u/babyboytoydave

I wanted to share some photos from my first Realms. The first map I made all by myself, including the hexes, which are a real pain in the ass to draw by hand. I found this blogpost https://www.redblobgames.com/grids/hexagons/ to be an really interesting read and helpful in drafting out a grid that I used to make the hexes themselves. The math wasn't perfect by hand which is why the hexes wound up slightly longer than wide.

I created a simple mini game for my players, who drew the map entirely on their own during our first session. I placed the rivers at the end and plopped down the Holdings as well. I really recommend having the players make the Realm! They all said that they enjoyed it, and one player who had played in my first campaign as well said that he felt way more connected to the Realm just from the outset.

I hope people find this interesting!

The blank hex map, AT sized (4 sheets of A4 taped together because I am not fancy). I photocopied this at my library to to keep a template.

Cat for scale. He's sitting on my A4 dummy copy I drew all the terrain on first, and some of the tiles are sketched in on the big map.

All the tiles are fully inked and rivers are added with blue ballpoint pen! Again, not fancy.

Colored pencil layer was final step.

Slightly better lighting and background on my bed instead of my Magic Eye looking kitchen table.

And here is Realm number 2! Made by my players in about an hour and a half instead of multiple days all by myself. I love how different all the styles are compared to my first map.

I recently got the books and I'm prepping for a campaign. My players are all new to an OSR/OSE-style hexcrawl- as am I, tbh! I see in the maps book that the river widths and some details about the strength and flow are given for each river, and I wonder how people tend to rule attempts to cross narrower rivers about 20-30 feet in width. Anything less than that I figure a Strength check is appropriate or they can simply walk across, anything over 30 feet I figure is uncrossable, but I'm curious how people are ruling the middle sizes. Also, I saw some older posts suggesting just placing fords along the waterways, so what do people think about this? How many would you place, would you apply some difficulty to the use of fords, and how wide of a river spam is realistic to for a ford to span? Thanks in advance!