The Queen’s Gallery at Buckingham Palace has a display of Leonardo da Vinci’s drawings, drawn from a folio collection obtained by Charles II in the 17th century and only made publicly available in the early 20th century.
I saw the exhibit while I was in London last week.
I had not previously had my attention focused on his cartography. Seeing them close up and in real life, however, impressed upon me how beautiful and informative these 15th century examples of cartography could be.
Take his map of Imola for example (click for large version):
You could pretty much just plug this directly into a D&D campaign, and I absolutely love the aesthetic of it. Check out this video for how he made it:
You can find the original versions of these articles in Gamemastery 101.
Places to Go, People to Be, a French RPG ‘zine, has published Structures de jeu 1-2-3, which is a translation of the first three parts of my series on Game Structures. (The original version can be found here.)
They’ve also told me that we can expect translations of Chapters 4-8 within the next few months.
You can check out previous PTGPTB translations of Alexandrian content here and here.
… que faites-vous? has also started translations of the GM Don’t List, under its English title. (For reasons I’m curious to understand.) English versions of the GM Don’t List can be found here.
Since I’ve been making some efforts to learn French this year, I’ve quite enjoyed my fairly inept efforts to read my own prose as rendered in a foreign language.
I’m actually a fair bit behind on sharing these international efforts, so if you’ve sent me an e-mail letting me know about a translation you’ve completed and it hasn’t been highlighted either here or on my Twitter account, I’ll be getting to it ASAP.
On that note, if you’re interested in writing translations of articles here on the Alexandrian, please contact me from the About page. I’m generally pretty easy going about giving permission unless there’s some specific reason why an article can’t be translated, and I appreciate knowing when the translations are available so that I can share them with other people.
Some of you may already be familiar with the Web DMs, but this is a really excellent overview of hexcrawl gaming.
There’s a bit of talk in the video about when hexcrawls are an appropriate structure vs. not appropriate for wilderness travel. My experience:
1. Exploration. (The “West Marches” approach.)
2. There’s meaningful consequences as a result of the navigation choices you’re making.
Anything else? Don’t run it as a hexcrawl.
When it comes to #2, the meaningful choices also need to largely be at the scale you’re running the hexcrawl at. If Moria vs. the Gap of Rohan is the meaningful choice, then 3-mile hexes aren’t the right scale. If Old Forest vs. the Road to Bree is the meaningful choice, then 3-mile hexes would probably work well.
(You might also consider the benefits of a point-crawl here if the meaningful navigation choices are actually quite limited.)
This makes for an interesting corollary to my oft-repeated comment about keying hexes: If you’ve got a lot of empty hexes or if you’re routinely keying multiple areas of interest into each hex, that’s also an indication that you’re using the wrong scale for your hexcrawl.
