Superhero 2044 Second Edition Revised :: Bloomberg Map

Overview

Following on from my earlier effort for updating the maps within Superhero 2044.

Quandary

I decided to pursue the inevitable; getting the Bloomberg City map refactored. To my surprise, the labeled scale for the original map is at 1 hex = 200 meters which is not the same as the label. So I was in a quandary because I had to make a choice to go with a larger scale of 125 meters per hex in order to fit into my scaling rules, or make the artwork be at 200 meters per hex. This is a logistics issue because I had already built the full island map and that took about two weeks worth of work.

I looked closer and the rendition of the original art and I discovered that there's also issues pre-existing on it. Take a look at the top-left (East); the roads I have from the 500 meter/hex scale don't fit with whatever was provided originally.

The RED roads are the accurate vector lines I used for the 500-meter map of Inguria Island. When overlaid upon the "200-meter" map of Bloomberg city, it can be seen that the roads (black lines) of the original artwork don't line-up correctly. BTW, that portrait box shows the extent of the 8.5x11 layout.

This made it easier for me to decide; I'll go with 125 meters per hex. At that scale, not all of the original map will fit into an 8.5x11 sheet were I to keep the dimensions of the hexagons I'm currently standardizing against. So, what I'll eventually do is create two renders; one for a letter, and one for 11x17 tabloid.

Suburbs

Another area where I wanted to make a decision was the suburbs. The original map has these tiny little ovals. I didn't know what they meant when I first started my campaign those many decades ago, and presumed that they were an abstract representation of a neighborhood. Sort of sparse.

This is a zoomed in image of the suburbs of Inguria. WTF are those ovals supposed to be? I decided that they've got to be circular streets. Any houses along these streets are not rendered.

I did some recent research on how neighborhoods are supposed to look within a planned community, which I presume that Inguria Island would have many such. I found that modern cul-de-sacs are more space-economic when they are using honeycomb designs. However, this arrangement can get pretty noisy for a game map.

An ideal arrangement for suburban streets is the honeycomb.

A very dense honeycomb neighborhood.

I decided to show just the main suburban access streets. It's about 140 single-family homes per street, with about 15 streets shown. That is about 2000 houses. According my drawing tool, I have 540 hexagons in that suburbs area. If I were to correctly decorate that area using honeycomb tiles with some variation where I add some marketplaces, social venues, fire-houses, etc.; I'd have a 10,000 buildings for 2.5 people (single person or married couple + 1 or so kids) . And this is presuming that the rocky hills of Inguria in that part of the island have been leveled and shaped correctly.

I'll eventually add low-rise apartments in the suburbs as well; these should be able to support an additional 10-20 K people. My notes tell me that the middle-class population should be around 50,000 citizens. I'm guessing the majority live in the Central district. This I think will be OK; it would be similar to living on Manhattan Island in New York, NY which has a much higher population density; about 1.6 million people in 60 square kilometers (27K/KM^2). Bloomberg's Central City just needs to support about 150,000 people within its 7 square kilometers (21K/KM^2).

Anyhow, here's the 125-meter scale map of Bloomberg City. It's a work-in-progress.

Bloomberg at 125-meters per hex. WIP. Once I figure out the tessellation pattern for the suburbs I'll update the map.

Superhero '44 Second Edition Revised - Update

UPDATE: I'm naming my effort "Superhero '44 Second Edition Revised".  I'm over 100-pages of written material so far and I'm still adding to the background setting. On the Moh's Scale of Science Fiction Hardness I've decided to make the initial genre be harder; about a 2.5 or 3.0 ... still not as hard as GURPS Transhuman Space or Traveller which I'd rate around 4.0. I've also added some crunch to support that hardness so that it falls somewhere in the middle of GURPS | Hero System | Mutants & Masterminds.

The Maps

Every RPG enthusiast like maps, right? So, one of my first things to do was rebuild the maps for the original Superhero '44 game. I'll show them in order of relevance for the fans of Superhero '44.

Patrol Areas of Inguria. This is key to the Weekly Planning sheet.

Inguria with terrain. This is the sort of map that inspires people like me to play a game; all of the little "points-of-interest" make for prime material to conduct memorable games.

Melanesia near Inguria. I decided to place Inguria between Fiji and Vanuatu at a spot on a submerged ridge at 11°51'41.0"S 173°53'22.6"E. This also allows Inguria to be in an ideal location for commerce between two fairly populous island nations.

Oceania near Inguria. I'm still work-in-progress to convert this map into something I purely own, but currently it is an adequate hack of Oceania showing the nearby nations. Inguria is at the center. The purple areas are "radioactive fallout" zones where most life has been destroyed. People still inhabit areas around it and society has rebounded since the Six Day War, so I guess a thermonuclear holocaust isn't so bad.

The World of 2044. I've decided that the Six Day War took down all of the first world nations of 2003, but things got better! These 48 nations listed and numbered above are patron nations guarding or supporting minor nations with less infrastructure. World population dipped from 6 billion in 2003 to about 4 billion in 2008, but has since risen back to about 6 billion by 2044 if I presume a 1.2% growth rate per year.

The Play Aides

I'm still working on these as I solidify the rules. These are sort of teasers I suppose, especially because I'll need to refactor them once the I get more of the system into place; a lot can change.

This is the Weekly Planning Sheet. I intend to have a Monthly, Quarterly, and Yearly variation as well. The thinking I'm pursuing is that each game session starts with a "Time Planning" activity where the Referee and Players perform "time skips" in order to quickly advance the story. These time-skips also allow training, research, and construction to proceed quickly.  Anyhow, the Weekly Planning Sheet above has little circles to identify Moon phases just in case it matters for espionage events, Lunar lunatics, and that sort of thing.

This is the front page of the character record sheet. I decided to do like all other modern RPGs and separate the character sheet from the other materials; the original rules had them together. What you can see here is that I've been working on how to organize information on the page, and to provide clear arrangement of "crunchy data" in places that can be quickly referenced. Look at the right-hand side and you'll see a character outline. This is not my art and I intend to replace it soon though I realize that in the digital age there's a lot of resources demonstrating better than anything I could provide. The idea is that there will be about a dozen such character outlines, and the players just pick the ones the want. At the very minimum I'll have one for male and female characters.