8 by 8, so that’s one sixteenth of the entire campaign map. I have some ideas about the surrounding area, but I’m not going to worry about it at this point. The fact that this is an island helps somewhat also; it is unlikely that the PCs will accidentally wander too far afield near the beginning of the campaign (Trollsmyth took a similar approach in his hex mapping series). It also means that PCs can either begin as natives or as victims of a shipwreck.

I really like this particular map because it has two major sections with a nice small choke point in the middle. I’m envisioning those connective lowlands as the center of civilization on this island with deep, forested wild mountains to the east and more wild interior to the west past the barrier of the rocky mountains. Flipping the assumptions of Keep on the Borderlands, I think the mountains will contain chaotic border forts (like the gates of Mordor, but smaller scale) protecting the western interior from the settled lowlands. In addition, other lawful settlements will be scattered around the edges of the island, much like the way settlements hugged the shore of Ancient Greece. Communication between the lawfuls will be by short range sea vessels, but more on that in later posts.

To proceed, I need to zoom in on that map and translate it to 6 mile hexes. The Welsh Piper has some wonderful hex templates that can be used with Hexographer, but unfortunately they assume 25 mile and 5 mile hexes (thus 5 subhexes per superhex), which is not compatible with the dimensions I am using. So this is what I did to make sure that the maps line up at different scales.

I started by marking the center of the 24 mile hexes using an arbitrary hex icon that will go away at the end. I chose volcano hexes because they stick out. All hex centers should be equidistant and separated by three hexes in any direction. To see why I placed the centers where I did, check out this picture from my previous post.

Then, I grew the terrain type outward one level:

After that, I filled in the rest of the hexes that would be entirely contained in any of the 24 mile hexes. The remaining gaps between them are liminal hexes that could go either way:

Contiguous terrain of the same type is then connected and the 24 mile hex center markers are removed:

Finally (for this post, at least) we have the “filled in” terrain, with the beginnings of some local variation:

This is still far from complete geographically. You can see that I started to add some details, such as small variations in terrain type at the 6 mile resolution. I don’t plan on creating all the variations prior to play, even just within this single regional map, but as I start to place locations such as domains and dungeons, I’m sure more terrain variation will creep in. My personal rule of thumb is that the majority of subhexes should share the terrain type of the superhex (for example, if the 24 mile hex is forest, at least 7 or 8 of the contained 6 mile hexes should also be forest). Exploring this geography also finally led me to a setting name, which I will reveal in the next post.

Grognardling recently wrote about some problems he was having making maps following the guidelines in Adventurer Conqueror King System. Here are the recommendations (ACKS, page 229):

A standard sheet of hex graph paper, 30 hexes wide and 40 hexes long, covers an area 1,200 hexes total. When creating the recommended two maps, one sheet of hex paper should be used with 24-mile hexes for the campaign map, while a second sheet should be used with 6-mile hexes for the regional map.

This sounds good, and 6 miles is a good scale for regional maps, but 30 by 40 doesn’t “zoom” well. That is, a small section of the 24 mile scale map can’t be conveniently represented by another 30 x 40 map at the 6 mile scale. The confusion is compounded by the fact that Autarch makes example hex maps available at three different resolutions, and it is unclear how these fit with the guidelines in the book (other than to show the proper way of fitting four 6 mile hexes into one 24 mile hex). Also, the example map dimensions are not 30 by 40.

I would suggest using 32 by 32 rather than 30 by 40, as that has a number of pleasant mathematical properties (this should not be surprising, as all of the numbers turn into powers of 2). A 32 by 32 hex map at the 24 mile scale divides evenly into 4 by 4 (16 total) sub-maps which can each be represented as a 32 by 32 hex map at the 6 mile scale. Thus, it is obvious how to create zoomed-in maps with added detail for any particular region. 30 by 40 yields 1200 hexes, while 32 by 32 yields 1024 hexes; the two are thus approximately the same area (certainly close enough for tabletop RPG purposes).

Example 32 by 32 campaign map at 24 mile per hex scale:

Example 32 by 32 region map at 6 mile per hex scale (large sharpie hexes correspond to individual small hexes on the campaign map above):

I was going to wait and post my thoughts on the ACKS setting guidelines all at once, but I found that it was taking me a while, so I’m going to do it in parts instead so that I can maintain momentum.