Of Hexes and Inhabitation

Thinking about Appendix B and Territory Development in the DMG.

Lately I’ve been playing with maps of different scales and seeing what happens when these maps are zoomed into, out of, and just plain experimented with. The real magic of the 1st Edition AD&D Dungeon Masters Guide is that it is absolutely filled to the brim with many small ideas that can be tried, manipulated, and tried again in endless permutations and variations. Playing with the Inhabitation Table in Appendix B is no exception to this. It’s important to keep in mind that these ideas aren’t just theoretical constructs about playing, but are practical methods and processes that fire the imagination and stimulate creative thought when actually used.

One thing that becomes apparent when looking at the Habitation Table on page 173 of the DMG, is that the chance for any kind of habitation is quite low (16%), meaning that fully 84% of the hexes on a map, on average, will contain no “officially” recognized habitations. This isn’t to say that these hexes are necessarily totally uninhabited wilderness though, as we will see later.

The other thing that can be seen is that some habitation types are more heavily weighted than others, (‘Single Dwellings’ as opposed to ‘Towns’, for instance). If this information is converted into its own d100 table, it gives the following distributions:

When I created this table, fractional values were rounded down if they were below 1/2, and rounded up if above. The one exception to that rule was with the values of “Hamlet”, “Thorp”, “Ruin”, and “Village”. In order to come as close as possible to a more smooth, bell shaped distribution, I took these equally weighted values (12.5%) and rounded two up, and two down. I chose “Ruin” and “Thorp” as my higher values because of the overall trend of a seemingly low-population milieu. In Gygax’s instructions on the use of the Random Wilderness Terrain table, he explains the following:

The Inhabitation Table is directly after this, and seems to be directly tied to the recommendation on scales, i.e.,” …a 1 space =1 mile, or larger, scale.” The difference in these scales can really have a profound effect on the resolution that the map is able to convey. It occurred to me that, just as a terrain type of “Plain”, when zoomed into, might very likely have hills, various water features, and relatively large wooded areas distributed here and there, while retaining the overall terrain type as the majority, the same could be said for any indication of “Habitation” on the larger scale map. It seemed logical (and interesting), to me, that if a check for habitation came up within the whole of a 25 or 30 mile hex, there was probably more stuff there to find. A hex that is 25 miles across represents a relatively large area (406 sq. miles):

The total number of hexes within a given width of hex will always be the square of that width. In the example above, a 25 mi. hex gives a result of 625 total hexes (25x25).

As you can see, the possibilities are huge, and we’re talking about a single 25 mile hex. If we take into account the Habitation table, and its 16% threshold for a positive result, there is a possibility of up to 100 affected hexes (625 x .16 =100). Even if we follow Gary’s advice on page 182 of the DMG and ignore “Ruins” when rolling for inhabited areas, this still gives us 88 (rounded up), possible inhabited hexes in a 25 mile hex. Although this may seem like a lot, remember that most of these will be very low population areas. That these areas possibly exist can be determined with minimal effort, ahead of time, as we have just seen. We can even discover the type of habitation with a few quick rolls on the habitation table. No fleshing out is initially needed. There is a very low/zero prep feel to this, plus it’s fun. Another possible way to look at this, and what I’ve done for this article, is to simply make the rolls for the possible number of marked settlements, (100 in the above case) and see which ones meet that 16% threshold. How long does it take to make 100 d100 rolls? Probably 10 minutes or less? If you’re like me, and you love rolling dice, it’s probably not enough. Even if we convert our d100 table for settlement type to allow for ignoring of “Ruins”, the smaller settlement types of “Single Dwelling”, “Castle”, “Thorp”, and “Village”, will still account for roughly 70% of our results. You’ll want to develop your larger territories in this rough way until you get a least a couple of the “City” and “Town” type of settlements, as larger populations are important to the finding of available henchmen, expert hirelings, and men-at-arms.

So what did I get on my first set of 100 rolls?:

Letting the dice have their way, I managed to roll three “Ruins” in a row(?), but I also got two castles, which could be very interesting. I like the idea that ruins are kind of wide open for different possibilities, For instance, maybe these three sets of ruins were tied together as a part a larger complex of ancient cities? Who knows? That’s something that can be decided later. I’d like to add here that, there is still a possibility of finding fortresses in the uninhabited hexes on a roll of 1-in-20 (DMG, p.182)

The next thing that I wanted to know was the average population of these settlement types. The Village, Thorp, and Single Dwelling categories were easy to average for, being 750, 50, and ~7, respectively. The Castles are a little more involved, but still, really fun to work out. Two averages had to be worked out: one for Humans (Bandits, Brigands, Berserkers, and Dervishes) and one for Character Types. As mentioned before, the basic information for who-is-where can be figured out quickly and easily.

I came up with the following averages:

Humans: (These totals include slaves/camp followers)

Bandits - 159

Brigands - 130

Berserkers - 68

Dervishes - 182 . (Dervishes have numbers of 200 to 300 if found in lair (a walled fortress) MM, p.68. Splitting the difference between the average and the max of 300 (118/2) leaves 59, or a grand total of 241.

Character Types:

Rough avg. of 62/ Castle

As one last aside, I’ve decided to include some maps that I put together of actual cities with hexes mapped over them. These are all as close to scale as I could get using Google Earth. Enjoy: