How detailed are your wilderness/overland maps?

[Phaedrus]

My problem is that I want wilderness to be "accurate" (whatever that means in a fantasy world). I'm always worried the mountains won't have enough foothills as they become plains, there aren't enough rivers, terrain types change too abruptly, that city doesn't have enough farmland around it to sustain it "for real." The nomads' grasslands are too small for their numbers. There are too many orcs too close to the goblins competing for food... logistics and ecology.

I'm way too hung up on wanting it to be "realistic" that I get paralyzed from making any decisions.

What do you guys do?

 

[rounser]

Dungeons are far more compact, and thus need more thought/logic to be believable than wilderness does.

Believable? I think that it's easy to make an almost empty wilderness believable, just as it's easy to make an almost empty dungeon believable (I'm sure most real world dungeons are basically empty of most things of interest).

That's different to making something an effective and interesting adventuring environment, where the dungeon gets the lion's share of attention, and the wilderness might get a wandering encounter table and a map, if it's lucky.

I'm way too hung up on wanting it to be "realistic" that I get paralyzed from making any decisions.

I can relate to that to an extent. For example, how big is a typical mountain, in miles from side to side, as a rule of thumb?

 

[nopantsyet]

My problem is that I want wilderness to be "accurate" (whatever that means in a fantasy world). I'm always worried the mountains won't have enough foothills as they become plains, there aren't enough rivers, terrain types change too abruptly, that city doesn't have enough farmland around it to sustain it "for real." The nomads' grasslands are too small for their numbers. There are too many orcs too close to the goblins competing for food... logistics and ecology.

I'm way too hung up on wanting it to be "realistic" that I get paralyzed from making any decisions.

What do you guys do?

Enough to interest, not enough to bore. It really is tough--I agree. I'm trying to work out the logistics of a city like a two-tiered Venice. My first session, I made the idiot mistake of saying the tide moved 10' in the inland tier where there would not likely be more that 3' of tidal fluctuation. But I didn't watch the TiVO'ed Nova special about Venetian tides until *after* that session.

In other words, I know your pain. I embrace it. I don't share all of that with the players. No individual is so observant as to notice everything about a place the first time they pass through. As they get to know places better, they learn more of the details. Lets me focus on the important areas and still prepared for the less immediately-vital locales.

As far as map scale goes, or the most part, terrain is not going to change abruptly every 4 miles, though. Sixty five miles is a very reasonable hex size for a general terrain map. How often will you find something truly interesting every 65 miles, much less every 4? Wilderness is wilderness for a reason--it hasn't been filled up by man, and its inhabitants aren't quite as good at peaceful coexistence as man.

Now, for important regions, you need a better scale. But unless you want to map every farm and every hill and every road, 4 miles sounds like a bit much. But it sounds interesting nonetheless. I think I'm going to give it a try and see if I get anything out of it.

 

[rounser]

Now, for important regions, you need a better scale. But unless you want to map every farm and every hill and every road, 4 miles sounds like a bit much. But it sounds interesting nonetheless. I think I'm going to give it a try and see if I get anything out of it.

Perhaps the appropriate level of "detail per X miles" for a given DM's campaign is the number of encounters/locations/interesting features that you want your PCs to find per day, or days, of travel. Maybe one campaign's wilderness might be detailed enough to potentially discover 1 or 2 things in a day, and the next campaign might discover a single interesting feature for upwards of ten days of travel at a time. Either, for a fantasy world, is "realistic", I think - just depends on the density of opportunities for adventure in a given world.

 

[Tonguez]

doubled

 

[Tonguez]

I tend to write my maps rather than draw them
In otherwords I will decide that between point A and point D there are 7 areas
of which ABC&D are 'planned encounters' the other three are random 'corridors'

I'll then do something like:
Area 1 Foothills: Mountain tussock merges with forested hills, gentle slopes and light open forest (medium density), becoming sparse towards the base where it emerges into scrub and then plains (see Area 2)
Encounters (roll d20): Pixie 1, Assasin Vine 2-5, Orc Scouts 6-10, Wolves 10 -12, Goblins 13 -17, Other 18 - 19, 20 OwlBear
Sites (Roll d20): Fairy Ring 1-2, 3 OwlsBear Lair, 4 - 9 Goodberry bushes (dense undergrowth) 10- 20 Nothing

Area 4 Plains (Scrub):The forests and hills merge into the grasslands via a margin of sparse scrub. The Encampment of Mog Khan stretches out to the east and north
Encounter (Event C): Orc Scouts guarding the permeter of the Camp (Spot, Hide etc etc)

My problem is that I want wilderness to be "accurate" (whatever that means in a fantasy world). I'm always worried the mountains won't have enough foothills as they become plains, there aren't enough rivers, terrain types change too abruptly, that city doesn't have enough farmland around it to sustain it "for real." The nomads' grasslands are too small for their numbers. There are too many orcs too close to the goblins competing for food... logistics and ecology.

I'm way too hung up on wanting it to be "realistic" that I get paralyzed from making any decisions.

What do you guys do?

The Wilderness is 'big' and throughout most of history the only way to measure how big was by how long it took to travel through it. Even shorter measures were non standard - take the foot my foot and your foot are unlikely to be the same length and thus for most of history measuring distance was arbitary - It was King Edward in the 13th C who ordered that the 'Iron Ulna' be created as a standard measure of the Yard (Ulna = Forearm bone)

Anyway my point is DON'T be accurate don't tell the PCS how big something is in standard units, instead tell them in non standard descriptions like "the walls are the height of two full grown ogres" or the Forest "extends to the shadow of Mt Doom"

Tell them that the Marshlands are dark and menacing and take 4 days to cross -
do the PCs actually need to know that the Swamp is only 3 miles wide rather than 300 miles (maybe it takes four days to cross because it is so muddy and dense)

 

[S'mon]

Believable? I think that it's easy to make an almost empty wilderness believable, just as it's easy to make an almost empty dungeon believable (I'm sure most real world dungeons are basically empty of most things of interest).

That's different to making something an effective and interesting adventuring environment, where the dungeon gets the lion's share of attention, and the wilderness might get a wandering encounter table and a map, if it's lucky.

I agree with that. Many of the most memorable scenarios from way back were wilderness ones - the Fighting Fantasy gamebooks did this particularly well, eg The Shamutanti Hills mentioned earlier, & The Forest of Doom. I have a soft spot for EX1 Isle of Dread, also. Treating the wilderness as a big dungeon with roads/tracks as the corridors gives a very different feel than D&D's usual 30 miles/hex, 1-in-10 random encounter approach. I'm not so keen on hexes as encounter-demarkers, I think they give an artificial feel. Using pathways, rivers and such with encounters along them gives a better feel IMO, although it doesn't work for open deserts so well.

 

[Inconsequenti-AL]

I've previously used a selection of pre-created events: Come up with half a dozen of them before we start. Mostly pretty straightforward stuff, some combat, mostly non combat or at least possible to resolve by talking/thinking... some of them just weird diversions. Few of them tend to link up and involve the same person/tribe/organisation...

I'll then throw them out if I think we need a bit of a break, or to kill some time off if I ran out of plot and need time to think. They tend not to be random.

I've normally used a really rough sketch map, but I'm thinking of doing a proper one for my next campaign... simply because I've got lots of time on my hands and want to see if it makes a difference. Going to try something more like Rounser suggested.

Anyone know any good mapping tools?

Edit: Missed a bit

 

[S'mon]

Now, for important regions, you need a better scale. But unless you want to map every farm and every hill and every road, 4 miles sounds like a bit much.

I think the best, most engaging wilderness adventures *do* map every farm, hill & road. This isn't suitable for a general campaign map but it's much more immersive than 30 miles of blankness.

 

[bushfire]

Take a look at this download from Necromancer/Judges Guild for the level of detail in the JG Wilderness.
http://206.65.59.13/pdf/rorystone.pdf
Remember that this download is only about 1/8 of one of the 18 maps of the Wilderlands. This is the level of detail that I think is needed for good wilderness adventures.

Now another question is why are there no other products that do this? I mean the Judges Guild Wilderlands was first published before Greyhawk, it can almost be said that the Wilderlands is one of the very first D&D campaign worlds. It has had this level of detail since the beginning. There are even some JG products that detail the 5-mile hexes for a given area down even further. So why hasn't anyone else done this? Why all the large pretty poster maps but no detailed maps?

bushfire