Maps, map, maps, maps, maps. I think I've realised a flaw in my personality. Or a "character trait", if we're being charitable. Hmm.
When I make a system to create something, like a map in this case, I want it to run like a piece of clockwork, so you roll or pick a thing, write the result and move on the world slowly builds itself. But I also want it to look very bespoke and special and not at all run-of-the-mill. That's quite a rock and a hard place to stand between. But I'm not backing down on the first bit, which makes it all slightly impossible to achieve.
I'm not letting impossibility stand in the way, and I'm tinkering with creating maps at the moment. I'm not even clear what I'm creating maps for, other than I remembered starting to write a game where you are a dragon and fly around the land trying to do whatever it is that dragons like to do while not getting shot by some annoying archer over a lake.
More specifically, perhaps, I want to generate maps where there are satisfying clumps of similar terrain rather than a chaotic jumble of individual square (we're working in squares here).
One thing I can do is to make the contents of the next square dependent on the square I'm currently in. In that way, I can make it a higher chance of being the same type of terrain and so we've built in an element of clump already. So if I'm in a forest square, then the change of the next square being forest as well should be higher than it being, say, water.
I also realised that if I just calculate one square, and then move and calculate the next square and so on (which I'm calling the "move-in-and-reveal" approach), then that is going to be more random than generating all the squares around my current square (which I'm calling the "all-around" approach) based on the current square.
Cut to some exciting formulae and conditional formatting in Excel to try and prove to myself that this would look simply magnificent and I'm maybe 50% convinced it might work. After tinkering with the results of each draw (we're using cards here, so each outcome is roughly 8%) I figured I'd better write that down for posterity.
I had a bit of a spark the other day when I realised I needed to separate terrain and features - up until now my map generator table included "forest" alongside "ruin" and "fissure". By splitting them apart I can generate a type of terrain and then its contents. I should have thought of that earlier, but the original map generator is not measured in squares or hexes, it's based on locations and the relation between them (paths to and from). I think I'm probably keeping the "no hexes/squares" approach, because it has a nice "local knowledge" feel, but I want slightly more detail in my locations.
Also, if I might just say, bloody rivers! The only good way to generate a river on a procedural map that I've seen is the one in D100 Dungeons World Builder (Book 6), where it takes account of the rivers flowing into the hex and has rules on how rivers split and so on. For now, I've included a single entry for "Water" and that could be a river, a lake or the sea.
In an effort to try and do more research, I tried out The Lonesome Cartographer by Wren the Forester a couple of days ago. It's a journalling game that generates locations based on a standard tarot deck. I quite enjoyed the meandering sensation of generating as you move, but found it confusing when my cartographer headed off in a direction I wasn't expecting. So, I wrote a quick table of distractions, things that might cause you to head in unexpected directions.
Percolate, percolate, percolate. As I said a post or two back, if I leave it swimming around in my mind for a while then something might pop out. In the mean time, it's back to colouring in squares, tweaking the table and figuring out the contents of these locations. Why did I make one of the land types "bog", I was really grasping at straws at that point.
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