this blessed plot

By: Unknown on 10:56

When I close my eyes and imagine an overhead view of Britain in my head, this is what I see:

Britannia is a fun game, but the detail is a bit lacking as a basis for a campaign map.  So I went over to boardgamegeek.com and did some judicious searching.  Turns out issue #11 of Wargamer Magazine included a game about Simon de Montfort and the unpleasantness between him and Henry III.  Someone was kind enough to scan in the map, which cropped to the area I care about ends up looking more like this:

Click to get a better view.  There's a little more Wales than I wanted on this map, but that's not necessarily a bad thing.  I wouldn't have minded a large area that incorporated more of the English Channel, the Channel Islands, a little Normandy and the Isles of Scilly but there absolutely nothing preventing the occasional venture off-map.  Sea travel should be mysterious and perilous anyway.

Things I have yet to do to get this map fully operational:

• Finish re-labeling stuff to fit Thomas Hardy's Wessex stories and/or new made-up names.
• Figure out a labeling scheme for the hexes.  I'm thinking the bottom left hex is N1 and the upper right partial hex is A20.
• Stock hexes.  Given that they're obviously bigger than 5 miles across I may have to develop a new format.
• Figure out what the crap the scale is.