A Little About Me - The Need To Get It Just Right

A little while ago I was looking for the perfect numbered hex-map online.

This had started to become something of a nightmare for me. Although I know that they had one in the back of an old citybook by Judges Guild (that I had bought the same day in 1985 that I picked up FANTASY HERO), but I didn't like the size of the hexes involved. Frankly, they were too small for my eyes to make out. I'm sure I could have blown them up to something workable if I had gone to a copy shop but I just didn't have the energy to cart it all over there and get the hexes just so and start to transfer the other map (the one from Verbosh) that I was thinking of using.

This wasn't something that would have bothered me all that much about five years ago, or even ten years ago. Back then I would have done the extra work without blinking an eye. Whether or not my beleaguered eyes could see what I was doing wasn't something that was ever an issue when I was in my teens. I'm hardly in my teens anymore, though, and this is something I have to remind myself sometimes.

In my teens, I was the keener. I was the showman. I was the one in our group of friends who made the maps for things he was running when we were gaming -- specifically for the kind of huge complexes that the bad guys had when they were up to their nefarious villainy in our ongoing game of CHAMPIONS.

I tended to host a lot of the gaming sessions and I tended to do all the prep. I had tried to set the superhero game in the Marvel Universe back-in-the day, and that meant a lot of adaptation and guess work, and metric conversion, and (it being CHAMPIONS), a good deal of math. Math on a scientific calculator I had - this was long before computers were something most people used more than the TV. This was about three years before TSR licensed a proper Marvel game (and by that point we'd pretty well burned out on superheroes as it was and were playing a lot of JUSTICE INC. ) JUSTICE INC. was a pulp game
that I suspected I liked a lot more than the group (the troupe? maybe we WERE a troupe - I think I'm going to look into that), but we always seemed to have a good time. I liked the kind of meticulous work that went into game-prep and I always felt that it used to pay off, eventually, whenever I was running things - be it the superhero game I just mentioned or one of the Call of Cthulhu games that I ran for Blackmore and Michelle back in the 90s.

And here I was again, a couple of days ago. A couple of days ago I had promised a friend we'd be ready to game in about two weeks and I was trying to figure out the scale for the game map - or am, rather, still.

I managed to find the hex-grid I wanted online in an excellent resource site hosted by Lord Kilgore. He has a ton of other serviceable things just waiting for your usage, if you are so inclined.

Now I have to determine how many hexes I need per mega-hex for the sandbox styled D&D restart that I'm trying again after I burned out on it 18 months ago and wasted some time trying to excite myself for CALL OF CTHULHU again. I'll do CoC someday again but... just not feeling it.. This hex situation is something of a poser because, as it has been pointed out in a few places by a few people all of whom have had more recent practical experience with the question, that will really determine how much the people playing get to do during the course of a session - or depending on how often we can get together to play, if we get together to play. I think that will happen tho - I had enough happy players last time.

Every now and then, years ago and now even, especially on days when work or life had been a pretty nasty slog, I used to think that I might not have the time to do any of this. But then it kicks in again - the need to do this stuff and that great feeling of satisfaction when I have. Just today over lunch I was cut and pasting OSR versions of classic D&D spells into a new text file to make my own baseball-card-sized spell cards that makes it so the players have to choose things randomly. Also, so that sometime in the future I can just paperclip them to the stats of whatever antagonist my players are running up against rather than having to look em all up in the book again. I'm doing it as a time saving device. Really. No, REALLY. I am. Really.

I, mean, I turned 50 years old this year - what the Hell am I getting myself into?

Well, lemme tell you about that here and talk about my game too.