Regional hex maps are live

December 2021 · 2 minute read

My first intention for the sandbox generator was to use its generated content to populate my own hand-drawn hex maps.

It didn’t take long to realize that having it generate an actual map as well is going to be very convenient.

Hexroll is now generating a regional hex map for each random sandbox, every minute. Here’s one example:

Hex map example

The generated maps are raster images composed of pre-drawn hex-tiles. Nothing too fancy, but it does the trick and should work great for our home campaigns.

What’s on next?

NPC descriptions

NPC descriptions are quite repetitive. Some simple model tweaks and a bit more variety can go a long way here.

Dungeon call-out texts

Dungeon areas call-out text are awkwardly structured at times. Reworking the generation model is needed to make them sound better and be more robust to randomness.

Traps

Traps are painfully missing from the current dungeon model. Adding basic traps generation is on next.

Roadmap ideas

World maps?

What if we could import a sandbox ‘fingerprint’ into a world map canvas and construct a bigger map from multiple generated sandboxes?

World map

Sandbox markdown editing

If we could get a stronger hosting service, together with sandbox permalinking, we could have a built-in markdown editor to add custom content (more NPC storylines or external dungeons and maps for example).

Care to contribute?

Ideas, feedback, suggestions, bug reports or new random values for the generator - we welcome all. Please share these with us either through Github or to directly to our Email.

We will also gladly review any pull requests.

Lastly, there’s our new Patreon page. The first eighteen patrons will help us fund a better vps hosting service-level so we can add features that require more computing power.