Happy February folks! I hope you're all doing well!
I thought I would provide a small update on my worldbuilding today as I have a moment. On Jan 19th, my wife and I welcomed our second child into the world... but, she was a bit of a stinker and we were technically in hospital waiting for her since Jan 17th! So, while sitting in the hospital I decided to pop out my notebook and my mapping pens & pencils.
One of my fellow r/worldbuilding mods from the reddit community suggested I make a Transit Map - which is something that I knew nothing about and had never considered for my tabletop fantasy setting, but I was excited to learn about what transit maps are and how they're made and go about starting to make my own.
Now, because it's a fantasy setting, I first had to figure out what a public transportation system in a fantasy setting would look like. Inspiration struck while browsing Twitter and I decided that my city's transit system would be powered by gigantic centipedes that are ridden and steered by several of the smaller races of my world.
With this decision made, I looked at just how transit maps are designed. There's a fucking ton of thought put into transit maps that I was totally unaware of, and after a bit of research I sketched out my first draft:
Now, it's important to note that if you're unfamiliar with transit maps, a very common feature of them is to use simple straight lines wherever possible. So while these are perfectly straight on my transit map, the streets themselves won't be.
A second thing to note about transit maps is that very commonly, distances are absolutely not represented to scale. So several of the branching lines away from the main hex series are actually significantly longer than depicted.
Each transit line has it's own unique colour, just like real maps, and I decided that the city would have two main transit hubs. These would each be controlled by a different group, leading to an opportunity to have some 'Gangs of New York' inspired conflicts between the two groups. Not as violent as that movie perhaps, but still two very different groups using the same basic under-ground tunnels, and having contention about who gets priority.
One group will be for Hub 1, and serve primarily the mid-to-poor side of the city. They're a group of Kobold and Gnomes that through close contact over many years has formed their own hybrid language that bridges the common tongue, kobold, and gnomish languages. Similar to our own real-world cases like pidgin.
The second group serves the more wealthy side of town (H2), and is run by Goblins and Halflings. They also have developed a specific track-language that serves as a quick way for workers to communicate.
I have more work to do on this, but that's the basic outline of my transit system and how it functions, and I'm sure you can get a sense of how I plan to make it interesting to the players based on the strangeness of giant-bug-transport and an added layer of conflict between the two transit guilds.
With this in mind, I think any adventure in this city will have plenty of chances for side-quests or at least interesting diversions based on what I've created here.
Next step will be to actually map out the city and surrounding countryside! Normally you'd have a city map first and do transit second, but there's absolutely no reason in a fantasy setting that you can't do things however you damn well please!
Join me next time as I map the city itself, and provide some more information about my fun and unique transit system.
Until then, have a great day everyone!
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