Decad(enc)e

 

The above remains my favorite hex type, though I do need to spend some more quality time around the Rockies to make sure. As I write this, I find myself once again in the great North American rainforest; this time in the western reaches of North Carolina, just on the far side of the Smoky Mountains where the Blue Ridge and Piedmont blend. 

I'm sitting on a deck a good 25 feet above the forest floor, and the trees within arm's reach stretch another 30 feet or more still. It's raining but that rain has yet to filter through the canopy. It's cool and green and good.

--

It is, as surprising to me as anyone else, the tenth anniversary of the blog, the illustrious Aluminum Anniversary. There's likely a time when I would have spun that into Something Relatable, maybe pulling out that merchant route calculator or what-have-you, but today is not that day. It hasn't been that day for quite a while - you may note that my plan to get through the backlog of unpublished posts here did not get out of it's own way, and we managed to miss the entirety of 2021. I was close to missing this minor milestone, in fact, but while packing for the trip I suddenly realized it was time for a Useless Summer Post - so let's go for whatever place on the podium the aluminum medal stands:

This was more than anything else a way for me to talk to myself with another voice, a luxury and a decadence, which has evidently lost its luster. I considered fading away, but will instead flicker out; spitting out the the grit of unpublished thoughts as it's become clear I'm not interested in enpearling them. Their irritation is more impediment than inspiration now.

Thanks to those that read, thanks to those that commented, and thanks to those that linked. I really did and do appreciate it.

ACKS Blackmarsh (4) - Viz

Good day to you, my most loyal of subscribers who have yet to delete their ties to this humble blog in a huff due to a severe shortage of content! While I cannot call this a comeback, I can call it at least a rolling over in one's sleep. My archive of unfinished, unpublished content is a wide field of weeds I have yet to pluck, place in the first cup I can reach in the counter and present to you as a doe-eyed child presents the first dandelion of spring to his or her mother. 

Behold, the first, tallest weed:


In the Smoking Bay lives a wizard, on a mountain that once fell from the sky.

It's rich in 'viz' - the Blackmarsh setting's version of "magic in physical form". Viz is vaguely defined, to whit it "could be a flask of pure spring water, a newly bloomed flower, or an iridescent rock". It's a thing that is another thing - 'viz' is a substance that takes on the characteristics of another object.

Much like other things, you know it when you see it. From my reading of Blackmarsh, 'viz' is something that's constantly renewing in the environment - there's ash trees in the Greywoods whose seeds contain viz.

It's like if "abiotic oil" was a real thing - here's this source of power just leaching into the world that just needs to be collected.

The Value of Viz

The two things that viz gives you is the ability to cast spells without wiping it from memory, one "viz" used per spell level, and it's worth 100GP towards magical item creation.

I'd mentioned earlier that one could probably treat viz and Dwimmermount's azoth as the same thing.

Turns out that's pretty darn easy.

Dwimmermount (ACKS), pg 360 - refined azoth is valued at 100 GP per ounce. Note the descriptors of what viz could be above - poetic, yes, but, also very much possibly things that could weigh an ounce.

So it could be deduced that some process in Blackmarsh is exuding refined azoth into or as everyday objects, including plant life and vermin. That's...kinda worrisome, really.

The expanded capabilities of refined azoth from various sources:

• The GP value of refined azoth (100GP/ounce) can substitute for equivalent value for:
• Some or all of the base cost of magical research
• Some or all the special components required to create a magic item or perform a ritual spell
• Some or all of the precious materials used to create a magic item, perform a ritual spell, create a construct, or grant undeath
• If consumed (literally) the  spellcaster regains the ability to cast a spell of a level previously expended - one spell level per ounce.
• Substitute the full base cost of alchemical transformation ( crossbreeding, creation of brand new lifeforms, or gaining immortality as detailed in Dwimmermount pg 399)

From Dwimmermount, it has a number of side effects; it's combustible for one, acting as double-strength flaming oil.

Touching or consuming refined azoth causes a save; if failed, a set of tables determines effects that are a mix of helpful and baleful.

But, as things go, just because it's potentially harmful doesn't mean people won't seek it out - we don't need a fantasy world to prove that. There's a bit of a 'gold rush' theme tied to viz, but nothing terribly defined, as far as amounts or ease of finding. 

We can make a guess about the relative value of viz.

A load of semiprecious stones weighs a stone, and averages 1,000GP in value. Precious gems are the same weight, and 3000GP in value.

A stone is about 10 pounds. There's 16 ounces in a pound, so there's ~160 ounces in a stone, and therefore a "load" of viz weighs a stone and is worth ~16,000GP at face value.

Sources of Viz

Let's assay the landscape:

The Greywoods: Several hexes - "grey ash" trees drop seeds that are a "potent source" of viz.

Hex 0105: the ruins of Daur Anthar, there was a vein of metal rich in viz.

Hex 0217: Oldan Hold; established as a base for dwarves from Bolzak seeking viz; the lord of the keep, Mazardan, heads an adventuring company seeking viz. In fact, the dwarven Lord Mazardan will pay 200 GP per viz brought to him; that's "over value" for it's use.

If we take the face value of 100GP, that's a 200% markup. We can have a maximum demand modifier of +4, I believe, modifying a 4d4 roll for market price - that's a maximum roll of 20 on 4d4+4, to get to 200%.

Clearly, Oldan Hold wants viz, enough that they're willing to pay maximum adjusted market price for it.

Hex 0616: Mages of the Bright Empire once harvested viz from a half-mile long, 50' deep gorge.

Hex 0804: Stardell Falls, a 40 foot waterfall, is a "rich source" of viz.

Hex 0913: Castle Blackmarsh, survived for a time on the traffic of folks seeking viz. Has an elite association of adventurers called "the Viz Club".

Hex 1112: Bright Empire's last treasure ships from Blackmarsh; contains crates of viz.

Hex 1309: The Mountain That Fell; "incredibly rich" in viz; guarded by a high level mage.

Hex 2114: Mermaids collect shells for a pool in the center of the island; they turn into viz during the full moon (4d6 of them).

Hex 2401: A giant ant lair; 1 in 20 eggs are viz.

Hex 2410: Large pillars with compartments "where viz can be inserted".


That's a lot of different things. I'm interested in what I can pull out of this and define. (and yes, I realize I'm missing the point of not defining it, much like the robot who knows the chemical composition of the rose but will never know love, but this is my fun-time, let me go)

The Mountain that Fell

...is a good place to start. 

Presume the Wizard of the Isle is a 14th level mage. (Dwimmermount includes a progression table for ACKS up to 18th, but we'll stick with 14 for now) His actual HD may be higher, he's probably transmogrified himself, since he's been around for centuries. It may be construed he's unlocked some form of immortality  as per Dwimmermount, pg 408.

He has no domain or realm.

The realm he presumably could be running, however, is an empire of millions. 

The minimum assumed income for an empire; ACKS pg 230, is somewhere in the neighborhood of 385,000GP per month. For completeness, that number jives with a 14th level character's Monthly Henchmen Wages (350K).

His expenses may technically be lower, as he's not providing for a population, but that could be easily subsumed into whatever measures he's taken and must maintain to guard the island itself. That golem probably doesn't come cheap.

Since the mountain is "incredibly rich" in viz, the Wizard is presumably actively doing wizardly things, one could posit that his "income" is gained via the procurement of viz. Since he's an immortal wizard on an island that exudes magic, I'm going to take a wild leap and say he probably doesn't spend money on mundane things like...food, maybe, or fancy clothes, or anything that isn't furthering his research or protecting his research from others. I honestly don't think this guy would have apprentices, he probably has a small company of artificial creatures doing the extraneous work.

I'll continue, then, computing this base 385K of income as if it's all coming to him in viz.

Base division means, then, he's pulling 3,850 ounces, or 240 pounds (24 stone) of viz out of the mountain each month.

He can't spend that much in a month, though - not on the things that viz can be spent on.

The most expensive things our Wizard can do, on a day-to-day basis, is creating constructs, crossbreeds, or doing necromancies. For per-month output, nothing beats max-value construct creation, at something like 27.5K per month in created value. We can take the Abstract Magical Research rules and figure that this wizard only fails on a roll of 2+ (some special HFH class ability, can't recall which), invert the 1.05x multipler for cost, and easily state that:

The Wizard of the Isle takes in 27.5Kgp of Azoth per month, and converts that to abstract magical research value totalling 26.2Kgp per month, in items, constructs, or just plain library value, as needed.

Mining for Viz

We know how much viz is worth -  - how much viz do we pull out of that space?

Let's take the Axioms mining rules as an example, and think of it like a gem mine.

We know 140 carats is about an ounce, and by density a diamond of that size is about three-quarters a cubic inch in volume. That's not a bad size for what we see above in the descriptions for viz sources - seeds, shells. Giant Ant eggs might be up to 8 lbs, but maybe it's just a portion of the egg.

Value-wise, it's way off though; a 140ct diamond is probably damn near invaluable - in the real world a 163 carat diamond went for about $34 million at auction. So, we'll table that for now, and we'll look instead at results.

Each bit of viz is 100gp, and we need 275 bits per month to fuel research. That's about 17 pounds of viz at an ounce (140 carats) per bit, and as such we need to dig out 38,080 carats per month.

That's a very big gem mine. Like, wizard-did-it big. Fortunately for us a wizard has indeed done it.

We need to net 16 times the yearly profit of an ornamental gem mine per month. If 200 work gangs produce 2,400 carats in a year, that's 12 carats per gang per year - or, 1 carat per gang per month.

That's 38,080 work gangs, or 190,400 people, digging out 11.4 million cubic feet of material per month - a cube of material 225 foot on a side, or a small mound about 80 ft tall and 160 ft in width.

Clearly inexplicable, cause as the Dungeon Master says,

OR DOES HE?

Well, so, the Wizard did it, and if we've got a wizard with a teleporting construct that guards the surface of the mountain, what the heck you think he's been up to underneath? That's right - horrible spiky bladed relentless digging machines.

From D@W:C we know that monstrous workers multiply their labor rate by their normal load divided by 5. 

Giant Crabs seem diggy, have a load of 210; divided by 5 that's 42, that's 4,533 giant crab constructs.  (190,400 lazy humans divided by 42)

That's ridiculous and terrible, but is it the best we can do? Of course not.

Purple Worms, the very essence of "dig", clock in at a load of 320; that's a divisor of 64 or 2,975 purple worm looking constructs roiling up to the lab to barf out little bits of viz every couple days.

That's pretty ridiculous and quite terrible, but I'mma stop you right there, and tell you who has the greatest normal load of ALL TIME.

SPERM WHALE.

(greatest load...sperm whale... just, you know. Enjoy that.)

Boasting a 2400st normal load, that's a divisor of 480, and so 397 sperm whale constructs constantly churning the nethers of the mountain, surfacing in some infinite dance loop of choreographed terror to spit collected viz out of their blowholes and into some sort of collection apparatus.

That gold construct's not there for defense. He's there to warn you that you're hilariously out of your league.

Wizards cheat though...

The best way to run a high level wizard is to assume that the wizard has a copy of the rulebooks of the game she lives in.

The best CCF in the L&E monster creation rules is 0.430, for the Coleopteran/Beetle body form, with a set BME of 1.62. Weight is (HD*10)^BME, and so CCF*(HD*10)^BME)/5 is the formula for figuring out the divisor - or, 0.430*((HD*10)^1.62)/5.

That simplifies to 16*HD, assuming I remember how to math. If we want 397 beetles with a 480 divisor, that's a 30 HD beetle. At 30HD the beetle form is 10,300 lbs, merely gigantic instead of colossal, costing with at least one "*" ability 65,000 gp.

Technically it's a bigger construct in HD than a 14th level mage can make, but, only by 2HD, I feel like there was maybe a proficiency in a later book to give a bit of a level bump, and if not, there should be. Or, again, the referenced Wizard already exceeded mortal limitations.

400ish gigantic beetle-looking constructs. roiling around in that mountain. My guess is that they don't even remove the material, they just fill it in behind themselves, and there's just something that makes little tiny bits of 'viz' spontaneously generate that they store in their giant midguts until they emerge engorged and ready to vomit it out.

Alternatively, assume there's some time period between the digging and the filling, and at any given point there's 11.4 million cubic feet of tunnel - let's say these guys make 20x20 tunnels, so that's...28,560 linear feet of random tunnels PCs could blunder into and explore for a little bit before they are summarily chewed up or crushed by the next gigantic beetle construct to cross their path.

Anyway, it took the Wizard about 78 years to make all those beetles, assuming he did it by himself, using the abstract rules. It's left as an exercise for the reader to figure out how to shorten that. I'd suggest a construct-making construct. Or, actually, a construct-making construct-making construct?

A Number of Irelands

In looking at various ways to abstract the game down to its fundamentals, one starts looking at things outside the rules a bit - or, things that start to intrude on the fiction of a game world.

In a system where building strongholds and ruling lands is a thing, one might step back and ask how best to enable it - what ought one do to provide the opportunity?

The guidelines say something like this, when talking about the status of a hex as being civilized, borderlands, or wilderness:

• Within 50 miles of a large town, it is civilized.
• Within 25 miles of the civilized border, it is borderlands.
• Else, it's wilderness.

Now - some of the above relies a bit on the assumptions that settlement patterns and the general traffic of "civilization" tend to tamp down on the occurrence of wandering monsters - the bellwether of hex status, and makes no nods towards the realities of terrain, etc. We will assume for the moment this works as stated.

Assume a spherical cow domain.

and there's the map. Blue is our little center large town. The green bits then are the 50 mile radius around that town that is civilized by default; then the yellow is our borderlands, and the red our wilderness, as we have to end it somewhere, and another 25 miles out is fine.

Our landmass is the platonic ideal of such things for campaign purposes - a disc 200 miles wide. If we look at that through a lens of high occupancy, if not maximum:

	Area (sq mi)	6m Hexes	Fam/Hex	Possible Families
Civilized Green	7854	252	500	126000
Borderland Yellow	9818	315	200	63000
Wild Red	13744	441	100	44100
TOTAL	31416	1008		233100

You can see that the consecutive areas of C/B/W embiggen, because geometry, and there's about twice as much wilderness as there is civilized area. 

233K families is a principality. We're looking at a Class II city there in the middle, 4 or 5 Class IV large towns (which would kinda bulge out the civilized area, but we'll deal with that later), then maybe 12-15 Class V's scattered at the edge of the borderlands.

More realistically, the totals may be more like one half or three quarters those levels; perhaps a Class III city as the centermark, with the outlying cities barely reaching IV status.

The demographics of either of those aren't horrific - you're looking at a 10th to 12th level NPC at the top. A party that's focused on their goals can knock that over and take control - or at least gain enough for a credible shot at independence. Or, if we're setup already with a set of independent smaller domains, perhaps conquering one and uniting the island from there is on the menu.

Out in the interwebs there's the idea of measuring things in the number of Libraries of Congress, as far as data goes, or the number of Rhode Islands, in terms of area.

For this, however, we might state that for a campaign maybe all you need is the minimum of one Ireland...

...in order to  have a compelling space for a set of would-be conquerors to operate in.

As I recall, Jack Vance's Lyonesse was near the size of Ireland - so - I find myself in proper company.

The world is yours.

(had to retitle the post, can't believe I missed a chance at a Motorhead reference?)

For Christmas, I give you the world:


or an approximation on 96 mile (approximately) hexes.

I've gotten my hex map project to a point where I'm using it in-game; and rather than go down my next rabbit-hole of figuring out the effects of population on forest coverage (and thereby illustrating the concentrations of population on the map itself, vs trackless forest), I thought I'd take a stab at replacing another bit of my toolchain with my own code - the one that takes the spherical grid and aligns it to a classic 'flat' hex map grid.

That's the initial result.

Few things to note:

• The grey-blue or whatever was marking out 96 mile hexes fully within the 0-200m bathymetry of the ocean. Those 'lines' are where the code tripped on the fact some of the shapefiles are broken up into individual shapes.
• The triangular inclusions into the map is where pentagons exist on the grid; the pentagons are what allow it to 'wrap' unto a sphere. My code is currently ignoring them, so bits of the landmasses, like where western Europe breaks off of Asia, are rotated off to one side or another. It's going to be an interesting problem to stitch those back together without human intervention, while keeping the same side of all the hexes 'north'.

But, not at all bad for an initial stab. Once I solve the 'split' thing, I'll come back through and figure out how to 'zoom in' on individual hexes rather than regenerate the grid at the wanted scale.

Hope ya'll are having a good holiday.

Great Random Encounters; Hexomancy (III)

Bit of a slow summer post. I'm a little low on interesting things to say; I've been doing a lot of backend stuff.


Vacation bore fruit in many excellent experience-granting encounters for the girls:

That's a sea turtle nest hatching. My wife noticed it while getting some sunrise pictures; we waited until the volunteer who keeps tracks of such things came by.

She determined it was stalled, decided to excavate, and the girls got to help escort baby turtles down to the shore.

Those dudes are about the size of your palm; maybe...80 or so in the nest? It's surprisingly deep.

We found a solitary baby the next afternoon; he'd got washed up by the surf; took him to the local rescue.

The earlier night 4 different moms came up to lay; we evidently just missed a 5th green sea turtle - these you are seeing are the "usual" loggerhead.


---



I'm having a lot of fun, as I can, with that TextMapper program, and my intervening shim:

I've taken a turn from Alexis over at The Tao of DND, and I've indicated the average elevation of a hex. As it's a small experimental map, I've smooshed everything together to get something representative. That purple over in 0907 is 6,248 meters - ~20,500 feet - which comfortably holds the tallest 150 or so mountains on the planet. It's likely, depending on where this would be on a planet, anything redder/purpler than 0307/0606/0805/1005 is above the timberline.

Those rivers are drawn SVG paths; as are the borders. You can see I've got realm borders, then up there in Vassalville I've bordered a subdomain out of the main domain.

I've got some reordering to do in presentation - SVG is "last writer wins", so you can see my borders are over my town names, etc. I've already split out certain types of terrain (the elevation, rivers, lakes) from "objects" - towns, whatever.

There's some wiggly bits still. Rivers change sizes oddly, I guess I need to plop a little reducer object down. I need to work on shoreline presentation - that seems like it'll have to be another full layer.

After a bit of a break on this I'll probably start looking at showing vegetation and landmarks - I expect I may be able to find an inoffensive way to show peaks of hills or mountains. I think I'll also lay down subhexes under the rivers to "depress" them from the surrounding land - might be a nice effect, getting the rivers to carve through my hills and mountains.

Hexomancy (II) and the Summer Post

So, some putzing around with the TextMapper software mentioned earlier got me here-ish:

which is kind of a start? I'd have exposed the image as the actual SVG, but evidently Blogger or whatever really mangled the text sizing, so it looked like junk.

I'm utilizing the concept from James Bennett (also mentioned last post) of splitting the hex into thirds - using the northwest for elevation, the southwest for temperature/vegetation, and I'll use the east third for information about other features - probably civilization features, like...well, whatever.

The hex-thirds are custom SVG paths, filled with a solid color. The mountains and trees were drawn in Inkscape, aligned correctly, and defined as path objects. and the raw "text" that makes up an SVG was cut and pasted into the TextMapper resource file. Same with the "Cave" for Dwimmermount, but I took that from Wikipedia.

The little "city circles" are...XML circles, and the text on top is a custom XML text.

 The source file looks like so:

<path id="nw-mountain" fill="sienna" d="M -100,0 L 0,0 L 50,-86.6 L -50,-86.6 Z"/>
<path id="nw-hill" fill="peru" d="M -100,0 L 0,0 L 50,-86.6 L -50,-86.6 Z"/>
<path id="nw-marsh" fill="yellowgreen" d="M -100,0 L 0,0 L 50,-86.6 L -50,-86.6 Z"/>
<path id="nw-plains" fill="lawngreen" d="M -100,0 L 0,0 L 50,-86.6 L -50,-86.6 Z"/>
2210 default nw-mountain east-plains sw-forest mountain brush
2310 default nw-mountain east-mountain sw-forest mountain heavypine
2410 default nw-mountain east-mountain sw-forest snowmountain heavypine cave "Dwimmermount"
2510 default nw-mountain east-mountain sw-forest mountain heavypine
2211 default nw-mountain east sw-forest mountain heavypine fort class-fort Patricians
2311 default nw-mountain east-mountain sw-forest mountain heavypine
2411 default nw-mountain east-mountain sw-forest mountain heavypine
2511 default nw-mountain sw-forest east mountain heavypine city class-five Muntburg
2212 default default nw-mountain east-mountain sw-forest mountain heavypine
2312 default nw-mountain east sw-forest mountain heavypine city class-six Tribune
2412 default nw-mountain east-mountain sw-forest mountain heavypine
2512 default nw-plains sw-plains east fort class-fort Patricians brush
2209-2310-2410-2511-2411-2312-2211-2112 road
2410-2511-2611 road

and you can see how I've defined my "hex thirds" above. Other objects:

<g id="snowmountain"><path id="path15084" d="m-2.6214-16.641h-61.474l30.737-53.238z" stroke="#6c5353" stroke-width="3.2461" fill="#6c5353"/><path id="path15086" d="m-1.4331-16.913h-36.523l5.7945-52.052z" stroke="#ac9393" stroke-width="2.5572" fill="#ac9393"/><path id="path15104" d="m-23.785-54.729h-18.935l9.4675-16.398z" stroke="#e3dbdb" stroke-width="2.25" fill="#e3dbdb"/><path id="path15098" d="m-23.343-54.724h-10.708l1.5877-16.17z" stroke="#f9f9f9" stroke-width="1.6802" fill="#f9f9f9"/></g>

The labels on top of the city circles are custom text objects, as are the settlement names. I generated them with another script that takes my hex entries out of a spreadsheet and on-the-fly generates custom objects.

The trees and such are too complex to post...they are seriously hundreds and hundreds of characters long. I drew the objects (not the hex thirds, that's just drawing point-to-point at the hex corners) in Inkscape, placed them centered at 0,0 (upper left), exported as Optimized SVG. I opened the SVG (they are just text files), cut out the objects I needed, and put them in an include file for Text Mapper.

When possible, I attempted to simplify things in Inkscape by combining paths - keep in mind a combined path has a single color, as it's a single object, so you have to do layers separate. The pine trees above are each made of 4 triangles, two green, two dark green. All the green triangles in all...12 or so trees are combined into a single path, on top of the dark green triangles that are a single path. You'll note I have some layering errors in a few of them because of that.

This stuff just stacks on top of each other as the file progresses - order is important - which is why you see the roads covering up my text.

I kinda like SVG now.

I'm sure next time I post on this I'll have rebooted into a completely different presentation style, but, hey.

For now, however, I don't have to "map", in the classical sense - puttering around in Hexographer, reworking hexes, relayering, invoking GIMP for certain tasks, blah de blah. Everything I need to know is in a spreadsheet I'd be using anyway, and I've got some middleware to translate that into something I can pass through Text Mapper - on-demand, just-in-time mapping.


Admit it: it's a little sexy.

---

So, it's time for my yearly more-useless-than-normal summer post. Hang on to your butts:

IKEA: Have you ever noticed how good Ikea product names are for anything vaguely Scandinavian? PCs, gods, boats, horses? That's where I got all my names for CharlesDM's PbP game on the Autarch board - my PC, my horse, my followers, my sword...

Hell of a weird place to go, but, they've got a great naming scheme.

STAR WARS: And what is the deal with Star Wars planets? Does it not seem that the whole thing makes more sense as several biomes on the same planet? Scale it all down - crazy floating fortresses for star destroyers - like maybe Avatar-style Firebending boats that fly, instead. Evil empires, princesses, magic swords, magic users...meh.

...hm. So, technically, we have some guidance for scale. Consider the phrase "That's No Moon". We can theorize, therefore, that the Death Star, whether a space station or floating fortress or whatever, by default will initially appear to the viewer as the size of a moon -- Earth's, in this case, for the relative ease of invoking the mind's eye.

We can use the angular diameter equation to figure this out. We'll combine this with figuring out the maximum size of a cylinder (to represent our stronghold tower) we can fit in a sphere to determine our capacity in units.

For several choices of "cruising altitude", then , we get several spheres - their diameter compared to the heights or lengths of well known objects:

Altitude (miles)	Diameter (ft)	Length Of	Spherical Volume	Tower Height (ft)
238855	11005638	(moon's diameter)	6.97982E+20	6,354,108
8544	393677	Death Star I	3.19461E+16	227,289
30	1382	432 Park Avenue	1382945438	798
20	922	USS Nimitz	409761611.2	532
10	461	Great Pyramid of Giza	51220201.4	266
5	230	Omaha Double Tree Hotel	6402525.176	133

If the Omaha Double Tree Hotel is floating 5 miles in the sky, it can blot out the Moon. As an aside, Wikipedia's really got some weird lists.

Tower height/volume/diameter/stories is the maximum "cylinder" that will fit in the sphere defined.

Tower	Tower Height (ft)	Tower Diameter (ft)	Tower Stories	Sqft/Story	Ttl Sq Ft
Moon	6354108	4493033	635410	1.59E+13	1.01E+19
Death Star	393677	160718	22728	2.03E+10	4.61E+14
Park Avenue	798	564	79	250117	19759229
Nimitz	532	376	53	111163	5891641
Giza	266	188	26	27791	722560
Omaha	133	94	13	6948	90320

And, let's add some ACKS stats to it:

Tower	Possible Cost (GP)	Possible SHP	Can "Secure"			Size Comparison
Moon	8.06E+19	3.57E+18	Everything. This fortress is a harsh mistress.
Death Star	3.69E+15	1.63E+14	A galactic empire without lost Jedi water farmers.
Park Avenue	158,073,836	6,996,894	333,500 to 166,700 sq mi (10,500 - 5,300 hexes)			Madagascar (226K sq mi)
Nimitz	47,133,127	2,086,275	99,500 to 50,000 sq mi (3150-2100 hexes)			Ellesmere Island (75K sq mi)
Giza	5,780,478	255,864	12,200 to 6,000 square miles (385-192 hexes)			Sardinia (9K sq mi)
Omaha	722,560	31,983	1,525 to 765 square miles (48 to 24 hexes)			Long Island (1,400 sq mi)

More:

Tower	Units/Story	Total Units	Garrison Cost	Indicated Families	Indicated Realm
Moon	4,404,195,380	2.79847E+15	4.50137E+18	2.2 Quintillion	Galaxy
Death Star	5,635,284	1.28E+11	2.06E+14	103 Trillion	Galactic Quadrant
Park Avenue	69	5,489	8,644,663	4,322,331	Empire
Nimitz	31	1,637	2,577,593	1,288,796	Kingdom
Giza	8	201	316,120	158,060	Principality
Omaha	2	25	39,515	19,757	Duchy

The "Unit" I'm using there is a abstract notion - it's 2,640 men making up 24 units; mixed between LI/HI/XB/HA/CC - so I'm dividing population numbers and multiplying costs by that.

On the forums, Alex stated 30 sqft per soldier as a decent living space. We'll assume a floating fortress means they live within the whole time. We've got a lot of leeway on space used; our cylinder in our sphere is only using about half the volume we have to work with - plenty of room for storage, siege weapons, griffin pens, magical floaty-engine things, etc.

Indicated Families is the "civilized realm" value of how many families that amount of garrison spend would cover.

And finally (ignoring the numbers that'll just stay in scientific notation):

Tower	Troops	Market Class	Support Pop.	Supply Cost	Stronghold Upkeep	Familes to Cover Costs	Minimum Realm
Moon	3.08E+17	---		1.25933E+18	4.03E+17	2.31085E+18	---
Death Star	1.41E+13	---		5.76E+13	1.84E+13	1.06E+14	---
Park Avenue	603,754	Class II	17500	2,469,948	790,369	4,532,300	Empire
Nimitz	180,022	Class II	9775	736,468	235,666	1,351,403	Kingdom
Giza	22,078	Class IV	1200	90,322	28,902	165,738	Principality
Omaha	2,760	Class VI	150	11,290	3,613	20,717	Duchy

If an army's baggage train counts as a market of some size, then a floating fortress would have the same thing within it for support needs. If we take the population needed for support as the number of families - as single individuals - from a settlement of that market class, we can pretend there's some number of support staff along for the ride.

We can also, then, calculate supply costs for the army, and upkeep costs for the stronghold, in the number of families worth of domain income we'd need to cover.

There. Death Star as a floating stronghold for ACKS. It's...not all that unreasonable once you just stop worrying about how the thing flies. If you're big enough to have an extra principality or kingdom's worth of income you can throw around, it certainly would make for a hell of a way to run a war. You could probably just land this thing on a truculent enemy stronghold/settlement (rather than figure out what the Death Star's laser would do in ACKS terms).

That being said, if we're looking at an atmospheric vehicle of that size, you'd be better off flattening it quite a bit and using the available surface area as farms to offset your supply costs...left as an exercise for the reader.

Hexomancy (I) - Text To Map

If you, dear reader, are like me, and I hope you're not for your sake, you've been puttering around with maps for quite some time, and you've used tools like Autorealm or Hexographer or Campaign Cartographer or several others I've forgotten as time passes.

And you do it again, and again, and again, in different formats or styles or whatever. Often for the same map.

I've got a larger project I'd like to work on, and I need to see it on a map - alternatively: I have data I want to visualize. And, unlike the work I did on visualizing Blackmarsh, I'd really rather work with the data and make something else do the work of showing me what I need to adjust.

As it turns out, this time I'm converting real-world maps into something gameable - taking these maps from 1880 and applying unto them a hex grid, and figuring out what is in what hex, etc. I want to do that once, on the input - then let something else output it back into workable ACKS-compatible hex maps.  I'd like to do something as informative as James C Bennett's work here on Dwimmermount; and at a glance see how the various domains and realms I'm mapping out interact with the terrain and each other. I'd also like to change layers and show the players something else, less informative.

But, I'm sitting here working on a 300MB bitmap, between the two political maps and the terrain map and blah blah, and it's ridiculous. So I need to simplify, and I want to take a spreadsheet that describes the hexes, pass it through a script, and receive a map - I want to change data, not an image.

Since I need to fill the blog with something, then, I'll share with you my process as it develops. 

Haha, no. I ain't gonna develop nuttin.

As it turns out, inbetween real life and other work and not finishing this post, I've found everything I need, because hooray Internet, and I will simply pass it along to you here.


First off, digest Red Blob Games' article on Hexagonal Grids. It is fantastic, and that whole site is a treasure trove of information.


Secondly, and here's the magic button: TextMapper.

Click on the help, click on Submit, click on Random, feast your eyes.

It takes a text description of hex features, buoyed by custom object definitions, and puts out a SVG (vector based, so infinitely resizable) hex map.

And on top of that it uses the same language the Good Lord used to let_there_be( \%light ), Perl, so it's right the heck in my wheelhouse for hacking it up if I go rogue.

I am damn near giddy at the possibilities. I can take a subset of my spreadsheet and only generate that part of the map. I can overload the hex descriptions and pass it through a multiplex script to create SVGs for the political layer, the population layer, a trade layer, terrain, elevation, damn near anything...

Here's hoping our summer trip this year ends up productive on the time-wasting aspect of vacations.