The Brinemarch Run

The Brinemarch Region is on the coast of (greened) Antarctica facing the Indian Ocean. My section is located at 70° latitude in the McMahon zone. I have ideas for what to populate it with and themes and so and so forth, but I am struggling with the process of documentation as it's a bit big.

My goal is to contribute about 100 keyed hexes to the https://itch.io/jam/antarctica-jam which are still being Old School Revival (OSR) agnostic or Table Top Role Playing Game (TTRPG) systems neutral. An example would be writing that a monster has armor "as leather" rather than listing amending or defending Armor Class (AC) which differs from system to system. Whereas most systems would have their own rating for how to rate leather armor, or chainmail armor.

REGION SIZE DISTANCE

Est. 32,000–33,000 square miles. Given 6 mile hexes, I counted 30 hexes × 6 miles = 180 miles across.
180 miles × 180 miles = about 32,400 square miles. This changes as the ocean makes up a large portion of the map.

| Corner | (row_index, col_index) | Description
|| ------ | ------------------------ | ---------------------------------- || NW | (109, 531) | Top left |

This is all rather large for a hex crawl map (though it is average for most of the Antarctica Jam claims). I have estimated it is roughly the size of South Carolina (32,020 square miles with 30,061 land).

• I have been learning a little about South Carolina to gain some personal understanding of the relative human scale, and population distributions, I am from the midwest and do not have a direct relationship with South Carolina. Geologically, ecologically and historically it sounds gorgeous by the way. *

Take away points, the size provides: -wilderness survival tension

• weeks-long journey -weather gradients -room for geopolitical tension -support for megafauna and apex predators

IfI make a final document separate from the https://itch.io/jam/antarctica-jam, I will need to organize it into chapters. I have considered doing this in clockwise order of rivers, blocks of terrain, biomes, or by tile. I will refer to "Tiles" repeatedly. Tile here is a 9x9 hex of 61 standard travel hexes (6 mi to a side, roughly 7 miles from center to center). I am also experimenting with creating sub-regions out of tiles. The first iteration of [tiles] looks like this roughly:

A. B. C. D. E. F.
G. H. I. J. K. L.
M. N. O. P. Q. R.
S. T. U. V. W. X. Y. Z. A&. AA. AB.

Terrain Estimates • Mountains: I, N, T, O, U • Forests: A, B, C, G, H, I, M, N, O • Some coniferous stands in H, N, O • Arid Flats (Desert/Salt): Z, A& The rest is plains of various elevations. F, L, R, X, W, V, U, A&, Z, Y are the outer coastline.

I've considered renaming the tiles in a grid fashion, assigning a letter to the row, and number to the column. This is nice visually, but quickly dissociates from the character of the tile.
1A 2A 3A 4A 5A 6A 1B 2B 3B 4B 5B 6B 1C 2C 3C 4C 5C 6C

Either way it presents me with the side project of doing some hyperlinks between these tiles and their contents on this blog.

The other issue with the thinking in terms of Tiles is the lack of a map or rather lack of skills to create or manage a map digitally. This is an example of an attempt to define the corners of Tile A which his nicknamed here "Archers' Reach".

Note: Something that will be of interest is when and how AI has been used in this project. I have presented my ideas to AI for formatting and grammar purposes. Above and below is a markdown table. In both instances I entered the coordinates manually and then asked ChatGPT to reformat them into a markdown table. Almost all of the tables presented here will have been done in this fashion. In all cases the ideas and content are mine (bibliographic attributions will be made as appropriate), but the formatting is entirely aided by AI and then reviewed by myself.