Hex Maps

For my current campaign I wanted to put together some regional maps for overland travel. That wasn't much of an issue in my last campaign; I generally just hand-waved that sort of thing, and at high levels teleportation handled the lion's share of travel. I've also become enamored of the old Judges Guild maps, with the 5-mile hexes where each hex always has something in it: a mysterious (or mundane) village, a monster lair, some weird ruin or crumbling statue, etc. The question then came down to "what to use" for the maps.

The first obvious choice is CC-Pro since, well, I own it and I should get my money's worth. I also found a JG-style hex template for CCPro on the web, complete with numbers in each hex. The problem with going this route is that it's not particularly fast. It's not bad, but I wanted something quick. To that end, I decided to use a mapping tool that was specifically designed for creating hex maps. I looked for how to do this in CCPro (other than just throwing a hex grid over a regular map), but didn't find anything. So, I looked for other software designed for hex maps. I found four: Grid, AKS Hexmapper, Hex - World Creator, and Atlantean Enquirer. Oddly enough, these programs are all pretty old; as far as I can tell they haven't been updated past the 20th century. I suspect part of the reason is that hex maps have gone out of style; TSR used to use them all the time. Some people seem to think they're only really for old wargames. Others believe that every map must be an artistic masterpiece with utility being a quaint afterthought. There are even a few who are so immersed in their own egos that they can't fathom the value of a hex map and think that they're only for people who can't read a "real" map. In any case, I believe hex maps do have value and are quite useful in a tabletop game setting. Anyway...

I remember Grid from years ago. It's a very complex mapper, but it's a DOS program, so I pretty much set it to the side. I realize I can run DOS apps in a command window in XP, but I'd rather deal with something written with Windows 3.1 in mind at least. Hex - World Creator has a lot of potential (as well as some extra features I don't need), but the biggest problem with it is that it's very unstable. Given it's repeated crashes, I rejected it pretty quickly. From what I've seen elsewhere, others have had the same problem as well. Atlantean Enquirer was just...weird. I filed it away for ideas but I'm not using it. I ended up selecting AKS Hexmapper. Like the others, it appears to be unsupported, though it does have a small community of followers on Yahoo, mainly for trading tilesets. I was actually pretty impressed by Hexmapper. The program is small and fairly simple, but it has a clean, fairly intuitive interface and works well. One nice feature about it is that it can load any BMP file so you could convert existing maps into hex maps if you so desire.

There are some features that are lacking ("undo", for instance), so I'll likely do some post-work in Paint Shop Pro. But for something that's easy to use and gives pretty decent results, I'd recommend the program. It's everything my own Wilderness Mapper should have been but wasn't.

Once I finish the maps, I'm hoping to put together some JG-style tables to generate interesting features that can crop up in each hex...