Xish 2.0

Here's a map:

The scale is 25 miles from one side of a hex to the other. It was originally 6 miles, but everything felt a bit cramped, and in my recent hex crawl reading I've come to the conclusion that the most straightforward procedure is 1 hex = 1 day's travel = 1 roll on the encounter table, and that means a larger hex scale. It also means the map can reasonably be keyed with just major sites/landmarks/notable features while minor encounters like monster lairs, smaller villages, etc. can all be handled with random tables. I do get the utility of having a key ready to go with things like "12 orcs in a lean-to," but in the end it doesn't seem particularly necessary.

While I was adjusting the scale I went ahead and rearranged some things and added a few regions compared to my original hand-drawn map. I may or may not add more cities (smaller settlements will be filled in on the level of the regional maps). I will definitely add more castles/towers/fortresses; right now I just have the obligatory necromancer's tower in the desert. The dungeon near the bottom of the Meethrep Forest where it borders the Painted Hills is, of course, the Crater of Termination.

A couple of the terrain symbols may not be obvious, and/or their names may not indicate what they are. The Hanging Man Valley is badlands (I actually used Hexographer's "broken ground" symbol, because the badlands symbol just looks like desert). The Redcap Forest is a fungal forest.

The map changes have necessitated a few conceptual changes. Originally, Xish was conceived of one of the islands of a small chain of islands, the rest of the Earth having been swallowed up by the oceans by now (to refresh: this is a "dying Earth" scenario, where the campaign world is our actual Earth however millions of years into the future, where its time is almost up). Now that it's a lot bigger, that's no longer tenable, so Xish is the name of the last continent. In this sense, I am now straightforwardly ripping off Clark Ashton Smith's Zothique stories, down to the name of the last continent starting with a "z" sound. Call it "an homage."

Other islands referred to in previous write-ups are still there, they're just actual small islands off the coast of Xish now: Skreel (renamed from Skarshex or some dumb shit like that), where the barbarian humans and goat-men live; and the Isle of Akrillug, named for the god-being that lives there after having destroyed all its inhabitants, not to mention all plant and animal life, as detailed here.

I'll give a rundown of the different regions in another post, or maybe each region will get its own write-up with an outline of a few points of interest. At this point, some I have a really good idea about, and some I don't. And with that deeply insightful note on my creative process, I leave you.