On Wed, 12 May 2004, Gary wrote:



> Something about the inorganic, mathematical nature of a grid, however,

> turns me off. In a perfect world there`d be something that had the

> functionality of a grid with the more naturalistic method of more

> irregular borders.



There`s no reason you can`t have both: that`s what using many small hexes

is for. A hex three miles in diameter has an area of about 7.8 square

miles; you can fit 128 to 192 of these in a "typical" rulebook province of

1000 to 1500 square miles. With that many little bits to arrange, it`s

perfectly possible to represent even weird shapes like Bhaine in Taeghas

tolerably well; the only drawback is that it`s a rather time-consuming

task. Ideally, all one really has to do is photo-enlarge sections of the

map enough that you can just lay over them one of the clear plastic sheets

printed with a small hex grid which were distributed in several of the

other 2e boxed sets. If I were running an active campaign, I`d be headed

to Kinko`s right now to do just this.



> Back in the early D&D days we used to map out the domains ruled by PCs

> using 1 mile hexes inside larger, 30 mile hexes.



The Companion Set used squares inside of the hex, as I recall (or at

least, modules like CM2 did), but yes. =) A BR province is about one and

a half 30-mile hexes, such as may be found on the 1983 Greyhawk map.



> That was a big of a leap in scale, but I`m thinking that something

> like that would work, and would allow for a scaling effect of a domain

> from the local, manse level to whatever level one wanted.



Those rules were designed for minor nobles who only ruled one or two

provinces; beyond that, they grew too unwieldy. The thing which first

drew me to Birthright was the larger scale of domains it made practical;

perhaps all one really needs to describe the low-level structure of

province and guild holdings is a translation table to the "old way"....





Ryan Caveney