Warlocks & Warriors Wilderness Map

The Warlocks & Warriors map board, drawn by David Sutherland. Source: Board Game Geek.

Reading Hill Cantons' Pointcrawl post, Bruno's Demise's Wild Campaign (where he used maps from Dungeon!, Outdoor Survival and Boot Hill among others), and then Save Vs. Dragon's Hex Crawl Week (1953 Peter Pan board game) got me thinking that David Sutherland's map for the Warlocks & Warriors (above) would make a great wilderness map for a Holmes Basic campaign, particularly for beginners/kids.

Warlocks & Warriors has several things going for it when viewed through a Holmes lens (as we always view things here). The game came out the same year (1977) as Holmes Basic, in the same size box, and with the same cover artist (Sutherland). It was designed by comic book/fantasy writer Gardner Fox, mentioned by name on page 40 of the Blue Book (this was not in Holmes' original manuscript, but was a later edit by Gygax/TSR). Fox published a series of Conan-esque fantasies from the late 60s to early 80s, including the Kothar series, the Kyrik series and the Niall stories in Dragon. The first volume of the Kyrik series is actually called "Warlock Warrior" (1975), which I still need to read to see if it's connected in any way to the game (so far, I've only read the Niall stories).

I'll need to think on this some more, but obviously the Sea Port in the lower right hand corner would be Portown, and the Castle in the upper left hand corner would be the Keep on the Borderlands...perhaps the "Borderlands" is all of the area between. Skull Mountain would be in the Mystery Mountains. The Dragon's Lair would be home to an ancient red dragon - the same one shown on the cover of the Basic set. Other Basic Level modules could be placed in various locations; B4 would fit in the Parched Desert, B1 might be the Lost Dungeon, etc.

Each circle would represent one "hex" of x miles (size to be determined later) that has a path through it. Characters might move off the path with some kind of penalty. The stars would represent special areas; IIRC, in the game they are the spots where wizard characters can cast spells, so they might be areas of increased magic and/or enchanted monsters. Arrows would represent difficult terrain (in the game they send you back two circles). The random tables printed on the map might be worked into the encounter areas.