The Great Antarctic Hexcrawl

This is a hexmap (& associated GIS data) depicting a fantasy version of Antarctica with a temperate climate, intended for use with your TTRPG of choice.

The coastline & terrain were calculated by applying an isostatic rebound correction to Bedmap 2 data from the British Antarctic Survey. Biomes were estimated by training a random forest model on real-world temperature, elevation, & precipitation data and then applying it to warmer & wetter versions of real Antarctic climate data.

Files

• Antarctica_maps.zip contains seventeen 600 x 800 mile maps covering the whole continent. 
• Antarctica_hexes is a GIS point layer of hex locations with attributes for terrain, elevation, and row/column index. Provided as a .gpkg and .csv file.
• Antarctica_hexes.qmd is the QGIS project file used to make the maps. Edit this to alter the hex symbology.
• Antarctica_rivers.gpkg contains rivers calculated from Bedmap 2 terrain.
• Antarctica_elevation.tif is a 1000m resolution raster recording estimated post-glacial elevation in meters.

All data uses the Antarctic Polar Stereographic coordinate reference system. Hexes span approximately 6 miles.

Additional details are documented on my blog: Idraluna Archives.

License

Licensed under CC-BY-SA, so feel free to use it in your projects as long as you provide credit & share your work under the same license. Additionally, the Bedmap 2 readme requests that users cite the following paper:

Fretwell, Peter, Hamish D. Pritchard, David G. Vaughan, Jonathan L. Bamber, Nicholas E. Barrand, Robin Bell, Cesidio Bianchi et al. "Bedmap2: improved ice bed, surface and thickness datasets for Antarctica." The cryosphere 7, no. 1 (2013): 375-393.