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Albatross Hexbook

Six years ago I ordered some “Albatross Hexbooks” off a POD site; the books are still available but blog explaining how they worked, by their creator (Jed McClure, not sure if that was a pseudonym) doesn’t seem to be there anymore.

I’m digging my notebooks up again and refreshing my memory. I remember I liked the system a lot.

Each planet is an icosaeder with 20 triangular faces.

Each of those faces on the continent scale is divided into a handful of 625×600 mile squares.

That’s the kingdom scale; these maps has both 24-mile hexes (which look tiny) and a five by five grid of 125×120 mile squares.

Each of those 125×120 mile squares is a region that has both 24-mile hexes (approximately six by six of them, which look big at this scale, duh) and smaller 6-mile hexes.

Then it skips over one level and the next level is called the hex, it’s one six mile hex so the maps are 7×6 miles. It’s divided into mile squares and smaller ¼ squares.

Then it skips a level again and then the next level is called location; maps that are ¼×¼ miles. It says 40 acres but I don’t understand the acre system yet because I’m a eurotrash girl. These location maps are yet again divided into two sizes of squares. The big squares is a four by four grid of 110 yards (2.5 acres), each divided into eleven by eleven 10 yard (thirty foot) square.

Then the next level is called the site scale; doesn’t have a set size, it’s just a square grid. You could use it for 10 foot squares or 5 foot squares.

I haven’t been using this system since my homebrew campaign several years ago.

I ran a couple of ready mades and now for my current campaign I’ve been using a huge Inkscape file with many layers of various grids and bitmaps.

Seeing this makes me kinda wanting to move the maps over to paper. I’ve gotten way faster at drawing maps since I switched to digital so maybe it wouldn’t be too bad.