A Southeast Asia Hexmap
As I've been discussing recently on Bluesky, I'm getting ready to start a campaign of Mangayaw, a Philippines-inspired Cairn hack, in a couple weeks with my group since we decided to stop playing The One Ring. This should be a lot of fun, and my one Filipina player is particularly excited, but for the next few weeks until we can start I'm getting deep into prep, and today I decided to make a campaign map.
I'm excited in particular about the sea travel rules in Mangayaw to highlight the importance of water connections in this part of the world and allow them to jump around quickly between very different places. While I'll be starting with The Rumbling Forest, which is based on the Philippines, I plan to pull in other adventures from the wider Southeast Asian scene set in different areas, like Lorn Song of the Bachelor and Deluge at Drizzle Distillery. So, having a big map to work with from the start feels right to give space for that diversity rather than making it up as the campaign goes.
While I looked some for existing fictional maps of island clusters and thought about making my own, I ultimately settled on just using a map of Southeast Asia. To fit better with a campaign set in the mythical past, however, I went with a historical map and all the beautiful inaccuracies that come with that. There's many to choose from, but I liked the look of this 1649 Dutch Map by Jan Janssonius. Apart from just looking nice, it also includes the Mariana Islands, where I live, and opens up the door to add in an excursion out here as part of the game sometime. The historical nature of the map also makes it possible to use it as in an in-game artifact if the party manages to get their hands on a map from Spanish colonizers somehow.
As for making the map, I just followed this guide to adding a hex overlay in GIMP. The hexes are set to roughly 60 nautical miles based on comparison to the latitude and longitude lines on the map. I chose this not only because 1 degree of latitude or longitude equals roughly that distance near the equator, but also because it's a decent estimate for how far a traditional vessel could travel in a day based on recent experiments, so it helps match things up to the Mangayaw rules for sea travel. Then it was just some masking to restrict it to the areas I wanted it to show up.
Anyway, that's it for now, but I hope to be back with play reports and adventure reviews once the campaign gets going. You can grab the map image above or from here if you want to use it for yourself.