Gaps

Coming off a rush of work, I can breathe air again ... and since I haven't posted since last Tuesday, I feel ready to shove something onto the blog.  In the basket, I have in mind that post about Muetar, and a post about "facilities" and micro-worldbuilding.  However, these seem like too much work for this particular Sunday, so I'll write another post about mapmaking.

Come around the end of day, I'm not up much for D&D rocket-science, so I pick tasks where the skull-sweat's done and I can plug-and-play build.  This describes the map generation I've been describing for awhile now.  The generation system was hard, with a lot of contemplative design involved, but the build itself has unexpected moments, includes an easy creative element and is pleasantly satisfying.  So it's easy to plug away at it for an hour here, a half-hour there, and let the general picture take form.  Here's where the 6-mile version is now (complete with extraneous, bothersome notes):

When you're working on something like this, write your notes directly on the work; think of it like scaffolding that you put up around the building during the construction process, knowing that you'll inevitably pull it down at the end.  If you're keeping too many notes on pieces of paper or in other windows, you're only increasing the number of times you're being distracted while working, undermining your general creative flow.

As the map unfolds, I've recognised a creative stage that's occurred for me many times before, and that's partly what this post's about.  See, in the beginning, there are doubts about the methodology as I begin to apply it.  Plus there's a stage of adapting myself to the method.  For instance, remembering to draw in the streams and add the hills and include the borders, as well as the extra little villages and then the roads, plus the hex numbers and oh, the hammers and food and coins.  At first, I forget something or put the wrong figures in, or forget to set up the background guides so the numbers fit consistently ... and this means going back over and over to fix and add and fix and add.  Which can be frustrating.

This can be a threshold to get past — as for a time we can believe our mistakes prove the fault of the method or vise versa.  This may cause us to step back and re-evaluate the method, either wasting our time doing that or even dismembering a perfectly good method by inventing reasons not to like it.  This thinking can stymie forward progress for years.

So, when encountering the frustration, I tell myself I'm in the "educating myself" stage and keep moving forward — knowing, as I do, that if there IS something wrong with the method, this will become self-evident, inevitably.  Perhaps I will have gone down a long road before that happens, but in fact I'm gathering knowledge as I go ... so if it IS the wrong road, I know exactly why.  I'm not guessing.

I'm pretty much through this stage, however.  Oh, I'll go on making small mistakes and fixing them, that happens forever with slightly diminishing frequency.  The stage I'm reaching now is quite different.  The above indicates the expansion of thirty-five 20-mile hexes ... and the process is beginning to set in as a routine; meaning that I'm less and less moved by each new hex as it's added.

Anyone who's settled in to create a megadungeon knows this feeling.  There's an uncomfortable growing feeling that "sameness" is becoming an issue.  In my case, because the world's being generated from a complicated series of templates, it has to be remembered that sameness is an expected consequence of the world itself being, well, very much the same over large areas.  If the reader has a strong familiarity with places like Nebraska, upper Sweden, central Spain or most places, they should know that the scenes don't markedly change over mere 20 mile distances.  The changes that exist, if they exist at all, are tiny and subtle, which can kill motivation over the long haul.  That "wow, this really looks good" feeling dissipates as the creator's thoughts turn to, "Sigh, all right, one more hex."  Inevitably, this becomes, "I'm done, I think, for awhile."

At the speed I'm mapping 6-mile hexes, I could literally spend the next ten years sketching out Europe.  The map on the right, the base 20-mile hex sheet map that the above is from, has more than a thousand hexes.  Imagine how long this alone would take.

The combination of apparent pointless repetition and impossible-to-achieve scale provides a devastating combination, axing the wherewithal to keep going ... which is why most creators don't.  They let the size of the project infringe on the enjoyment of carrying forward, thinking the goal is to "produce" rather than to "experience."

I suppose I'm lucky that it's the latter with me.  I started this post by saying that I find the mapmaking calming and satisfying at the day's end.  Adding one bit after another created the big sheet map in the first place, and the other 75 sheet maps like it.  Time lets us accomplished many things ... particularly as we stop being conscious of that time.  When we let it work for us instead of against us.

Comprehending this, we see life in a much larger sense; we stop worrying about a particular day or how much time was lost in a given week.  One week is merely a part of five hundred weeks, or a thousand weeks ... they don't matter in and of themselves.  With all the weeks left to go between the reader's present age and when they reach my 57 years ... there's so much that can yet be accomplished.  So don't worry about it.

Of course, if you are my age, then ... if I can make plans for the next 20 years, without worrying about the reliability of those plans, you should be able to as well.  You've lived long enough.

But ...

Let's put all that away and address a different bug.  Which isn't one.

With reference to my roads & routes page, take a look at some of the results I'm getting for a backward part of Wallachia.  As an explanation, the large white numbers are just the infrastructure totals for the 20-mile hexes underlying this map.  As I work, I go back and forth between having the background showing in the Publisher program as I work, and it's helpful to always have these numbers showing when laying out roads.

There are several places where routes on the map end, without making a connection.  This is intentional.  Since by the generation method, each 20-mile hex is responsible for its own roads and routes, and since priority for those go to the most important adjacent hex ... sometimes, a minor hex will build a route to the end of that hex, which the next hex over fails to connect, because it's priorities are more important hexes.  Thus, we get a situation like the one below.

To the right of Brebu, there are a cluster of hexes in the upper right of the picture.  These had a total infrastructure of 19 (number not showing, because I don't need it on the top map any more), with a group of type-5 hexes.  By the routes page, this meant it only has 4 outgoing roads; and since two adjacent hexes had an infrastructure of zero (being all mountains), the 19-pt. hex could afford to lavish routes into Brebu and south to Tiparesti and the group of hexes marked "12" in the pic.  Granted, not great routes, but routes nonetheless.

Unfortunately (if you look on the top map of the post), that 12-pt. group is surrounded by hexes that have 115, 108, 61 and 56 infrastructure ... and it too is limited to only four routes.  So it can't afford to send routes to that 19-pt. group.  The result?  A broken road, divided by a 6.67 mile gap, or one "6-mile" hex.

Is it a bug?  On the surface, we tend to think so, because we imagine that someone would have come along and fixed that gap by now — which is fair.  So far, I've failed to explain that every hex is connected by a kind of route not shown: a "path," which my wiki defines as

"very uneven, narrow routes over a hard clay surface and are impassable to carts. Mounts must be ridden single file. The width is typically between 4 and 6 feet wide. Surfaces are covered with roots and scrub, with brooks and rivulets that must be jumped. There are occasional places, every few miles, where the path squeezes between trees or rock outcroppings."

Which means there is a route over that gap, the path described.   The upper route is a "cart track," while the lower is a "dirt road."  Presumedly, there are depots between the two ends, that really only need to be occupied for about 4-6 weeks a year, during the harvest season.  At that time, some farmers from the north bring their produce south to the depot, where they sell it; then their produce is loaded on animals and transshipped to the south road head and parked at another depot ... where it's loaded on carts and wagons for shipment further south.

But that doesn't answer the question, "Why doesn't someone just complete the road?"  Well, because it's barely used 11 months out of the year.  We know that, because the combined infrastructure is only 31 pts., and much of that looks to other hexes, such as the routes to Brebu and Tiparesti.  Only 1/7th of both hexes is really concerned about that broken route, which only represents a total infrastructure of 4.42.  And really, the connections means less to the southern link than it does to the northern one.

We live in a car-focused infrastructure system, which means everywhere must have a road ... but much of North America didn't have that as recently as my father's generation.  By 1995, every shitwater town in Canada and America was replete with three or four gas stations, Burger Kings, McDonalds, Tim Hortons and what else ... but even I can remember a time from my teens when "gas alleys" didn't exist at all in towns with as many as 10,000 residents.  Imagine what it was like in the 17th century, when my world takes place, or the 14th and 15th centuries, when most people set their D&D worlds.  A lack of services is NORMAL ... something we don't even think about as we include an inn in every village, along with a blacksmith, an apothecary, a jeweller and a grocer selling weapons and armour, for lawd's sake.

Even in Europe, large parts of the game world ought to be completely devoid of the most basic services, including a tavern or even a rentable bed.  Here I'm saying that even roads are a luxury.

And if the players feel they can use their coin to build a road, picking from a dozen disconnected but potentially linked ends, all the better.  It's one more thing for them to spend their money on, isn't it?  And make the world a better place.  And build some contacts with an area.  And some credibility and status.  Yes?

Which I've argued is the reason for building a deep and varied world, with lots of weird "irrational" bits in it.  Because "gaps" are opportunities ... and in a believable world, there are always gaps.