Beyond the Wall and Other Adventures. The Manor of Barley.

 I find the hardest part of map drawing is knowing where to start.  Faced with a blank piece of paper my mind just goes, well, blank.

Beyond the Wall makes things a little easier for the cartographically challenged like me, at least it suggests putting the characters home village in the centre of the map, it's a starting point at least and the sheet of paper is no longer blank.

Barley, manor and surrounding countryside

In a normal game of Beyond the Wall, one where there is a GM and several players, the task of mapping is shared but for my solo campaign its all down to me, I have to decide where to put the key features and places of possible interest in the area surrounding the village, this has both positive and negative aspects to it.

On the positive, I control what goes on the map, for the Barley games I knew I wanted a monastery near Barley, I wanted a second smaller village not to far away, a stone circle and a burial mound as well, the negative is that the dilemma of where to put them and, beyond those few locations,  what other places of interest should go on to the map. 

What made things a little easier for me with the above Barley map was the fact that I had already described where the village of Thune and the monastery where in relation to Barley so it was a relatively easy task to place them on the map (link to that post here), also I had mentioned the river Orn so that to was easy to draw in.  To place the stone circle and burial mound I roll two 12 sided dice, one for direction, one for number of hexes away from Barley, finally I just filled in the blank space with lots of hills and trees and hey presto, I had my map.

The scale of this map is 1 mile to a hex, everything on the map is within a days walk of the village, the characters could set of early in the morning to explore the stone circle and make it back to the village by nightfall, certainly in the summer months that is.  There is also plenty of blank space to place other areas of interest, maybe a cavern system to explore or a goblin lair, a small secluded settlement in the Emerald Forest where the Fox Fairies dwell, there are lots of possibilities even in such a small localised region, indeed, without adding any more features there is at least 4 or 5 possible session of play already, The village of Thune may need the help of the characters, perhaps the monastery has a mystery to solve, who knows what strange things lurk in the burial mound.

Next though, I want to map the wider area of Barley, the mountains known as the Cold Ones in the north, the royal city to the west, its rival the imperial city to the south, how does the the Emerald Forest stretch and what lies to the east, then the characters can

Adventure On!