Subhex Coastlines

I wanted to highlight and discuss part of Mphs. Steve's comment on his experience with the Subhex Wilderness Crawl system.

"...The drop die method was better for my purposes since it puts more points of interests on a single sheet. I used two of the paths off the starting point to create a coastline. It ended up being too straight so I used it as a general guide with natural looking irregularity added by using a rule that I borrowed from ICE's Campaign Law for creating coastlines. The end result was a map of a nicely detailed small area with a lot of opportunity for adventure."

I don't know what the rule from Campaign Law was (never had the Rolemaster books,) although I'd be interested in hearing about it. But I can  understand why the subhex system probably wouldn't make satisfactory coastlines.

Theoretically, you can treat a coastline as a path, rolling d12s to establish where the coast changes direction. But the problem is, the path rolls are geared toward the viewpoint of traveling characters. The length of each leg of a journey is based on travel speed modified by terrain. These things should not affect coastlines in the same way. Also, coastlines are more fractal and more "noisy". In theory, what you should do for a coastline would be to roll d12s to establish a rough coastline, then for each segment of the coast, roll more d12s to divide it into smaller segments, and then repeat a couple times, zooming in to smaller and smaller coastal changes.

That's kind of unwieldy.

I haven't fully thought it through, but a good compromise would be to roll some elevation checks -- the roll with three light dice and three dark dice, but use more dice, something like 8d6 light and 8d6 dark. Read them in a line to establish broad details of the coastline: light dice are spits of land or rocky cliffs jutting out into the water, the dark dice are coves and inlets. That's the rough outline, and the places where the first draft of the coastline changes are the defining points. For each pair of defining points, roll 5d12 to establish the deviations of that section of coastline from the straight line. Or, if  you prefer, start at one point and roll 1d12 for every four squares of coastline until you reach the next defining point. That might work better for rolling a coastline on the fly when players decide to follow and map it.

Progress: SubHex Wilderness Crawl

I've been working on the subhex crawl material for Justin Alexander and I'm pretty much finished with the writing part, although I'd like to do some touch-ups in a couple places, plus I may have to write some examples. This took me longer than I planned. I figured I would just be compiling all the subhex posts, re-arranging paragraphs, rewording some things. Just a quick clean-up!

It turned out there was a lot more to do.

I wasn't entirely happy with the way some of the rolls worked. each step basically used its own, unique procedure, which made it harder to understand. There's a lot more uniformity now, although I may add an optional section reminescent of the original which would describe a "quick roll" method.

Another hitch in the plans: In the original posts, I just made suggestions on what kinds of landmarks or vegetation might exist. As I edited, I realized I needed tables for these. Not as elaborate as the tables planned for LMGM #1, but there's quite a bit more detail now. The new landmark table is essentially the same as the one in the hex/hexless random wilderness posts, but I made some changes... which will also be included in the PDF for hex/hexless wilderness generation.

The main thing left to do is some diagrams and formatting. I've been doing test prints with LaTeX, but not all the layout is acceptable yet. One table floated to the next page even though there was plenty of room, for example.

It's kind of ugly, still, but I feel strangely thrilled looking at it.