When I started my campaign, the first thing I did was try to put together a campaign map. I found numerous maps of different areas of the land, largely inconsistent, but I ended up piecing them together into one master map and getting it into D20 Pro. I've been in a retro mood lately, and I bought a hex map maker (Hex Kit) last week, and I redid the whole region map in old school hex crawl style. I'm pretty happy with it. Here's a link to the file in dropbox:
What do you think?
Don
Nice maps ! Thank you
I might borrow Fenrick Talon's map for showing the blighted area in the Fangwood once my players start Prisoners of the Blight. Thank you.
Looking over the map, I think that some areas featured during the campaign ought to be highlighted more. I don't see the Valley of Aloi from Siege of Stone on it. I wonder whether the Old Tower hex adjacent to the Wasp Cabin hex is supposed to be the ranger's outpost at Section I, All-Eye's Woods in Trail of the Hunted, but the outpost is a treehouse in a forested swamp rather than a stone tower in a forested grassland. And what about Keloch's homestead at section J, Hunter's Stead?
I am amused how individual choices vary. I had named Fenrick Talon's Woodstride Creek as Battle Creek myself, a pun on the similarity between Keloch and the Kellog cereal company in Battle Creek, Michigan. And then I put a village, Polebridge, where that creek reached the Marideth River, because travelers from Tamran to Phaendar would need an inn for the night right about there.
I had encountered a major setting problem due to the disagreements between maps: River Shipping from Longshadow. I had copied the endpaper maps, Southern Nirmathas and Ironfang Territories, from the modules for my players. Those maps clearly showed an impassable waterfall on the Marideth River between Longshadow and Phaendar. In contrast, the description of Longshadow in Assault on Longshadow said that the city had significant river shipping. Nope, that shipping can't go anywhere, due to the waterfall. I suspect that the writer, Thurston Hillman, who filled out the details on Longshadow never saw the waterfall, because other maps of Nirmathas lack it.
Researching the issue, I found Fenrick Talon's April 2018 thread Marideth River and major map disparities. Billy Buckman pointed out the fall line halfway between Longshadow and Phaendar that marked the east border of the Hollow Hills. Alas, the hex map software has no way of showing a fall line. I used to live in Savage, Maryland, a former mill town built on a fall line, so my wife and two daughters--three of my players--understood fall lines.
I finally invented a canal around the waterfall for that river shipping. And even then, the fort that the Ironfang Legion built at Phaendar was a new obstacle to shipping, so my players went to Fort Phaendar two modules early in order to restore shipping and free their former neighbors.