31 December 2025 Populating Hexes

    Been doing a little bit of world building/hex population over the last week or so. I've been working on a DCC scenario called "Old Gnaw: the Ravages of the Corpse God," and I needed a point of reference, so I threw together a map using the '9 Villages' method I learned from Keep on Crawling. Basically, you throw nine dice on a piece of paper, circle where they land, and use those points as villages/settlements on your map. That's what I did, and the results suggested a long river to me (since most of the dice were kind of on in row along the top half of the paper). Thus, Korg's Valley was born. Once I had the river placed, I filled in other features--mountains, woods, a swamp, some hills. The names are as bog-standard, barebones as you can imagine, and that's okay. As Carl Sagan wrote, "Before you bake an apple pie, you must first create the universe." I am not going all J.R.R. Tolkien here: this is good enough for me right now. I started writing a small bit of background, too. Nothing crazy, but the geography suggested a story to me, so I am fleshing that out a big, too. I like having a map to look at, even if it looks like it was done by a 6 year old.  

Next, we have a bit of (very rough) hex generation using Shadowdark. I did a bunch of rolling and populating, and ended up with a river that leads to an ocean with a jungle and a bit of desert, too. Two areas of caves--one safe, with a tribe of barbarians, the other unsafe with a hermit. A town on the river is risky, and is run by a malevolent sorcerer named Skalvin. Mind begins to churn. Story begins to emerge.

Finally, I used the good old Dungeon Master's Guide from 1979 to generate some hexes. I came up with a desert that lead to a plain, then a marshy area with a pond, the ruins of a city (!), followed by another marshy area with a pond. The tale begins to emerge from the concepts that are completely randomized. 

The point here is to show that randomization can lead to good, creative ideas. This is a way people could play (and did, back in the old days): procedural D&D. The world, and the story, emerge from the dice. I could see doing this at a table just to see how it goes, and to see what happens. It would be an incredibly slow game (I could actually play this by myself if I wanted to), but it would be...interesting.