A Decision Has Been Reached

After many hours lost reading various opinions and suggestions about campaign settings, I have decided to start with the compromise method despite Tony Bath's misgivings. That method, again, is historical factions over fictional geography.

However, taking a cue from his suggestion to look to fiction for lands to fight over,  I will use as a basis the previously shared maps from Tales of My Father's Dragon.  The idea for the campaign is based ever so loosely on the alternate history concept of "what if Russia really did invade New Zealand?"

Instead of New Zealand,  we have Blueland - by my estimates (I'm assuming 10-20 miles per hex) it's just a few thousand square miles and only a very small portion is inhabited. Tangerina, while not part of this campaign as ground to fight over,  may still have a role to pay in the action, if only via the narrative.

That decided, I needed to convert the map into something I can use for a game.

Enter Google Drawing:

Blueland with hex overlay

All I've done here is to upload the picture I took the other day into Google Draw, and then using the hexagon shape tool, added a rough overlay. 

To speed the process up, I laid down two or three rows by 8 wide, grouped them, and then copy and pasted. I quickly lined the groups up, and while I could have done a better job, it's good enough that I can use it to convert the map into Worldographer / Hexographer.

Converting does require decisions to be made, such as, is the hex with part of a mountain and part flat land mountainous or flat? 

This is the same kind of decision those of us who enjoy grid based games make all of the time. There is no wrong answer - I tend to choose what I think is more appealing visually when looking at the resulting map. If you're new to this idea, I highly recommend Bob Cordery's The Portable Wargame to see how he converts the well-known Hook's Farm to a grid.

I also decided to draw the entirety of Blueland, which requires filling in with my imagination what the rest of the map looks like. In this way, I can limit the scope to an island invasion campaign, rather than a continental war. Conveniently, this is a campaign-type addressed by C.S. Grant in his book on campaigns.

Because I want the desert portion to serve as the backdrop for handful-of-figures skirmish / RPG-lite exploration games - I am walling it off behind imposing mountains on all sides. Assuming a way to access the interior easily is eventually discovered, it could also open up ground for future battles.