I spent most of Mother’s Day 2020 celebrating my wife, the mother of my daughter, who is just plain awesome. My best friend in the world and the best thing that ever happened to me!

But while I was waiting for her to get ready to go out and celebrate the re-opening of one of favorite shops in Vegas, I had time to play around with a new way of doing my hex maps. I thought I’d provide a sneak preview to what I’d currently call a rought draft.

I’ve been using Hexographer for about a decade now to produce my hex maps, and I really like it. The maps it creates look great, but they do present a few small problems for me. First, I just recently switched to using a new computer, and last night had to do some digging to find my license key. If I hadn’t found it, I might have been in a sticky situation, so bringing the map creation completely “in house” would be safer for me, and give me more control over my product.

The second problem is that the hex maps I have been creating do not reproduce well in the PDF format. I’ve done just about everything I can think of to improve them, but I just cannot get them to look right. That’s why I provide the hex maps as downloads on the site … but if the site ever went away, the maps would go with it, and that wouldn’t be good at all. In addition, having the maps more at hand for GM’s would be a big bonus. I really want to include the maps in the books.

The final problem has to do with the format of numbered hexes. When you are looking at a map, you can see right away where cities, towns and villages are located, but you cannot see where all of the other enounters are located. As a GM, you have to reference every hex the party travels through to see if there is something in it, which is a pain in the rear and makes it really easy to miss something.

Thus, the new design:

My idea is to include with each hex crawl an overview map without hexes to give the GM a general overview of the region being described. This map is then subdivided into smaller sub-maps. The sub-maps look like the one above. Descriptions of the settlements and numbered encounter areas would be located after the sub-map in the hex crawl.

Each sub-map is labeled A, B, C, D, etc., to allow encounters on one sub-map to be referenced in the encounters for another sub-map, something like [A3] or [F4], rather than the current [0122].

I won’t use this new style on the next hex crawl – that map is already created in Hexographer. They will probably premiere in the next crawl, and in the compilation books I’m hoping to start publishing in 2021 under the title The Nodian Cosmography. These will collect the old hex crawls, starting with the Wyvern Coast and Nabu – and the city-states of Ophir and Ibis – published in the first issues of NOD. The new books will update the hex crawls to the 2nd edition Blood & Treasure rules, fix errors, and include some new material where appropriate.