The Hexbook System

The larger idea behind the hexbooks is that building a world is not something (most) people can or want to do all at once.  It is something that happens gradually over years, and dozens of game sessions.  But the normal method of mapping out this growing world is to grab some graph paper or hex paper, and fill it in as you go.  unfortunetly graphpaper is a valuble resource, and most gamers have multiple ideas bubbling away at anyone time.  Thus pages get lost, pads of paper get filled in with an assortment of unrelated maps, and invaribly some impiornet newly found part of the world gets lost after the session.

I am a big fan of notebooks, and I feel naked if I am not carrying one around with me.  And initally I thought it would be cool to be able to have one with hexpaper in it rather then normal grpahpaper.  But then the more I thought about it, the more I wanted the book to do some of the annoying work of mapping.  Specifically I don't want to have to figure out the scale each time I start a new map, and have to try to remeber if that is the same scale as I used last time.  And sketching out a world at different scales is handy for offering you different levels of information to share with the players, but a headace to figure out.

Additinally, I figure that for different scales, a map should have different qualities, that make it optimized for how it is going to be used.  Hexs are great for larger areas of wilderness, but would be strange for mapping a village or a set iof ruins.  But also if each scale of map has a unique layout, then it is hard to get mixed up. (and when a DM is running a game, he has enough on his mind as it is.)

This is the system I eventually settled on, after looking what was out there, and at the same time choosing to go with the 6-mile hex as the basic unit.  (more on this in another post.)