The Keep on the Borderlands Wilderness Map – In Hexographer!
Hexographer version of the KotB Wilderness Map
Abandoning all other projects I delve deeply into gaming history and we find ourselves upon the Borderlands of “the Realm”. This map was created with Hexographer, and yes fellow delvers of the deeps you will find the Hexographer Map included hereafter.
The map was carefully adapted from the scale set by Gary Gygax. However, I have interpreted it in the Welsh Piper Mapping System at the 0.04 scale, so each hex is 70.4 yards high. I (and possibly others) will be making larger scale maps later on of this area and The Realm. The next scale up is 0.2, a 352 yard hex.
I didn’t find a reference to the actual height of the rock on which the Keep sits, so I made it 50 ft. The same can be said of the Mound at map key 1, I made that 25 ft. Gary does make reference to the total height of the contour lines in the ravine (100 ft) so I set each one at an interval of 25 ft. The beauty of the Hexographer map is that even though you may well disagree with the cartography, you can change any part of it to suit yourself.
The font used is Bebas, which is reminiscent of the sans-serif font used on the original.
The map has a WoC attribution which should stay with the map, its at the bottom in 12 point Times New Roman.
With regard to The Keep on the Borderlands. The author acknowledges all copyrights, trademarks and registered trademarks detailed in this work that does not belong to the author and in no way make any challenges to the ownership of said property rights. Dungeons & Dragons is a registered trademark owned by Wizards of the Coast.
Click below to download the Hexographer Map
Hi Wisata,
I’m glad you enjoyed the article on the hexmap which is part of the Project on the Borderlands. I agree, BreeYark is a wonderful resource.
All the best,
Greg
🙂
I have the full version of Hexographer, but I’m not able to edit the map to remove any of the caves.
Would it be possible to provide a “Player’s Map” that does not show the Cave of the Unknown nor the three hidden caves ( E, G & H)? Making the location of The Mad Hermit less obvious on the “Player’s Map” would also be welcome.
Very nice maps otherwise.
Hi Matthew,
The caves are actually shapes, not symbols. Open the map in Hexographer and go to the “Shapes” tab, click the “Select Shape” button, then click on one of the caves (you might need to zoom in on the map). When you select a shape, a white dot appears at every point. Hitting the delete key will remove the selected shape.
Hope this helps – please let us know.
Cheers,
-Erin
Love this update to the classic module! It was the first adventure I ever ran and in fact, I recently got my original group back together to revisit this module but using the 5e rule set.
I hope you don’t mind, but I’ve published this on the campaign website but if you do have an objection, please let me know and I will take it down / make it not visible publicly.
Hi, I have no particular objection. Keep in mind that KOTB is property of Wizards of the Coast. I included an attribution to that effect with the map article and its possible you may want to include one on your own web page even though the map is an interpretation of the old KOTB map. It would also be nice to have a link back from your web page to the Bree Yark article. 😉 Its the foundation of the expanded campaign setting of the Borderlands lands beyond The Realm being constructed here, albeit slowly. I’d love to see what you do with it and how the game goes. Descriptions of the Interactions of the GM and players in play-by-play chronicles are a big deal in Japan by the way, a form of published RPG literature there. I’ll be interested to see how things go.
Oh yes, I included a link directly to the DriveThruRPG store for the pdf and as I flesh out the website I plan on including further attributions. I’ll also be winding multiple links back to your site as you have some wonderful articles to flesh out this old classic and breathe new life into it. Thinking I’ll be having a whole section in the wiki portion that will contain links to the various bits I’ve gratuitously borrowed from across the internet.
Thanks for providing this resource and looking forward to watching your progress as well!
Drivethru RPG? What have you got on there?
My apologies! I meant that I linked back to the PDF of the module on DriveThruRPG in case others got inspired to run a similar hybrid old-school module, 5e rule set style campaign. I’ve not been so ambitious as to submit anything for publication though I’ve been following their Dungeon Masters Guild initiative so you never know what the future holds!
Ah! I followed the link back. I wasn’t sure what you meant at first. I was reading the comments at DriveThru RPG, funny they don’t do proper quality control checks of the modules before selling them incomplete, that’s not good for customers.
I created a map by the way which connects to the existing dungeon for the other part of the caves complex, the Cave of the Unknown. I later added more levels.
There’s a misleading part of the KOTB outdoor map, at first one doesn’t realize the dungeons are but a short walk from the keep. That doesn’t really jive with the class castle building rules, where a leader is supposed to clear an area of monsters but that’s just the way we like it. Dungeons right outside the front door. 😉
The Castle was obviously built when the Caves were uninhabited, or possibly friendlily-inhabited, and the nasties moved in later.
In my campaign it’s an old Dwarf-mine later taken over by monsters while the Keepians weren’t looking.
I’ve been working at a 3d model of the wilderness map. It is really problematic. Looking at the map, you may think it has some real big hills and terrain, but with 25 ft contours, every slope is so gentle, you almost don’t notice. With the contours as they exist, it is almost boring terrain.
It could be a bit deceptive. Because the elevation lines are close together in places I do think that on foot, from that viewpoint, it would make it a steep climb. A lot of it is covered by trees and that hides what is there but it would also make it somewhat harder. I’ve wondered about this Gygax map sometimes, if it is something that Gygax copied from a real map and set the story in. The terrain is clearly inspired by actual maps, hence no hexes.
I tried to make it work with the 25ft contours. You can add a lot of 15 foot high mounds between the contours. You could even make a few 600 flat areas to squeeze the all the height to an existing contour, making a 40 foot cliff. This just isn’t the way contours are done though.
I note that the caves of chaos area on the map is 3 times larger than the localized map. The part that really stopped me is area 3. It is described as a rock out cropping for nesting birds in a forest of young oak and hazelnut trees. It isn’t possible to make this an outcropping where you see out over the trees with the 25 ft contours. It ends up being a rock in a 120 foot wide clearing that is still dominated by the surrounding trees. My best guess is that the artist drew the caves as if the squares were 100 foot, not 100 yards. The map seems to work if the contours are scaled up to 75 ft. I have seen people write suggesting that they should be 100 ft contours. i 3d modeled this and I find this unnecessary. I am trying to correct for errors rather than just make up something different.
Hills that only rise 10 feet per 300 ft are almost imperceptible.