In 1974, Bill Hoyt, part of the original Blackmoor Bunch, started playing Dungeons & Dragons, which he’d got at Gary Gygax’s house. Soon after, he began his own campaign.
These are rare maps and campaign notes from the very beginning of D&D.
Let’s GOOOOO!!!
Fresh from today’s mail, it’s Source of the Nile:
I had a couple of questions about his maps:
On the atlas map how many miles does the numbered squares (2-100) contain?
On the section pages which contain a 25 square blocks, how many miles are contained in these blocks?
What is one little square worth in miles on the section pages?
One last question, what type of graph paper where you using? It seems to be bigger than a 8.5 x 11 sheet. I counted the squares on my 8.5 x 11 @ 4 squares to the inch, it comes out to 44 squares high and 34 squares wide. Your paper counts 50 squares high and 38 squares wide. Would this be 5 squares to the inch?
I scanned through the PDF that I have and I didn’t see any scale given. The squares can’t be too big because each one only seems to contain a single settlement or location inside it. My recollection was that Arneson’s Blackmoor used 5-mile hexes. If we assume that Bill Hoyt borrowed that same scale for his squares, then each 25x25 section would be 3,125 square miles or slightly larger than the state of Delaware.
Of course, this is all just speculation. You can’t go wrong if you pick the scale that works best to you!