Angel Falls (Creative Commons Atribution Share-Alike 3.0 Unported; Credit: Kerepakupai merú)

When you’re creating a world for your game or novel, it helps to have a bunch of facts about our world at your fingertips.  This serves two purposes:

1. You get the dimensions of things on our world as a guide whether you want things to be similar to earth or vastly different.
2. You can be reminded of some unusual things to include in your world such as fjords that lead to a maelstrom or the largest freshwater lake.

Now here’s the list:

1. The earth surface area is about 197 million square miles; about 70.8% is water.
2. The earth’s axis tilt is about 23.5 degrees.
3. The equatorial diameter of the Earth is 12,756 km (7,926 mi).
4. Due to the earth’s rotation, the earth’s equator is 43km larger across than from pole to pole.  It is an oblate spheroid.
5. It takes 23 hours, 56 minutes and 4 seconds for the earth to spin one revolution.  But why is a day 24 hours? (See next point.)
6. The Sun moves compared to the background stars by about 1°.  The motion from that combined with the earth’s spin adds up to 24 hours.
7. The earth has 2 co-orbital satellites in addition to the moon which directly orbits earth.
8. “3753 Cruithne” is one of these satellites and is 5 km across.  It seems to follow the earth around the sun but  has its own orbit.
9. “2002 AA_29″ is just 60 meters across.  It has a horseshoe orbit that brings it near earth every 95 years.  Scientists believe that in about 600 years it will have a quasi-satellite orbit around earth.
10. The highest point above sea level on earth is Mount Everest in Nepal at 8,848 m (29,029 ft) above sea level.
11. The Himalayas are the highest mountain range.
12. The Himalayas are almost completely circled by three of the world’s largest rivers–the Indus to the north and west, the Brahmaputra to the north and east, and the Ganges on the southern side.
13. The lowest natural point on land is the shore of the Dead Sea at 418 m (1,371 ft) below sea level.
14. The Dead Sea is eight times as salty as regular seawater.  (Utah’s Great Slat Lake is six times as salty as sea water.)
15. The lowest natural point underwater is Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench (between Japan and New Guinea) at 10,911 m (35,797 ft) below sea level.
16. The lowest point in a lake is in Baikal Lake in Russia at 5,315 ft.
17. Largest freshwater lake: Lake Superior in North America at 82,000 km2.
18. Tallest waterfall: Angel Falls in Venezuela  is 979 m (3,212 ft) and a plunge of 807 m (2,648 ft).
19. The longest river is contested.  Some say the Nile is longest at 6,695km (4,160mi) and other rivers are shorter. Others sources measure the Amazon as longest at 6,992 km (4,344 miles).
20. The Nile river is made up of two rivers, the White Nile and the Blue Nile. The White Nile is longer and used for the overall river’s measurement.
21. The Amazon’s flow and volume is so great that it pushes back the Atlantic Ocean’s saltwater for more than 160km (100mi), creating a large freshwater area.
22. The Amazon’s largest tributary is the Rio Negro.  The river’s waters are black from an acid in the swamps of Colombia.
23. The Grand Canyon is the largest gorge on Earth, extending for 444km (277mi).
24. At the Grand Canyon’s Granite Gorge, the canyon drops for 1.6km (1mi).
25. The Grand Canyon’s widest point spans 29km (18mi).
26. About 160 volcanoes erupt each decade, and about 550 different ones have erupted through recorded history.
27. The coldest recorded temperature was -89 degrees Celsius (-129 degrees Fahrenheit) in Vostok, Antarctica.
28. Only 3% of water is fresh water. Two-thirds of that is frozen in glaciers.
29. 200 million years ago Earth contained only one land mass called Pangea.
30. Largest structure made by living things: Australia’s Great barrier Reef at 2,010km (1,250mi) long.
31. 90% of the Great Barrier Reef is underwater.
32. Largest body of floating water: Ross ice Shelf in a large bay of Antactica.  It is 800km (500mi) long and 750m (2,400ft) thick near the true south pole.
33. The Ross Ice Shelf moves 1.6m (5ft) and 3m (10ft) each day. It is pushed by glaciers behind it, snow from above and ice from below.
34. Icebergs from the Ross Ice Shelf are typically 40km (25mi) long.
35. Saltstruamen is the world’s strongest whirlpool/maelstorm 30 km east of the city of Bodø, Norway.  Water speeds approach 22 knots (about 40km/hour).  It is formed where a narrow channel connects the outer Saltfjord with the large Skjerstadfjord.
36. The largest cave is the Son Doong cave of Vietnam at 262-by-262 feet (80-by-80 meters) in most places and 2.8 miles long.  It was just discovered in 2009.
37. The Son Doong cave is likely even larger because a flooded section prevented explorers from traveling further.
38. The Son Doong cave also has Stalagmites over 230 feet high.
39. Longest Fjord in the world: Sognefjord, on the western coast of Norway extending 200km (125 mi) inland.
40. Deepest Fjord in the world: also Sognefjord.  Its sheer cliffs are 900m (3,000ft) in places.
41. The largest island is Greenland at 2,130,800 km^{2 (}822,706 sq mi).
42. Greenland is thought to be three separate islands beneath an ice sheet.  But the next largest island is New Guinea at 785,753 km2 (303,381 sq mi) so one of the three island of Greenland would likely still be the largest island.
43. The largest sea is the South China Sea at 2,974,600 square km.
44. There are four types of deserts: Subtropical, Cool Coastal, Cold Winter and Polar.
45. The largest desert is the Sahara, a Subtropical desert at 3,320,000 square miles.
46. The hottest place int he world is Dalol, Denakil Depression, Ethiopia. Its annual average temperature is 93.2°F (34°C.)
47. The coldest place is Plateau Station, Antarctica, with an annual average temperature of -56.7°C.
48. The driest place is Atacama Desert, Chile with an imperceptible rainfall on a yearly basis.
49. The driest inhabited place is Aswan Egypt at 0.02 inches of rain per year.
50. The wettest place is Mawsynram, Assam, India. It has an annual average rainfall of 11,873 mm, (467.4″.)
51. The wettest inhabited place is Buenaventira, Colombia at 267 inches of rain per year.

I’ll likely do 50 more in a couple of weeks to get to over 100.  If you have a few to offer, please post in the comments.

If you’ve determined that a given hex has some “Ruins” the following chart will give you some ideas of what those ruins may have in store. You may want to roll/pick multiple options from the last column:

Using the chart, if one rolls a 4, a 10, a 12, and a 4 (so we have two factions) one would get: a mostly intact but half underwater city that has been mostly ransacked but may still hold a few treasures.  It has a number of trolls and orcs to contend with.   From that jumping off point, you could sketch a quick map of a half underwater city and develop a reason why the orcs and trolls are there, what treasures may still exist, if there are any traps or secret areas, etc.  Crawling goodness.

(Read Part I.)

Larger Scale Maps

A hex map in the shape of a D20. (This was a very simple example without labels or lines for roads, rivers, boundaries, etc.)

As you move up to larger scale maps, the practicalities of fitting the area on a sheet of paper may play a factor.  If possible, you may want to keep the same 6-hex-to-1-hex map template in mind (or whichever ratio you chose) for consistency.  Using that template, the next scale up would be 216 mile hexes.  This scale is probably appropriate for fitting most continents on a single paper.  (For reference, Washington DC and New York city are 204 miles apart.)

Increasing the scale again by a factor of six results in a scale of 1296 miles across a hex. This is an odd number, but it allows you to continue stacking larger size templates with the same factor above each other.  At this point you may fit an entire world on a sheet of paper as long as you can fit about 20 hexes across resulting in 25,920 miles across, if your hex orientation results in hexes that stack horizontally. (If your hex orientation has neat columns, you’ll need about 4 more hexes to match that distance.)

Once you have that size in mind, you can apply an icosohedral template (a set of joined triangles that form a d20 shape) to your map.  See the planetary maps further down on at this link: http://home.comcast.net/~thinlines/hexmaps/index.html

You can even print a map with that template out, paste it on heavy paper/cardboard, cut it and fold it into a d20 shape. (See the example above/to the right.)

Alternative Hex Map Scales

The example described results in maps with 1-mile-per-hex, 6 miles-per-hex, 36 miles-per hex, 216 miles-per-hex, and 1296 miles-per-hex scales.  If you wanted to use a 5-to-1-hex map template you could have a 5-mile-per-hex map, then a 25-mile-per-hex map, and a 125-mile-per-hex map and finally a 625 mile-per-hex map.  (Of course to result in a world with a circumference of about 25,000 miles you would need about 40 hexes across.  40×625=25000)

But you can also mix hex template styles to get maps that match the distances you want.  For example, one can start with a use a 6-mile-per-hex map for what is visible to the horizon. (A 1-mile per-hex map may also be created.) Then move up to a 18-mile-per-hex map using a 3-to-1 hex map template. Next, move up to a scale that lets you fit a full country or even a small continent or large island on a hex map using a 4-to-1 hex map template or 5-to-1 hex map template for 72-mile-per-hex and 90-mile-per-hex map scales respectively.

A map’s scale is a key point to consider when creating a hex map, or any map for that matter.  Three driving factors behind that decision are:

• Are you creating a local area map, a country/region map, a map of an entire continent or a world map?
• What is the overall size of your world?
• How far can people travel in a day? How far can someone see?

Obviously, the scale of a world map will be dependent on the size of your world.  For reference, Earth’s circumference at the equator is a little under 25,000 miles.  So if you want a world the size of Earth, one should target an overall map size of about 25,000 miles across.  Naturally if you want a larger or smaller world, adjust this target number accordingly.  Keep your desired world size in mind for the rest of the article. But traveling and visibility/horizon distances are another factor to consider even when making a world map because of hex map templates that superimpose a hex map of a larger scale over a hex map of a smaller scale.  Therefore it is convenient to pick numbers that divide nicely when you make smaller maps and vice-versa.

Note: This may become a series of articles, so please post ideas for future hex map topics or corrections in the comments!

Basing the Scale on Visible Distances

On earth, a person can see about 2.9 miles away when all the terrain in the area is at about the same level. If the observer climbs a hill, he or she will obviously be able to see further.  If the planet is larger, the distance will increase (because the area will be flatter) and if the planet is smaller the distance will be reduced.  So if you want to have an earth-sized world, and you want a hex to represent how far one can see from the center of that hex, assuming flat terrain, you should pick six miles.

If you’re using the metric system, the distance a person can see is 4.7 km. Therefore, you may want a hex size of 5 km to represent that a person standing at the vertex of three hexes can see the full distance of each of those hexes.

Then when you drill down to a map representing a smaller area, you can find a hex template that has larger hexes superimposed over smaller hexes at a ratio to give one mile hexes.  While I didn’t find any with a 6-hex-to-1 ratio (expect one to be posted here soon), here are two examples with other ratios:

• 5-to-1: http://www.welshpiper.com/hex-based-campaign-design-part-1/
• 4-to-1: http://home.comcast.net/~thinlines/hexmaps/index.html

After seeing these, it should be fairly easy to make similar grids with other ratios.

Basing the Scale on Travel Distances

Many hikers and marathon trainers claim that they can fairly easily travel 18 miles a day, day after day.  So if you want a map to represent how far one can travel in a roughly straight line over easy-to-travel terrain, 18 miles may be a good pick.  But 36 miles may be a better choice because you could use the same 6-hex-to-1-hex map template mentioned above for 6-mile hexes and your map would simply represent how far someone could travel in two days over clear terrain.

If you chose a different scale for your smaller area map or if you chose a different size world, you may wish to tweak the scale somewhat, but you should avoid assuming a daily walking distance of greater than 20 miles.  Even if you believe people can move further than that in a day, keep in mind that rarely will the roads go straight from one location to the next and when traveling off the roads the travel will be more difficult.

Note that 18 miles is 28.9 kilometers.  So if you chose a map scale of 5 km previously, you could easily move up to a map scale of 25 km which is a little less than what people can travel in a day, but considering that things aren’t in straight lines, it would still make a good choice.

Continued…

Late last year I started putting together a number of random charts to create names that are reminiscent of the names of cultures in the real word. The goal is to make it easy to create names that seem to be from a particular culture and therefore differentiate those names/locations/culture from others in the world.

Today, I’ve created a fourth set of random location name generator charts. (Although in some cases they may work for naming characters as well.)  This set is based on locations in part of India.

Hopefully it isn’t too late to look back at 2009.  At Inkwell Ideas, the specialty is to give others tools and ideas useful for RPGs.

Although December was a little slow (working on the largest Inkwell Ideas project, Hexographer, as well as real life issues) there were a few November posts centered on random charts to create location names that sound similar to locations in various cultures. (The link goes to a main page that links to pages with charts for Chinese, English/UK, and Native American Indian sounding names.)

2009 also brought on some other random charts: random potion descriptions and charts of effects of expired potions, for fun.  Further, one set of random charts was converted to Javascript code to create the Magic Item Shop Random Inventory Generator.

Although the major projects at Inkwell Ideas are Hexographer and the Coat of Arms Design Studio, another large task was the 2009 RPG Blog Readership Survey. Hopefully something similar will happen later in 2010, but with more collaboration with other blog writers. Using the RPG Bloggers list it can have questions tailored to more blog writers and receive a higher number of responses.

Because of Inkwell Ideas’ Hexographer product, there are often several articles on Worldbuilding topics.  Three of these were: Timelines (tips for creating a constructed world’s timeline),  10 Ways to Vary Your Game World’s Cultures and 10 More Ways to Vary Your Game World’s Cultures.

By far, three of the most popular entries were for map collections: 101 Fantasy City, Town and Village Maps; Two Sites with Hundreds of Real Historical City Maps (which included direct links to many of the best); and 25 Inn and Tavern Maps.

The Random Dungeon Generators Reviewed article was also very popular.

My favorite advice columns described how our groups often use experience point bonuses and listed the Top 5 Overlooked Rule Subsets of RPGs.

Yesterday I put together some charts for randomly creating city names that sound like English/United Kingdom cities.  Today I’ve put together another collection of charts to randomly create Chinese sounding city names.  In each case I’ve also noted a very rough translation of each base word. Most Chinese city names seem to be  a combination of two other Chinese words.

Using the charts you will get city names like: Juining, Zishan, Dongdao, and Guangxi.

For one (maybe two) of my other projects, I’m putting together some charts to randomly generate city names that are reminiscent of cities of varying cultures.  The first charts I’ve done are English/United Kingdom city names.  I’ve split up a number of the real city names, usually by syllable, then divided them into a random chart with three columns.  There’s also a chart for determining which columns to use to assemble the syllables.

Using these charts you can get city names like: Covenfield, Winbury, Oxenpool, and Lanham.  You may also get some bad results, but just re-roll or swap one syllable out.  Or ignore the random rolls completely and just pick syllables that sound good together.

Link: Random (or not) City Name Charts

I recently wrote 10 Ways to Vary Your Game World’s Cultures and promised more as I put together a larger piece on building a fantasy world’s culture.  I’ve already written about designing religions (with a couple of example fantasy religions), local campaign area design (also with examples), and fantasy world timelines.

So without further ado, here are 10 More Way to Vary Your Game World’s Cultures:

1. Food & Drink:  In your typical fantasy setting dwarves are heavy drinkers of Dwarven Spirits and other hard liquor and your typical fantasy elves have a taste for wine and may be vegetarian.  Those facts inject a very minimal cultural flavor.  Maybe in your world the dwarves and elves aren’t like that.  Or perhaps dwarves and elves of some cultures match those descriptions but dwarves and elves of some other cultures do not. Think through your fantasy setting.  If you have a race that primarily lives underground, what would be some of their delicacies?  How about underground gnomes who go crazy for sauteed Purple Worm?  Keep in mind the many mythical creatures in fantasy settings and consider that any of your cultures may have some unusual tastes.
2. Entertainment: How does a culture feel about gambling, theater, chariot races, gladiator combat? These are a few of the entertainment options available in larger fantasy cities.  But some cultures may look down on gambling (and the governments related to that culture may ban it) while other cultures may abhor violent gladiator battles and some others may think that a play is useless and for the weak.  For the literate in an educated culture, books can be another diversion.
3. Openness: Some cultures look forward to a dialog with members of other cultures, while other cultures may shun outsiders.  Cultures that are more open may be open because of religious practices (again, a religion is not the same as a culture, but a culture’s dominant religion will have an impact on that culture) or because the culture is already a mix of people with many different backgrounds.  On the other hand, some religions may be very insular and they may preach suspicion of others. Or perhaps a country has been attacked many times causing its culture(s)  to be wary of others.  In other cases, a recent plague may cause outsiders to be ostracized.
4. Pets and Domesticated Animals: In the real world, most modern western cultures typically consider dogs, cats, hamsters, etc. as pets and horses, cows, pigs, chickens, etc. as domesticated/farm animals.  Some other cultures think of some of these animal as holy, and yet other cultures may consider some of western cultures’ pet as food animals.  Changing these designations (animals that are typically pets vs. domesticated vs. food animals) can help vary your fantasy world’s cultures. (Who can forget “snake surprise” from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.)  However, considering the many typical fantasy creatures can further develop your fantasy world’s cultures.  Perhaps blink dogs are more common in part of your world so many people are just as likely to have one of them as they may have a normal dog.
5. Sleep: We spend 1/3 of our lives sleeping, so it shouldn’t surprise anyone that sleeping practices may vary.  Some cultures sleep on a minimum amount of padding while other may sleep on an incline.  Some real world cultures embrace an afternoon nap. Some cultures advocate sleeping with your children for several years, others push the children into a different room when they are only a few months old.
6. Travel: Many people in medieval times never traveled more than a few miles from their homes.  Knights, merchant traders, sailors and nobles were the exceptions.  In your game world, how typical was it for people to travel? Consider the answer to this for each social class in each culture that you are detailing.  Does magic help people travel more-so? How do the answers to these questions impact the views of the culture?
7. Legal System: While the legal system is a function of the government, the cultures of the country impact the legal system.  If the predominant religion is very peaceful, the legal system will have few laws that call for an eye-for-an-eye. On the other hand, a militaristic religion may allow for a very stringent penal code. Consider the culture you are creating and how that will impact the laws of the countries where the culture exists.
8. Slavery & Servitude: How is slavery viewed by the culture?  Is it forbidden and other cultures that have it are looked down upon? Or does the culture support it?  Who in the culture is a slave?  People who commit crimes? People who go into debt and can’t get out?  People conquered and taken captive in a war?
9. Marriage & Sexuality: As with some other aspects of culture, it is difficult to untie marriage and sexuality from religion and government.  The religions of a culture may take some stances on these issues and the government may have some laws on the issues as well.  Here’s a list of ways these issues can vary: marriage is rare because people don’t make long term commitments; marriage is only between a man and woman; marriage is allowed (or not) between different races (elves, dwarves, humans, gnomes, etc.); marriage is allowed between members of the same sex; a man (or woman) may have multiple spouses; marriage may only happen between three people (perhaps your fantasy world has a third sex as in The Left Hand of Darkness).  Of course there are more ways to vary these issues, but this list should get you started.
10. Economy: Does your culture’s values impact the local economy?  Perhaps a religious decree by the dominant culture forbids charging interest, as was the case many years ago for some. Maybe a particularly honest and lawful culture has a peasant class with a good standard of living.  This issue was the hardest for me to consider, so please post comments if you have suggestions on this or any of the other entries!