Tales from Irminar 5
Building the travel map (and starting city)
The more information a map contains, the more challenging it is to confront the task of mapping. Yet, a map that has too little information and leaves too much unspecified does not provide a useful launchpad for the imagination of players (including the referee).
For practicality, we will always seek to balance these two considerations.
Basic Organization and Division
The crucial tool here is focus. To begin making our travel map, we need to nominate a PC starting area. We’ll choose Sakasfir.
Sakasfir (the purple realm) is centrally located. It is embroiled in conflict with Angilweyr (depicted as the mixed-color hexes on its southern border), and it also borders an organized realm of frost giants (Gerthar). Its northern reaches consist of harsh but mineral-rich tundra. It neighbors the largest realm in Irminar (Dinnlund, to the east), and it also has unclaimed wildlands directly off its southern and western border. That’s a lot of potential.
As outlined previously, we can readily understand the distribution of political power in the realm simply by knowing its population.
Realm Size Personal Domain (families)
Principality 7500
Duchy 1500
County 780Sakasfir is 115k (families worth of) population strong. This makes it a Principality with a ruler’s personal domain of 7.5k. Sakasfir’s largest city should be 115k / 50 = 2.3k, a Small City (market class IV) in the ACKS scheme.
Subtracting the ruler’s personal domain from the total population, 107.5k split (evenly) between four vassal domains gives us four Duchies at 26.875k. These Duchies will have capital settlements of size 26.875k/50 = 538, Small Towns (market class V).
Completing this pattern:
Realm Population Capital Settlement
Sakasfir 115,000 Small City (2300, class IV)
-Duchy (4x) 26,875 Small Town (538, class V)
--County (16x) 6,344 Village (127, class VI)We can think of Sakasfir as being organized as a Small City capital governing four Small Town minor capitals governing four Villages each.
Dividing the Realm
We need to split the realm into four Duchies. Since we have a 24-mile Tile map already made, that’s a good starting point. The ruler’s personal domain can be where the capital is located. That’s one Tile out of Sakasfir’s 28 Tiles. That leaves approximately 7 Tiles for each Duchy.
I began by outlining some areas, with my only constraint being that each of them be physically connected to the capital in at least one place. I mentally assigned numbers 1 through 7 (or 1 through 6) to these Duchy territories and rolled for minor capital locations. The three contested Tiles are marked here with slashes to remind me.
Liking the look of the southeastern territory, I decide it is a fitting place for players to begin. The orange/red Duchy is named Wallund. Its capital is Undrall, which will be the PC starting city.
Constructing a Travel Map
The ultimate goal here is to make a travel map consisting of the 6-mile hexes the game expects for travel and terrain considerations. This travel map is the core of the space-and-time coherency required for a setting to be a world rather than a backdrop.
We’ve already got a Tile map of 24-mile hexes. In previous considerations, I’ve implicitly presented certain assumptions which we’ll now spell out in detail. Even though it is atypical, I have imagined that a 24-mile hex consists specifically of a 4×4 configuration of 6-mile hexes. This is not precisely what the game assumes (although it is close).
Each “square” is a 4×4 honeycomb of 6-mile hexes. The hexes marked in green have coordinates that are internal to each of these tiles. The hex [4,2] is found by counting from east to west 4 then counting north by 2. Many different methods could be used.
One problem: the overall shape of the tile is no longer a hex if we do this! Are we going to be able to fit it together like hexes fit together?
Yes, easily and neatly! This is not going to correspond to a more strict pure-hex treatment, but we now have a really simple way to identify, reason about, and populate each Tile directly as 6-mile hexes without thinking too hard about which hex belongs in which Tile and so on.
Building a Tile and its surrounding Tiles
Notice we have a configuration in Figure 2 of a Tile and its six surrounding Tiles. If we refer to the region map from Part 1, we just need to choose a particular Tile to begin.
What we really want to mark are settlements and terrain. Things like lairs and dungeons and so on are something to be discovered; but the settlements and terrain should stay consistent (discounting extreme events).
ACKS already has a system with specific terrain types and corresponding tables. These types are:
Clear/grass/scrub
Woods
River
Swamp
Mountains/hills
Barren/desert
Inhabited
City
Ocean
Jungle
Of these, Inhabited and City are “logical” rather than geographic terrain. Ocean and Jungle and Barren/desert are not found in Wallund. We are left with five: Clear, Woods, River, Swamp, Mountains/hills. For Wallund, let’s assume Clear is default. That leaves 4 terrain types to choose from.
We’ll presume that most of the non-Clear terrain is probably Woods. Then a mixture of Mountains/hills and Rivers—and occasional Swamps. These assumptions will naturally shift with macroscopic geography.
We have the freedom to make a map however we choose, but for demonstration we will inject some generative dice-throwing into the process. Filling up a huge blank map might seem daunting, but connecting a few “dots” is relatively easy.
We choose a particular Tile on a region map (Tile-scale) to be our “center” honeycomb. There are six Tiles surrounding it. These surrounding tiles can be 1 through 6 on a d8, and the center can be 7 and 8 (see Figure 2).
By rolling (d8, d4, d4), we can interpret the first result as a Tile and the second and third as coordinates (as in Figure 1).
Water
Let’s try 6 coordinates.
(5, 3, 1)
(2, 3, 3)
(1, 1, 3)
(6, 4, 2)
(4, 2, 2)
(4, 4, 2)
We could always use more points and/or draw different connecting curves between the points. Consistency with regional geography is the most important consideration for travel-scale terrain.
Some lakes:
(3, 3, 3)
(2, 1, 1)
(4, 3, 1)
Though they could logically be treated as type “River,” I think it is interesting to have a few notable lakes, given Irminar’s Anglo-Saxon-style setting.
Woods
(7, 3, 1)
(2, 4, 4)
(8, 2, 2)
(4, 1, 1)
(6, 4, 1)
(5, 4, 4)
(5, 1, 4)
(5, 3, 4)
(1, 2, 1)
(1, 1, 2)
(8, 3, 4)
We can see how this is going. Again, more or fewer depends on the idea we have of the area—this is purely for example.
Mountains/Hills
(2, 3, 2)
(3, 2, 3)
(5, 1, 4)
(2, 4, 4)
(7, 4, 3)
(4, 3, 1)
(2, 3, 3)
(3, 4, 3)
Mixed terrain types in a hex gives travelers the option to keep to one or the other. A hermit lives in the forest, but a troll tribe claims the mountains—that kind of thing.
Swamps
(6, 2, 3)
(2, 1, 4)
(8, 1, 1)
(1, 1, 3)
Summary
With an organized approach and a few dice thrown, a map is already beginning to formulate. Even the “empty” terrain is a particular terrain (Clear/grass/scrub). This is before we’ve added any settlements, lairs, dungeons, or other points of interest.
Irminar: Early Travel Map
Following exactly the method above, I chose a starting Tile on the Irminar region map and threw dice. I shifted my “center” around a few times to capture a larger area.
I have added settlements (and reasonable-seeming roads between them), shaded features for contrast, and shaded the “background” to denote political borders. Major features like the western path of the main river are still incomplete (compare to below).
The down-pointing triangle is Helkort, the Small City capital of Sakasfir. Upward triangles are Small Town capitals of Duchies; Undrall is southeast of Helkort. The circles are Villages. I placed the villages by rolling coordinates.
Low-level PCs will not be able to venture far from the starting city—thus it becomes less important to make a very detailed travel map for things farther away. If you have a game with patrons, they can use these same methods to generate their sections of the map, and you can work with them to fill in the hexes they will need near their realms.
In this way, you the work of creating the “detailed” travel map can be spread out.
Player Starting City
Undrall is a Small Town (market class V) with 538 families. It is the capital of Wallund, a Duchy of Sakasfir with close to 27,000 families. It is firmly in the Borderlands category of the Wilderness / Borderlands / Civilized classification.
The town’s stronghold is part of the personal domain of Duke Messer, a 9th level Thief and ruler of Wallund. Most affairs of the town are, in reality, managed by the Constable Kahn, a 7th level Fighter.
The denizens there are largely fishermen, potters, toolmakers, and smiths. It’s not a bustling town, but a consistent flow of merchants and traders can be found there. Between festivals, one can always find a stretch of peace at its modest temple to Order—or its even more modest Balance temple.
It’s either rainy or cool there, with a tendency towards occasional surprising cold. Aside from the lake to its south and the northern river, the lands surrounding it are generally flat grasslands spotted with woods.
Ready To Play
And there we have it! The system allows us to work out further details (like garrison size and so on) based on population size, but that information can always be worked out when necessary.
Even though much of this article focused on using procedures to generate a map, it works just as well to use an existing map (keeping in mind the scale). The map is a crucial part of playing a real TTRPG, but its method of construction ultimately won’t matter much. It can set the tone and the pace of things at the start, but any campaign world will quickly change character due to sweeping events placed in motion by the players and demanded by the game itself.
With the setup stages complete, expect session reports upcoming!