A Procedural Hexcrawl I:The Land of Arador

I've always found the idea of procedural content generation to be rather fascinating.  Since I also find worldbuilding and Role-playing games interesting as well, it's natural that I like the combination of all three elements.  As such, this series of articles will follow my creation of a hexcrawl-style map, procedurally generated as much as possible.

What is a Hexcrawl?

Hexcrawling is a form of content organization for RPG content in which locations or other points of interest that the players might run into are keyed to a grid made of hexagonal tiles.  In addition to the tile, each tile also has a terrain type.

A more in-depth explanation of Hexcrawling can be found in Justin Alexander's excellent series of articles on the subject.

Starting Out: The First Parameters

The two things we need to know right away when creating our hexcrawl are as follows:

1. How large are we going to make each tile?
2. How many tiles do we want?

I'll be using tiles with a 6-mile radius (giving them an area of just over 125 square miles), generated in a 24x24 grid.  This means that in the end, we'll have a total area of 72,000 square miles, roughly the size of the US state of Washington.

Our map will come from the Wildgen Hexmap Generator.  For this step, I generated several until I got one that I felt had a satisfactory mix of terrain types (all present, but not dominated by any single type).  The end result looks like this:

Asking YAFNAG for some suggestions, I've chosen the name "Arador" for this land.

Letting my mind run: On your Mark(ov)

I was originally going to write a post about how Madoka Magica isn't good like a lot of people, mainly tropers, claim it is (but that instead, it's an entirely different and even better kind of good), or sum up some of my thoughts about the second season of Working!! in a rambling piece about what I like in a slice of life series.  However, I just finished writing my farewell to TV-tropes, which left me (a) much later in the evening than I'd originally banked on, and (b) in a somewhat melancholy mood.  Neither one of those factors are really conductive to my ability to write those posts that I wanted to write.  I also had some thoughts earlier today during work that I want to jot down somewhere...

In other words, fuck those topics.  I'm going to talk about Markov Chains.