A new world... and a new campaign

Some colleagues and I are starting a  gaming group - we played our first game on Saturday gone and are planning to get together perhaps on a weekend every month or so. I won't be running this game, as someone else has volunteered to be DM, so for the first time in ages, I'm actually playing a PC!

My character is Sir Darlan of the House of Vong, a minor noble who is also a Paladin. I've never played a Paladin before, and I've never played 5th Ed either, so it's all new to me. There will be a report at some point soonish.

Meanwhile, I'd done a bit of work on a setting for a game if I ended up running an old-school game (we only worked out who was DMing about 9 days ago). As it won't see action in its current form in either of my other campaigns, I thought I might post it up here. This was the basis for a campaign I was planning...

Iriond 1411336555

http://donjon.bin.sh/fantasy/world/

The plan was to start simple - a location, with a few encounters round it, possibly with a vaguely oriental feel - somewhere with plains-nomads and ancient and empires. Something away from my normal generic western/northern Europe setting anyway. Perhaps I can utilise some means of generating adventures from the pdf I just downloaded - the Swords and Wizardry scenario generator pdf, which though its more geared to a faux-Japanese setting is close enough to what I'm after I think.

I rolled 4 4 8 4 9 10

So the party meets in a Tavern

with a Sensei (Senior cleric?)

They hear of a Kidnap

by a Ninja (thief/assassin?)

Which they can foil by going to a Dark fortress

and Winning a contest.

I could have just taken it from there, though of course the players might not.

Except that I got a bit carried away with a hex-mapping technique from http://www.welshpiper.com/hex-based-campaign-design-part-1/ - though in line with the hex-maps of the Known World from BECMI, I'm not using the very sensible 1-5-25 mile hex-progression suggested, but the slightly-more-difficult 1-6-24 mile progression.

Anyway this is the 6/24 map I came up with, based on a small area of the far north-west of the Iriond map, in the area between the Bladegrass Plains, Tumunzar Spires mountain range, and Forest of Thorns, all of which seem like excellent adventuring locales to me (I started making icons for the hexes, but then decided on colour-coding instead):

The marker is for settlement for the PCs to begin in; the area is mostly mixed plain and forest, with some hills and a few little bits of other odd terrain thrown in - a few lakes (one of which is large enough to make it onto the Iriond map if you look really hard), some hills and swamps, and some odd bits of desert, which I'm thinking are more like dust-bowl type areas than proper desert.

I've subsequently started keying in the hexes with encounters (a few individual hexes have changed since I started so this doesn't quite represent an accurate map), and pretty rapidly populated the area, as least in outline. I also spent far too long playing with the random generators at Chaotic Shiny...

The hex with the settlement and the six surrounding large hexes are done - at least in terms of keyed encounters. That's pretty much an area with a radius of 36 miles around the town. There are 49 keyed encounters in that zone including a dozen settlements of different types, a few monster lairs, 6 different terrain types and some locations where frankly weird stuff is going on.

I also had a blast thinking of various themes and stuff that I wanted to include. Not sure where it's all going in the end, perhaps it'll be used somewhere!