Fractal Madness!

Last Friday, I noticed that Noble Knight had a copy of ProFantasy’s Fractal Terrains in stock. I was eventually planning on picking it up anyway to use for the Battletech 2759 campaign, and since I still had plenty of store credit I grabbed it immediately.

Battletech has over 600 canon worlds, and only a fraction of them have maps. I’m absolutely horrible at mapping, myself (I’ve been able to hide it with Campaign Cartographer 2 for many years but trust me…I suck) so naturally the prospect of a decent worldmap generator was too good to pass up. I’ve been playing with it for a few hours and this is what I came up with:

This is my first-draft map of the infamous Von Strang’s World.

 And that’s The Rock…site of the first appearance of the Clans in Battletech fiction.

One good thing about Fractal Terrains is, as you can see, that it’s possible to convert the planet files it generates to the icosahedral view that Battleforce 2 uses. Unfortunately, doing so turns it into a JPEG, to which I don’t yet know how to add a hex grid. I’m thinking I might copy the blank icosahedral hexfield from the Battleforce 2 maps onto a transparency and simply lay it over an image printed to the appropriate size.

Whatever fix I use, this program is going to simplify the mapmaking portion of the campaign enormously. I might even be able to use Battleforce 2 to determine the course of the planet-level campaigns the PCs will be experiencing as background.