Building a Fantasy Sandbox: Step 12: Better Late then Never

12. Decide to place Lairs (locales that revolves around a home of monsters)

Lair, in this case, is a bit of a misnomer, it doesn't necessarily have to mean a dungeon area that is home to a certain creature and its guards, indeed, it doesn't have to be a dungeon at all or even always a cave that houses a sleeping warg.

Lair, basically, means any encounter that always takes place when the PCs enter a certain hex. Whether it's because it's a creature's hunting grounds, because the creature actually does have a physical lair there (be it one "room" or many levels) or because it's an area particularly thick with a certain species, if it's a keyed encounter set to go off when the PCs explore it, we call that a "Lair" for the purposes of that step.

So, here's our map, with the Lairs (conveniently marked L) added in:


As for what's located in each "L," well, I can't reveal all our secrets now can I? Much like the ruins, that will go unsaid. What it does bring up, ties into my previous post about "A Little Reality..." in that we now have specific creatures and species in particular areas, what that means is we have to reverse engineer that, so to speak. We have to know what those creatures are there, and each creature we pick, has to go through our "standards of existence," in that, we have to know how and why it exists at all. As this is the last step in terms of mapping the overall area, it leads nicely into the actual writing that's now ahead of us, where I feel the most challenged and have the most fun.

Speaking of finishing up, since the major details are finished, it's now time to drop the hexes on the map. Each hex is 10 miles and you'll see that with that new sense of scale, we had to slide a few things around to not only fit the hexes (to keep unique features within one hex as is easiest to describe them), but also to have them make more sense in how the world works (as in the fact that our "guard" islands were floating way too far from the dock to be either practical in defense or able to be secured to the main island without, as Sean pointed out, A LOT of chain).