The Littoral Conundrum

Work on the previous model and the Afghans continues unabated.

In the meantime, I find myself thinking on the matter of hexmaps and littoral zones.

I do not know quite what I intended when I added the colour gradient onto the water of this map. I believe I was copying the sailing rules from the old Birthright setting.

There is a significant problem with this approach. While the Birthright map uses non-hex zones of varying size, my maps do not. This introduces problems. In most hexcrawling games with sailing rules like ACKS there are two locational sailing states, one for navigating with sightlines to land, and one for navigating without sightlines to land. In theory this would mean I only need two colours on the hexmap, but this is not the case. Why? Because horizon sightlines on a ship can vary greatly. One ship without a crow's nest might have the typical 3-mile horizon line, but a fully-rigged galleon might have a sightline over four times that number. In Birthright this distance can be abstracted to a range through non-hex zones, but not in my maps.

Credit to Howard Pyle for the image.

For the moment I believe I have settled on the hexes representing encounter zones. The first hex represents encounters happening on the shore, like someone watching you, and littoral encounters like fishermen. The second grouping of hexes represents rich areas of the sea like coral reefs, and the third area represents open ocean where marine life is scarcer. Due to the way continental shelves and reefs work this means the middle zone should be extended on future maps.

As a bonus, here is the fog-of-war technique our group has been using during games. It was previously accomplished on Google Jamboard, but with the shuttering of that service a new program will have to be found. The map only displays hex features which are highly visible, like the fortified town in the picture. The radius of the magnifying glass can be adjusted to represent shrinking or growing visibility based on vantage points and terrain conditions. My hope is to one day create a physical equivalent, even if it starts out as a large sheet of paper with a hole in the middle and a camera iris glued on top of it.