Hex Change

No, I haven't been ensqualmed*. Here's a hex map of Turnip Valley, the one I'll be working from for the forseeable future. I used Grim's Blank Hex Sheet, which is pretty damn handy. A scale of one hex = twelve miles gives us a total area of 2,304 square miles, which is the exact same size as Osage County, Oklahoma. This wasn't done on purpose, as I've never been to Oklahoma (nor have I seen the musical). It's 704 square miles bigger than Glacier National Park.



I picked 12 miles as a scale because I thought it would be a good pace for daily trekking with dungeoneering equipment. According to WikiAnswers,

"20 miles in 7 hours is 2.8mph and reasonably comfortable for a fit person. 26 miles in 7 means a much harder pace of 3.7mph and it takes a concerted effort to bash out this pace. The Royal Marines final test is a 30 mile yomp over Dartmoor in 8 hours at 3.75mph. They do it carrying 18kg or about 40lbs.

The problems arise when doing this on consecutive days. Back to back 20 milers get tiring. Up this to 26 and it gets hard. But if you train for it and get fit it is possible. John Merrill, the first person to walk the entire British coastline would often put in back to back 30 milers at a good pace with 50lbs of kit."

The hexes immediately surrounding Scrapfaggot Green (hex 0508) comprise the agricultural area known as Habberdasher Downs. Each hex is the name of the Brother Holbrook who owns that particular farm.

I drew this during my chemo infusion today and I sort of forgot what the original looked like. I like this set up better, so it's a happy accident. I haven't decided what that village in hex 0708 is all about yet. Maybe it should be a ghost town destroyed by radiation, given it's origin.

Those two beacon things in hexes 0410 and 1501 (Castle Gammafrost) are connected by a bright beam of light that splits the nighttime sky of Turnip Valley. I'll have more to say about that once the players start to ask about it. For now, it's enough to say that it creates a coruscating, aurora-like effect that can be disorienting to the those walking outdoors at night, especially when combined with the dim blue light reflected from the twin moons Mu and Mongo and the distant sparkle of the Prismatic Mountains. For three nights every month this effect becomes so overwhelming that even magic suffers. Spells have been known to remove themselves from the memories of wizards and go off to cause havoc on their own.

The phenomenon of light is particularly important in this campaign setting. Gammafrost has a blue sun, meaning that most vegetation tends toward reds, oranges, and yellows as opposed to the greenery caused by the yellow sun of our solar system.

The northeast part of the valley (southeast on this crooked map), is fairly busy. I've connected Mt. Forever, the Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth, the Forgotten Temple of Tharizdun, Alphonso Warden's People of the Pit, and very likely Matt Finch's The Spire of Iron and Crystal (if Lulu ever gets off their asses and sends it to me...) into a massive complex under the Prismatic Mountains. Jaftgong (hex 1611) from Obregon's Dishonor by Cameron Dubeers would be an excellent base of operations to delve this area, which is almost a complete mid-level campaign setting of the Weird in and of itself.

*"Ensqualm" is from Rhialto the Marvellous and is a word created (I believe) by Jack Vance to signify a kind of magical male-to-female gender change caused by spending even a brief period of time in the presence of a being called the Murthe. I must admit that I'm pretty excited that American Barbarica exists in some forgotten sub-level of the Blogosphere Megadungeon, where there's at least some chance that readers might already know this kind of esoteric crapola.