Setting of Play - Notes to share with the players

[ffilz]

I have been long inspired by things like monasteries on cliffs and steep mountain terrain so I will be setting up the campaign in The Mountains of the Moon and Sughd.

The Google Sheet has more information on the Setting Info tab:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/ ... sp=sharing

[ffilz]

I've been playing around with trying to come up with a good map. Bhutan seems like a good fit for The Mountains of the Moon. Nepal would also work, but I've found better resources for Bhutan. So here are a couple maps I've thrown together:

This one uses Bhutan at real world size with 6 mile hexes:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1AMu3IA ... sp=sharing

That sort of seemed like a small area for a campaign, so I tried making the hexes about 4 times smaller:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1L3EmfN ... sp=sharing

That makes for tiny hexes with that map (but I can zoom in on sections of it).

Frank

[ffilz]

So I've also been playing with Nepal, I found a really nice hi-res trekking map, here is a low res version with 6 mile hexes.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1OHF5pQ ... sp=sharing

The nice thing about this is that it's a contour map. It's also easy to find various other maps of the same area (including a 1920s US Army Topo Map).

This actually has too much detail, but it would be easy for me to work from.

One thing that's interesting is the circuit in the 1970s before all the roads took 23 days (not all of that original circuit is on this map), I think it actually counts out to about 23 hexes..,so it looks like it would be about 1 hex a day. Considering that a trekker probably does count as unencumbered, that's about 1/2 the BX movement rate (24 mi per day unencumbered, 1/2 in mountains).

This map actually makes neighboring river valleys much further apart than the Bhutan map.

The challenge I was hitting was how to turn the map (which really applies to either map) into some kind of player map that's easy to maintain.

[sulldawga]

Whenever I DM, I leave the Players Map to the players.

Just give us a map with numbered hexes and we can handle the rest.

[ffilz]

Whenever I DM, I leave the Players Map to the players.

Just give us a map with numbered hexes and we can handle the rest.

A BX style hexmap of the area would not be very helpful... It would be a 10x7 hex map (hmm, about the size of a Traveller sub-sector, just landscape instead of portrait) filled with mountain hexes (maybe a few foothills hexes at the bottom) with some rivers. It would be even less interesting than the map at the back of Yoon Suin... It really wouldn't help you navigate...

[ffilz]

And here's a simple hex map from the Annapurna Circuit map:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Gy7o5v ... sp=sharing