First post - welcome!

-- Introduction --

Hello and welcome! I started this blog as a way for people to keep track of my progress on remapping the known portions of Golarion at the scale of 12 miles to a hex. This is the same scale that was used in the Kingmaker Pathfinder Adventure Path. Kingmaker may be the most popular and best example of a sandbox PnP set of adventures. It certainly is my favorite adventure path (though I'm waiting to see if the upcoming 'Iron Gods' AP displaces that). Because Kingmaker is so open ended and because there are literally innumerable ways for the plot to develop, it is impossible for Paizo to develop sufficient source material to cover every contingency.

-- Background --

One of the areas where GMs are left to their own devices in Kingmaker is in fleshing out the world around them. By this I mean not just the random encounters and commoners, but the actual world. The flora, the fauna, the geology, the hydrology. You may have a wonderful GM for your game, but he may be a sociologist by trade, or an accountant. As such, he may want to have a good handle on the world around him, but might not have the background or time to invest in fleshing it out (GM's have day jobs, too). My initial thought was to provide some of that back-filling in the form of a blog for the Kingmaker area. But I quickly realized that the world is interconnected (duh) and that to properly work out the Kingmaker area I'd have to expand beyond its borders. One thing led to another and before you know it I was contemplating remapping everything to the Kingmaker hex size.

I'm a geologist by trade and a lover of maps since I was very young. I've had a particular fondness for hex maps as my introduction to PnP roleplaying games was the Mystara campaign setting (Basic DnD). Mystara also produced a line of supplements called the Gazetteers. Each Gazetteer covered a single country within their campaign setting, much like the Pathfinder Campaign Setting does. One thing the Mystara people did that Paizo did not was to include a fold-out map with each supplement. These maps described each country at a 1 hex = 8 miles scale. I recall looking forward to the maps more than the text and being thrilled if they extended the known world by even one hex. I must not be the only one because since Mystara's demise dedicated group have kept the game alive with new supplements and new maps.