February to May 2022

This blog begins with a map generation I began in early February, 2022, on my blog, Tao of D&D.  I began creating a 17th century technical map of modern Romania, centered on the town of Kronstadt (modern Brasov), this being the home base of my longest-running campaign (since 2006).  As it first appeared, the map was just 60 miles across.  Each hex is 6.67 miles in diameter.  The strange number is based on dividing 20-mile hexes into a group of smaller hexes.  Although they're 6.67 miles, I call them "6-mile hexes."

By February 9th, I expanded the map further, calling it a combination of "random generation and geographical fumbling."  In essence, I was taking an existing map I'd created with 20-mile hexes and breaking it down, adding topographical and hydrographical details as I went.  Here's the map as it appeared by the end of that day.   

I did more work on February 10th, and still more on February 11th, using the latter post to overlay the map on top of the 20 mile hex map it came from.  From there I began messing around with other details before publishing the map below on February 20th:

The secret is to assign an amount of map to oneself each day, and then push past that amount on days when one has the time and is motivated.  Already, it's clear that the above has enough territory to run a campaign in ... but as I was interested in those territories beyond the map, I simply continued working.  I posted an update on February 28th, then again on March 3rd, by which time I'd grown dissatisfied with the colour scheme.  This meant going through the whole map and adjusting the colours, searching for something less washed-out but at the same time, pleasant to look at.  This process was completed by March 14, by which time the map looked like this:

After five weeks, then, the map was 200 miles across and consisted of more than 700 hexes.  Around that time, I stopped writing regular posts, since the work had settled into a regular, predicatable process.  I continued to work around the outside in concentric circles, moving clockwise, publishing a larger version on April 6th, by which time I'd reached the edge of the Danube delta on the east and the Danube Bend/Iron Gate on the west.  I spoke about using Google Maps to provide these details.

It was getting harder to publish the whole map by this time, as it had spread over onto multiple files.  Due to the detail, a publisher file of 30 x 35 hexes is 17mb in size, so that as each "sheet" is near to being finished, it starts to get unwieldy.  As such, come May 1st, I published the complete map, saying that I'd do so once a month: