Irony, MT - Part 2

One of the most important parts of a RPG game (for me anyway) is the map, so when I was putting together a set of western RPG materials for my wife's birthday [see previous post here], I knew that I wanted to make a map to go with it.

Since I had decide to use the Montana Territory for various reasons, I spent some time looking at Google maps, trying to find a town that was in mixed terrain, and was not too changed from its late 1800's plan.  The idea was to then look for a period map of the town, and use that, or a modification there of.  After some work, I finally found the prototype for my town of Irony: Bannack, MT.

Bannack, named for the local Bannock Native Americans, was a gold rush town that boomed quickly, then nearly disappeared before guttering out into the ghost town that it is today. I found a tourist map of the place, which had the look I liked, and drew a simplified version of it in Google Draw.  The pictures are either period pictures of buildings in town, or modern ones of the remaining buildings in the ghost town.

Click to enbiggen

After I drew the map with Google Draw, I then used MS publisher to put together this version, add in the photos, and the border.  I then printed it, and yellowed the paper with coffee and some dirt, folded it about 1000 times and there you have it.  I rather like it.

Isometric Dungeons

Telecanter, of the awesome silhouettes, has a couple of recent blog posts about drawing isometric dungeons, which give the illusion of depth to your maps.

Very cool, and it seems like the basics of this technique would work when done by hand, or with layers in a GIMP/Photoshop sort of way.

The aptly named Fantastic maps shows some of the basic steps involved:

1: Draw Map, 2: Rotate Map, 3: Magic!

This may be what I need to get me to finish the semi isometric tomb map I have been idly sketching on a post-it for a few months.  Then I can get on to trying to kill the players with it.

Map Test

Last week, Ckutalik had an interesting blog post about using point maps instead of a traditional hex map as a DM tool for exploratory games.  In essence, the point map catalogs those areas of interest, and details only the distance between them. 

It occurred to me that this sort of map would also work as a DM overlay onto a traditional hex map as well.  If you presume that an area is "safe", that is that it has no real exploring potential, then it can be reduced to just a blank hex.  A blank hex is fairly meaningless, and therefore can be further reduced down to just a travel point to indicate the amount of time needed to get from A to B.  However, the hexes are still maintained, in the event that they are needed for something later (domain level play, say)

Here is a quick map that I drew up using Google Draw, a handy little tool if you have not used it yet.

It uses the conventions mentioned by Ckutailk in the original post, but leaves the "interesting" areas as hexes, ready to be explored.  As an additional bit of usefulness, the node sort of map is how someone from City A might actually think about the geography, that is in terms of marches from point A to point C, rather than in terms of cardinal directions and miles.

Thoughts?

Maps the Carmen way

Carmen's Fun Painty Time! has a nice little tutorial on making a map using Photoshop elements.  Often I struggle with various open sourced software, and here is a little tutorial that makes the comerical products seem so much easier...  I assume having artistic skill helps a bit too (you no doubt recall my crude efforts in this area)

Anyway, here is his very fetching final product, a wastelands area map, which would be perfectly servicable for a miniatures campaign, or a roleplaying exploration map. Throw on a hex grid, and you are good to go.

Ir-Simha

I is for Ir-Simha in our ninth installment of the Deepest Sea A-Z.



Crude and Hasty Map

 Ir-Simha is a Dwarven kingdom located in the south Rim in the midst of Kékhzmet.  It consists of one small city and one village, each at the end of a valley in the middle of the Rim. The land between is arid due to the height of the mountains.  Ir-Simha itself is heavily fortified with effectively two walled surface towns joined by a keep in the center, which contains the gate to the under city.  The few humans, havlings, and elves who live in Ir-Simha live in the northern half of the city, in the new quarter, which has taller buildings more suited to those who do not enjoy living underground.

While the king gives nominal fealty to the king of Kékhzmet, in actuality the country is independent.  The king has a council of elders, who are reputed to speak with the voice of the ancients.  What this means, few know, as the council is not seen in public.  The city has approximately 1750 households, but appears to be smaller, as many of the residents live under ground. Trade with Kékhzmet is mostly concentrated on exchanges of grain from the more fertile north, for the well wrought swords of Ir-Simha.  There are also large flocks of sheep, which provide cloth and meat for the city.  The village at the east end of the kingdom relies heavily on timber production, in addition to providing services to traders and travelers moving from one part of Kékhzmet to the other.  Ir-Simha uses imperial standard measures, and takes imperial coin, although most are over stamped with dwarvish markings.

Ir-Simha was founded as a slave town early in the rule of the Titans, housing the working crews used to mine iron from the hills. After the overthrow of the Titans, more dwarves came to this area, and a frantic fortification process protected them from the upheaval of the era.  Elves came in numbers during the high days of the Empire, and created the south above ground town.  The fortifications were expanded when the Empire dissolved, and have recently be modified again to take heavier war machines on the main bastions.

Near Ir-Simha are the ruins of a small pre-Imperial town.  The buildings appear to be mostly elvish in nature, and only survive due to the arid nature of the high mountain regions.

To the north west is a giant head and arm which appear to grow from the hard talus of the slopes.  The  face is approximately ten cubits across.  Curiously, the head is screaming, and the hand is missing from the upraised arm.
East of the north south road is a tall black tower, clearly burnt out long ago.

Tuesday, more Deepest Sea A-Z with Justice.

On Hex size and mapping

Part of making a game map, particularly one for sandbox play, is figuring out what the scale of the map should be.  Once that is done, then you can figure out what size hex grid to overlay.  (sometimes those are the same thing)  Sometimes you want the hexes to be a standard for maps of that scale, and some times you want a hex size linked to a game more closely.

Zak S. has a great post here about how to calculate hex size. (caution, site is frequently NSFW)  He suggests that using the formula H = DN - P(DN) is a way to calculate the size of a hex for your map. [where H is hex size, D is distance in a day, N is number of days without incident, P is percent chance of an empty hex, and DN is again Distance in a day and Number of days without incident]

If you are drawing your map out by hand, I find this site to be very useful.  You are able to create your own PDF of hexes, and then you can print them whenever you need a new map page.  There are other interesting papers there too, such as square graph paper, polar paper, and even music paper.  The Cornell Graph paper looks to be useful for dungeon drawing and keying for instance.

Anyway, just musing a bit on maps for the Monday A-Z post.