Thoughts on Hex Maps - Part 2: Metric Boogaloo

In my last post about hex maps I looked at using Hex Kit to break down a 6 mile hex into sub-hexes. I used the 6 mile hex as a starting point based on the article In Praise of the 6 Mile Hex from The Hydra's Grotto. After playing around with those maps a bit, I thought I should look into doing something up using a metric scale, seeing as how that is the system used here in Canada and most of the rest if the world. It also makes breaking hexes down fairly straightforward as everything can be broken down into a smaller scale by dividing by 10. 6 Miles is roughly 10 KM so all the benefits of a 6 mile hex are still applicable.

So I started out with creating a template in Hex Kit. This is a 10 KM hex broken into 1 KM sub-hexes. As before the red hexes fall completely within the larger hex, and purple ones are partially in the larger hex.

Each hex on the above would be 1 KM side to side and about 1.15 KM vertex to vertex. The entire large hex would be 10 KM side to side and 11.5 KM vertex to vertex.

I took the village I made using my 1 mile per hex template and converted it to a 1 KM per hex map.

Village - 1 mile per hex

Village - 1 KM per hex

So in the centre of this area we have a large farming  community with mixed woodland to the northwest and a river winding it’s way from the northeast to the south. The windmill and houses could represent one large town or a small town with outlying villages and farms. This sub-hex could probably have room for a few more small villages and a few adventure sites. According to some other excellent blogs*, there could be as many as 3-4 villages on the low end of this size of a hex.

I'm thinking that for the next article in this series, I'll create an overland map and then start breaking down the hexes into smaller sub-hexes and then try and populate them with a little more detail. I'd like to try out the various tile sets I have and get some more practice with Hex Kit. Bye for now.

*https://coinsandscrolls.blogspot.com/2019/06/osr-sienas-6-mile-hex.html
*https://charlesmryan.wordpress.com/2011/11/16/the-medieval-kingdom/
*http://batintheattic.blogspot.com/2009/12/packing-stuff-inside-hex.html

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