Building a Fantasy Sandbox: Steps 5 and 6 - Almost

Let's move along, basically this is the start of where we'll be restarting again and again as we make more and more islands and clusters and build our world.

5. Grab a 8.5 by 11 sheet of hex paper.

Well, I'll be using a computer mapping program and I won't be overlaying the hex until after putting down all the cool terrain features, but, okay, got one!

6. The scale should be so that it represents a 200 by 150 mile region

Okay, so, the most important thing about picking your "opening" region is that it needs to both facilitate low level play and call out what makes your setting so different from the millions of others. A task that's not as easy as it sounds, as a lot of settings comes up with cool things, but those things would only be something a high level character could ever interact with.

For us, we wanted to do a "starting hub" cluster of islands. We have an idea of doing atleast one large "Super Island" that is bigger then the 200X150 mile range, but taking a chunk out of that to start would disguise the fact that the world is floating islands.

On the other hand, just dropping a bunch of floating islands with a few small towns and a cave or two of kobolds would just take your standard "Medieval Europe with some Mystical Monsters," and put them up on islands, and still not be unique.

In the end we wanted to hit a few key ideas:
1. Have a central "safe house" island that has atleast one town advanced enough to show both our swashbuckling airship elements and basic steampunk elements.
2. Have sister islands to show how island communities have used technology to connect islands to one another (cable cars!) but make them unique (visually at the very least) from the central island.
3. Have atleast one "lair" island, that is the main baddie area for the PCs to go off and kill things to liberate this cluster from fear of attack.

In the end, we came up with this:


The island is the center will be the main starter island of the area, within it's "harbor" will rest a steampunk advanced town that features airship docks and plenty of story hooks. The island will not feature any full size lair or dungeon, but there will be small threats that need to be quelled.

The islands below are sister islands, each settled and connected to the main island through a variety of magical and steampunk ways, they'll feature something unique about them to make them a change of pace for characters who travel there.

The two small rocky islands off the tips of the central harbor will pulled in to house dock security, currently I picture large towers with a huge ballista and other anti-ship weapons purchased on rocky landscape.

The islands two the right are going to act as our lairs and main baddie islands. Each will have atleast one full size dungeon, and they overlap because the one with the standard grassy terrain is actually floating above the desert one. The desert one is there for variety, drifting into this cluster thousands of years ago.

We haven't fully fleshed out what will be on the upper islands yet, mad druids, evil undead, ancient ruins? We'll figure that out as we go, we just wanted to have more options available.

So, you can see, everything low level characters need are within one convenient 150X200 mile area, places to shop and learn, places to delve and kill, and places to explore and discover. Eventually they'll be leveled enough to want to ply the skies with their own airship, at which point, a whole new cluster or isle will be ready to be made.