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I started    (Original maps all by Mike Schley 2004) Post your maps! Let's talk about maps! I don't care if they're not for RPGs, or have no squares, or are only barely gaming-related. Maps are cool! (If you post other people's maps, credit them properly.)
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Nov 30, 2021 20:32
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I love maps so much. They really get my creative juices flowing. Hope there are all sorts of maps -- goon-made maps, battle maps, tavern maps, world maps, space maps all sorts of maps. I picked up DungeonDraft the other day to start poking around making my own maps and threw this together in no more than a few minutes and really want to start making some more maps because it was real fun to just slap some textures and objects downs and have something neat. 
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Nov 30, 2021 21:02
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I must have used like six different mapping programs over the years, and inevitably, all of them saved things in some format I can't open any more. I eventually just settled on good ol' MS Paint, when I wasn't using pen & paper. A campaign setting I toyed around with for a while, originally intended for D&D 4e.  of course it wound up being, well, basically the mediterranean sea, ugh. I'd put a lot of work into it before I realized that. Another ms-paint map I made for a primals PbP adventure here on SA: 
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Dec 1, 2021 07:24
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Thanks for making this; a bunch of life happened, and then I just spaced. But I love map! I made this one for a campaign of I ran of Waterdeep Dragon Heist. First time DM with first time players, I decided to take a player's scant backstory (deathly afraid of rabbits after a vicious bunny attack left him scarred) and extrapolate some nonsense about one of the noble families and werehares. So the layout is based on what info was available for the Waterdeep noble Thorp family, as well as colors and crest, etc, as well as warrens for the werehare sidequest.  Assets used are from Forgotten Adventures, White Fox Works, and Tom Cartos. https://www.patreon.com/forgottenadventures https://www.patreon.com/WhiteFoxWorks https://www.patreon.com/tomcartos Software used was Dungeondraft https://dungeondraft.net/ Overview:  It's stupid huge and distractingly detailed, but it was my first real project. [52 X 52] (easily breaks into quarters for smaller maps) Warrens and basements:  Ground level interiors:  Second Level Interiors:  Tower (only SE building):  (26x26)Roof level (overview at stupid res):  Imgur gallery with pre-quartered maps and more detailed descriptions than the map thread needs: https://imgur.com/gallery/AKm84Tv My favorite thing about making maps is spending 4 hours on something my players will spend 5 minutes in. I currently use Foundry VTT, and it has some cool modules to really add cool effects (fog, lighting, spells, traps, etc) to maps.
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Dec 1, 2021 08:23
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I've been thinking about using these animated maps for my next virtual game: https://www.patreon.com/animatedmaps https://www.patreon.com/cybermaps Has anybody ever tried these in Foundary or somewhere else? They look really cool.
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Dec 1, 2021 14:57
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The Aphasian posted:My favorite thing about making maps is spending 4 hours on something my players will spend 5 minutes in. 
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Dec 1, 2021 19:31
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Argh, don't die thread. Please, I need to believe my mental illness is shared. Here's what I'm working on currently: the "slanty tower" from Wild Beyond the Witchlight's Hither. It is a slanted tower with a top-down view, and I am sticking to orthographic (vs perspective) with lighting from the top left. Very annoying getting the angles and shadows right and it was a terrible decision, but I think I'm mostly done with the tower, just need to add environmental flare around it and tie it together. Exterior:  Interior  I used Forgotten Adventure assets ( https://www.forgotten-adventures.net/product/map-making/assets/mapmaking-pack/ and https://www.forgotten-adventures.net/product/other/clip-studio-paint-brush-bundle/ ) and Clip Studio Paint. All their assets are top down, so I had to do a lot of distortion on textures to fake the cylinder shape. There are certainly easier methods, but I liked the challenge of limited assets. The balloon caught on the crenelations is a bunch of blankets I shaded and "stitched" together. Not 100% happy with the basket, but it needs to be big enough to show a couple spoiler items. I have used DungeonDraft in the past and like it for quick map making. It's powerful, you only have to buy it once (not subscription) and it's only real weak point is shadows. https://dungeondraft.net/ For extremely quick and/or progress maps, I use Dungeon Scrawl (free, online) https://probabletrain.itch.io/dungeon-scrawl . Then I can quickly plop them on old paper images and make a splash image for the login in FoundryVTT 
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Jan 3, 2022 20:21
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I have nothing to share on encounter maps (unless you count, like old Panzer General hexmaps?) but I love geography and cartography as a means of worldbuilding. I will dig around back home and post some of my favourites
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Jan 3, 2022 22:12
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The Aphasian posted:Argh, don't die thread. Please, I need to believe my mental illness is shared. That is not dead which can forever lie.. 
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Jan 3, 2022 22:17
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In the last month or two I've paid a couple battlemap mapmakers on Patreon for their collections and I've been really please with the maps that Czepeku and The Mad Cartographer both put out, and for me having access to hundreds of maps & variants for like $15 for each of the two of those creators is extremely good value for money.
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Jan 4, 2022 15:48
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So I believe I've posted this on the forums before, but now that we've got this thread I can go into more detail. A year or two ago I picked up a copy of HexKit and discovered I really like making hexmaps. My big, ongoing project is creating an 8-mile hex map of my usual Science Fantasy homebrew setting, which has eventually spiraled out into making 12 separate 8-mile-per hex maps of a 4,000 x 3,000 km area comprising the known world of my setting... You can probably see a few areas I've pretty heavily based on existing D&D maps, the result of me wanting to drop official modules into the world to run for my players: Karameikos from the old Basic Set can be found in the Easternmost area near the entrance to the central sea, Keoland from the various Saltmarsh adventures lies a little West of that, the area around Northspire is based on the region of the Sword Coast near Neverwinter and Uzuri (In the bottom middle portion of the map) is just a modified version of Chult. The two areas I've given the most attention to are the maps for the region in the Eastern-middle portion of the map, detailing a region called "The Midderlands" which is the closest to a traditional fantasy setting: A region comprised of 9 loosely allied nations built over the ruins of a collapsed empire, with geography similar to Western North America...   The other major one is the map for Uzuri, a nation in the Southern-central region that serves as a modified version of Chult in the heavily altered offshoot of Tomb of Annihilation I've been running...  Overall it's been a fun project to keep me occupied and my next steps are focused on fixing the discrepancies in the seams where the 12 maps fit together
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Jan 5, 2022 21:50
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That's really cool! Have you thought about using Worldographer? It does the Global->Regional->Kingdom scaling in the app.
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Jan 5, 2022 23:12
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1. Those are rad. 2. Wordographer's site says it does star maps too, so I guess you could go battlemap-town-kingdom-region-global-star system-galactic, really flesh it out.
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Jan 7, 2022 01:29
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Thank you! I haven't checked out Worldographer myself, but another member of one of my tabletop groups recently used it to make some maps for a Godbound campaign he's been running for us and the results looked pretty decent. I might have to give it a deeper look...
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Jan 7, 2022 03:50
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Here are some maps I made, mostly for our party's Descent Into Avernus campaign, of varying effort levels and quality as I slowly learned how to use Dungeondraft. Some I spent ages on, others I whipped up in 20 minutes, and you can probably tell which ones. Elturel Docks  Our adventure begins on the banks of the chionthar, as the party find themselves on the southern side of the river across the water from the burning crater that once contained the city of Elturel. Due to the circumstances of their escape they are have been in the astral place for about a day and so find the southern dock mostly empty, aside from some injured horses, broken wagons, and a lone woman with a crossbow very intent on ensuring her own wagon not be plundered. The Forest Edge  The party make the long trek from Elturel to Baldur's Gate, picking up refugees here and there along the way. At this bridge, bandits have chosen to prey upon passers by, and the party must defend their caravan. The Poisoned Poseidon  Arriving in Baldur's gate and receiving a mission to investigate strange murders, clues lead the party here. This ship was beached on the docks following a great magical duel onboard, and many years later has been repurposed as a tannery, and as a front for dead three cultists. The lowest deck, sunk into the ground, attaches to some underground catacombs, used to keep prisoners before sacrifice. [A redrawing of Mike Schley's ship from Ghosts of Saltmarsh and Dyson Logos' Buried at sea and using the appropriate key from the Alexandrian remix] Dungeon of the Dead Three  A redrawing of the dungeon of the dead three using principles suggested in the Alexandrian remix of the campaign. I've taken several elements from other people's own efforts in this regard, but broadly, the rooms are vanilla to the adventure, the room art is taken from a map by "colin r", but the specific layout of those rooms is mine. Of note, actual walkways have been added to watery areas of the dungeon so that the people actually living down here don't need to wade through knee deep water all the time, and a large wooden barrier added between the gas-filled area in the top middle and the back of the dungeon in the upper right. Betrayal at Heap Gate  The heroes rush for the Wide, attempting to head off an assassination, but the guards at the Heap Gate into the upper city have been paid to make sure they don't make it. [Conceptually, the actual portcullis gate is in the narrow section of the wall, allowing people on the wall to fire down from both sides, but also blocking line of sight to the gate until the party get close, to ensure the spellcasters cannot just snipe the door from range] Market Square Soup Kitchen  The heroes arrive in the Wide, where a crowd of refugees have gathered to hear a speech, off to one side, bread and soup is being dispensed from several tables. And then hell literally breaks loose as an infernal arrow strikes the speaker, causing panic. [This huge map was filled with gargantuan sized "Swarm of Panicked Humanoids", who would knock prone and trample the players as they attempted to flee, with devils attacking the crowd from around the stage. The Old Coachouse  A dastardly trap plotted by one of the party's enemies, the Cleric's squire and an acolyte from his temple have been kidnapped and taken here. One is tied unconscious to a pile of oil soaked timber and rags, the other, suspended in the air above a deep, deep well. When the part opens the door into the main courtyard, the trap is sprung, dropping the acolyte into the well and a burning lantern onto the oily timbers. Who do the party choose to save? [Map originally by Dyson Logos, redrawn] Flennis Manor  Flennis Manor is the home of Lady Flennis, a cultist of Myrkul who had brutally experimented on the nature of death and the soul using one of the party as a guinea pig. The party colluded with Liara Portyr to have that party member declared to be a disgraced nephew of the Lady and so the rightful heir to her estate. The manor is in the old style, with a main hall for dining (including a screened area adjacent to the kitchen for servants to hold dishes for serving), a drawing room for entertaining guests, a long gallery for portraits, a library with attached office for business dealings, a great chamber adjacent to the bedroom for personal recreation, bedrooms for the three head servants and a guard barracks. All others without their own homes sleeping on the floor of the hall, as is traditional. The main lobby has been renovated in the modern style with marble flooring and white walls, but the cost to renovate the hall or gallery is prohibitive, creating a mismatch in the decor. A chapel for worship provides an honest face for Lady Flennis, while the gruesome shrine to Myrkul hidden behind a bookcase in her bedroom is her primary place of worship. [Map based on Hevlod Manor by Dyson Logos, reconfigured internally to fit early medieval house design]. Gorion Wing  The Gorion Wing of Candlekeep comrpises the special residential chambers kept for visiting chosen of Mystra, to reside and research in a more secluded area seperate from the usual throng of seekers down in the court of air. When not in use for that purpose, some scholars in residence make use of the rooms as private studies, as in the case of Sylvira and Traxigor, who occupy the second and third rooms respectively. Sylvira's thaumoscope points out the window in the direction of Elturel, while Traxigor's room is a complete mess of papers, books and scrolls. Other rooms might make suitable residence for the PCs, if they can convince the monks of the need for special treatment. Elturel Arrival  This is one of the city blocks in Elturel, with the party arriving in the area with the well, the lack of immediate exits to the street should ensure they are still on this map when the arrival encounter begins. The High Hall  I don't have much to say about this one, but I needed a map of the courtyard of the High Hall in Elturel at approximately the correct scale. It comes out to a huge map, but one that might be suitable for fighting some huge battle on should the hall come under assault. The Keep of The Twin Suns   The Keep of the Twin Suns is the new nexus of power in Elturel. The headquarters of the Knights of the Companion, the old order's grandmaster makes his lair here as he orders out his loyal hell knight minions into the streets of the city to enforce their infernal curfew and to feed the citizens of the city their rations of cursed grain, sapping their will to resist and tainting their souls. A secret door behind the wall of names leads to a small shrine to the Companions' true patron, the Archduchess Zariel.
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Jan 18, 2022 18:21
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quote:The Dawnflower Library is a temple of Sarenrae and library west of the town of Otari, on the southern coast of the Isle of Kortos. Its high priestess is Vandy Banderdash, a talkative halfling woman. While the temple also hosts shrines to Cayden Cailean, Erastil, and Gozreh, most of the building is dedicated to its publicly available collection of books. The temple also offers medicine, magical healing, and divine spellcasting services. Starting off a new Pathfinder 2e campaign and wanted to have a map for the Dawnflower Library, so I stole the basic layout from a map I had seen somewhere in my travels and kind of decorated it to fit my needs. I really like the cute little living quarters for the high priestess and her assistant and the little cat sleeping on the bed. It just makes me happy to look at. 
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Jan 25, 2022 14:56
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Finished my Slanty Tower from WBtW.  Link here for undressed/halfdressed maps. https://imgur.com/a/HrpiSBh Also, here's one I made for the Arrival in Hither scene. 
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Feb 18, 2022 23:48
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KingKalamari posted:So I believe I've posted this on the forums before, but now that we've got this thread I can go into more detail. A year or two ago I picked up a copy of HexKit and discovered I really like making hexmaps. My big, ongoing project is creating an 8-mile hex map of my usual Science Fantasy homebrew setting, which has eventually spiraled out into making 12 separate 8-mile-per hex maps of a 4,000 x 3,000 km area comprising the known world of my setting... Can you post some more about how you used hexkit for this? Did you figure out a particular size for the regional maps and then stitch them together with something else? I've got a similar project for my homebrew game and worldographer slows to a crawl when I try to do the world>region>local approach.
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Feb 19, 2022 07:51
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Tanor'Thal Refuge of Skullport (35x35)(200px grid) 
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Apr 26, 2022 16:16
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The depth of field on the background is a really nice touch.
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Apr 26, 2022 16:28
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I have no idea if it was a conflux of being younger with more free time, new-edition excitement, and our particular gaming group's personalities, but in my experience the most successful dungeon maps were from the time our dungeonmaster was like "hey anybody who makes a graph map dungeon for my campaign can have a random starting bonus or something" and a week later he had like 30 hand-drawn maps that served the basis of basically the entire campaign's non-overworld adventuring (the maps were as detailed as we wanted, but he did not want us to like create encounters or monsters or anything, and he filled in things that made sense mostly extemporaneously). I know "collaborative world-building" is hardly a new concept, and indeed was totally in vogue at some point earlier this millennium, but yeah that stuff is fun! In theory it could have been metagaming to remember the dungeon you made, but in practice if anyone actually remembered the random map they made six months earlier it certainly did not seem to be the case. Though I did recognize my dungeon level where I filled like a quarter of it with an enormous outline of a headless person (obviously stolen for Caed Nua) I would definitely love to still be in a situation where I had an in-person tabletop game where everyone was even half as invested as we were there.
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Apr 26, 2022 17:48
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I can't believe I missed this thread somehow, god I love maps! Here's one from the start of a D&D 5e campaign:  Everything within and beyond the thorn-drenched north of the map is an impossible-to-chart accursed forest that changes shape according to the nature of its dark masters ala Ravenloft. Falconcrag is the PCs' fortress and home base, an explicit nod Dragon Age: Inquisition. I had originally intended to fill out more detail on the northern and central sections of the map, since I know what they look like in my notes, but events in the campagn were mostly occuring either in the east, or in the unchartable northern regions. And now it doesn't matter, because...  ... here's how it was going a couple years later. Things got, uh, a little out of hand. This one isn't something I made, but did find enormously useful - the layout of Maulbronn Monastery, already laid out like a dungeon with map key and everything:  Turns out these old heritage sites are often very well-documented, and if your game is relatively grounded you can just straight-up steal those maps, change the labels on them as needed, and use the actual photographs of them as visual aids!   And now a city map, one of several for that campaign, all made with the same Fantasy City Generator, albeit in a much earlier version:  Dungeon time! This one is dungeon in the One-Page Dungeon style, specifically inspired by Fuseboy / Michael Prescott's adventure locations, which are now collected as The Trilemma Compendium. This was an early adventure, I think around level 3 or 4, but which has been revisited something like four times for various reasons. I include it here both because I like the one-page dungeon format, and because it's representative of one of my favorite tricks: stealing maps from EverQuest. Points for anyone who can recognize what dungeon that map is from, and spoilered answer for anyone curious: [spoiler]Mines of Nurga, the original version.[/url]  And here's a battle map, one of several 'boss fight arenas' we've had over the course of that game. The gimmick of this one was that it took place in the middle of a violent, magically-controlled snowstorm, so that visibility was negligible past maybe 15 feet. Monsters were buried in the snow or shambling through the storm, violent winds would build up and give about a round of foreshadowing, then knock down anything in their path, and the boss was flying around on a spectral roc dive-bombing the party and carrying off hapless PCs to drown them in the cursed depths of the waterfall pool. How it started:  How it ended:  And finally, possibly my favorite "battle map," ripped from its archived Roll20 page: Teatime With Dancer.  (I also genuinely love how this picture shows what it's like playing with tweens and teens: a mix of PC names that are just ripped straight from League of Legends, edgy tiefling portraits, Cool Guy Homebrew Crystal Genasi, and "I can't find a good portrait so here's a dude from Team Rocket.") Dancer is (was?) one of the Big Bads of the setting, a Lovecraftian force of cosmic chaos manifestating as an enormous will-o-wisp, but which had once been a human child. The players had become very sympathetic toward Dancer and expressed a desire to free them, despite knowing that none of this setting's big bads can ever be redeemed. They spent literal years IRL thinking up ways to save Dancer, and I eventually decided I had to give them a chance. Real-life years earlier, the party rogue had survived an encounter with Dancer when it had been in a talkative mood, but made a promise to one day come and visit it for tea, and that obligation was finally called in. During a bizarre tea-time in an extradimensional realm, Dancer revealed that it intended to use its reality-altering powers to manifest a version of itself that was one-for-one identical to the child it had been, in order to interrogate it about a past event that it couldn't perceive, and which the party's illusionist had given Dancer an existential crisis over. But Dancer's humanity was so far gone that it had no good model with which to kindle the genuine spark of life in its puppet, so it requested that a delegation from the party to demonstrate How To Be A Person 101. The players quickly realized that this was their opportunity not only to influence how the manifestation would turn out, but to steal (read: rescue) the child while a portion of Dancer's power was locked up in it, rendering a profoundly dangerous entity vulnerable. All of this gave rise to Teatime with Dancer (heavily inspired by Fire Emblem, in a nod to a FE-obsessed player): a "combat" consisting of polite conversation over tea, where the challenge lay in remembering or deducing enough about Dancer's history, psychology, relationships, and nature to pick conversation topics that would shape its human version into something stable enough to rescue (accumulating Hope), while siloing off its Eldritch Horror component (Dread) and its Unhinged Faerie component (Restlessness) to prevent it from going some flavor of nightmarishly insane. There are three other "battle maps" in the series, one for a series of children's games designed to teach life skills and moral lessons, one for an extremely high-stakes game of hide-and-seek, and one I had to make up on the fly for "welp we successfully instantiated and kidnapped the child but things have gone Horribly Wrong and we're falling through a portal through time and space with no idea where we're going to end up." And that's how my D&D 5e party ended up in an alternate timeline where the campaign went Even Worse For Everyone, and they're having to Days of Future Past themselves back into the only version of reality where they have a hope of saving the world. Teatime.
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Apr 27, 2022 04:53
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The Aphasian posted:For extremely quick and/or progress maps, I use Dungeon Scrawl (free, online) https://probabletrain.itch.io/dungeon-scrawl . Then I can quickly plop them on old paper images and make a splash image for the login in FoundryVTT My current mapping idk, probably Sisyphean task, is unfucking Undermountain Level 1 (which is why I've quoted the above post, it's a bunch of in-game maps of the 5e version of the entrance). For reference, Undermountain Level 1 is infamous for being huge and creatively incoherent - it began with TSR staffers wanting to expand Ed Greenwood's original maps into a full poster map of 10 ft = 1" dungeon maps and adding just tons and tons of empty rooms (including the entirety of Quasqueton from B1 In Search of the Unknown). So I'm painstakingly taking notes on every room that has ever been actually keyed (over the 5 versions of Level 1, often covering different parts), compressing them into one set that makes sense, and then drawing a master map of all of the good bits and fixes and so on. Right now it just consists of me tracing the 2e Ruins of box set maps off my iPad as shown here (and which you can compare to the maps I've quoted, it's the same section but there are some changes between the 2e map I'm tracing and the 5e one in the quote):  I'm going to have to take all these drafts and tape them together into a master map at the end. I expect it will cover most of my floor. Arivia fucked around with this message at 15:42 on Apr 27, 2022 |
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Apr 27, 2022 15:39
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Crossposting from the procgen threadThe Aphasian posted:Threw Pack it in everyone, the ai's have beat us again.
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May 30, 2022 05:24
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at Midjourney, made some d&d nonsense.
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I’m glad I found this thread as I love making maps. I have a tendency to lose hours to mapmaking (or searching for THAT ONE PIECE I NEED in Dungeondrafts lovely tagging). The campaign I’m starting online is heavily influenced by Dimension 20’s Unsleeping City except my magic urban world is going to be extremely neon and synthwave so I’ve been hoarding cyberpunk, sci-fi and modern assets. Does anyone know of any great asset makers/resources for this genre? Alternatively I would be willing to start dabbling in making my own assets if someone knew of maybe a good youtube tutorial for the process - i haven’t been able to find much. The dream is to run a major season finale through a mini-mega dungeon modeled off an early 90s shopping mall, complete with glowing neon arcade and food court with fast good golems.
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Aug 17, 2022 17:37
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Lord Yod posted:Can you post some more about how you used hexkit for this? Did you figure out a particular size for the regional maps and then stitch them together with something else? I've got a similar project for my homebrew game and worldographer slows to a crawl when I try to do the world>region>local approach. Sorry for the (very) late response, but I'd be happy to! I actually created a rough map in Photoshop following the steps in this tutorial to use as a guide for the hexmap. Once I had the general landmasses set I roughly blocked in major geographical features like forests, mountains, deserts and glaciers as new layers on the map using a similar process to creating landmasses (Rough them in by drawing on the mask layer with the brush tool and then running teh mask through the crystalize filter a few times). Once I was happy with the rough placement, I exported the map to a png to use as a guide in the next step. From there I decided on the distance per hex I wanted the final map to be as well as the rough scale of the world map I was making by using a similarly-sized region on Earth. In my case I wanted the region to be roughly comparable to the Mediterranean, so I set the rough dimensions of the map at 4,000 x 3,000 km at 10km per hex. Since this would translate to an absolutely massive number of hexes in the final map, I designed a rough map of the entire region at 30 km per hex, then divided the resulting map into a 4 x 3 grid of 1,000 km[sup]2[sup] squares and then used those as guides to recreate these sections as 12 10km per hex maps. In both cases, I set the earlier map I had designed as a transparent overlay by going to file > Set Overlay. This makes it a lot easier to place hexes since you have a guide to where each type of terrain is supposed to be placed. A few general rules of thumb to keep in mind from a general map-making standpoint: -When placing mountains, keep the rain-shadow effect in mind: A bigass mountain range is going to affect the formation and travel of rain clouds resulting in one side being much dryer than the other. -Similarly, mountain ranges tend to form at fault lines, where two continental plates converge. Volcanoes form at the opposite point, where two plates drift apart. -Water flows to the lowest point on the map through the point of least resistance. What this means is that rivers typically start at a point of high elevation on the map and flow downhill towards the ocean and will have a bunch of smaller rivers that all gradually converge as they move downstream. While it's possible for rivers to split, this is a fairly rare occurrence and should be used sparingly. -Settlements tend to crop up at -Similarly, coastal settlements are typically found in places like bays and inlets because they provide protection against extreme weather and the more violent oceanic forces. -Sailors absolutely love coasts. Sailing out on open ocean without a coastline in site was massively dangerous back in ancient times, so sailors would typically sail along the coastline rather than exploring out into open water. This has a major effect on the distribution of settlements. -Similarly, settlers will tend to follow rivers as they move inland and the distribution of settlements will reflect this. -Things like deserts and mountain ranges typically act as major barriers to trade and exploration. This leads to cultures with a big stretch of desert separating them will tend to be less culturally connected than settlements divided by the same distance without a desert. This is also why sub-Saharan Africa was never occupied by the Romans, but North Africa was.
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Oct 20, 2022 22:04
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Took an interesting game jam challenge the other weekend: Crossword Dungeon Jam Wherein you generate a map by finding a crossword puzzle, doing it, then using the clues and shape to make an RPG map. I turned it into an oldschool style one page adventure that's probably cliche as hell, but it was fun to put together in a night. My result:  If you want the PDF to go with it, grab it free from itch.
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Oct 25, 2022 06:16
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recently found an iso of the Forgotten Realms Interactive Atlas CD-ROM from 1999.  Had this cool sampler of basic building layouts for Waterdeep, although they should be good templates for any fantasy setting. All the maps are FCW (fastCAD) files, so I'm trying to figure out a way to export/convert them better than just screenshotting very zoomed in quadrants and rejoining. (Exporting as a DXF and converting to SVG didn't really work. edit: pdf->ai->svg works.) 
The Aphasian fucked around with this message at 03:20 on Nov 10, 2022 |
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Nov 10, 2022 01:27
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Guy on the left angrily asking how they could have forgotten the realms when the map is right there.
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Nov 10, 2022 01:44
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There’s two very important patches for FRIA you should track down. I think Candlekeep has copies for download. More maps, fixes to some of the included ones. The maps can be edited in Campaign Cartographer. 3 has come up as a Humble Bundle a few times and works fine with those files.
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Nov 10, 2022 11:02
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Thanks for the head's up; Candlekeep's links were old and dead (WOTC doesn't have a page up for 22 year old software anymore) but the internet archive to the rescue https://web.archive.org/web/20110322093635/http://www.wizards.com/dnd/article.asp?x=dnd/ex20020218a
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Nov 10, 2022 18:52
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Hey fellas, know a nice tool to make a modern-ish street map of a city? I'm basically looking for the convenience of doodling and re-making bits right now, with a good-enough output to serve as a foundation for an actual nice-looking map later on. My somewhat unusual needs are that I'm making a ttrpg about car racing and in my spare time I wanted to investigate the feasibility of making a sandbox module of sorts that's basically a printable city map on which a GM can mark a route with a highlighter and have a neat little pre-designed racetrack.
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Nov 18, 2022 20:21
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Hmm. For modern cities I tend to just use actual city maps. Not that I've done that very much. American cities built on grids contrast nicely with nonamerican (older) cities built on medieval street plans plus ring roads and sprawl. That said there's this thing which only makes American style cities: https://maps.probabletrain.com/#/ It's a generator not an editor so if you actually want to doodle and re-make bits it's not suitable, although there's a lot of parameters to tweak. Campaign Cartographer is the nuclear option, and there are modern assets out there if you google around. I don't like recommending it because it's a steep learning curve and I've never felt it was worth pouring dozens of hours into making maps that will hit the table for ten minutes and then the play focuses on some alley or warehouse or whatever. So I'll just throw in a personal favorite, pencil & ruler freeform drawing on nongridded plain paper. You can grab chunks of real google maps cities and trace them into a whole, if you like.
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Nov 18, 2022 21:29
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Lichtenstein posted:Hey fellas, do you have an old copy of a sim city, or a pc racing/driving game with a map editor? might be able to work from there if its for personal use. is this going to be printed or for a vtt?
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Nov 18, 2022 22:19
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It's sort of for personal use, in that I'd expect to spend a decent amount of time doodling and changing things (a city is a big thing, especially if the street layout has to account for actual game mechanics!). The idea would be for the end product to be just clean enough to work out usability needs (like what is the right size/density for the needs, how simplified can I get it without feeling weird, etc/) and serve as a useful reference file for actual drawing. I think my best option is to go straight to Inkscape (which I'm not that great at). Saw an idea to export a rando map from https://www.openstreetmap.org to straight up steal some decent-looking lines and icons, but the files are messy enough it'll take me a while to figure out!
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Nov 18, 2022 23:05
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I'd like to say a thanks to roleplaying games for the fact that there are so many maps of the internal layout of ships that really helped get me back into a lot of sci-fi when the opening of the sci-fi wi-fi subforum sparked me off. Having a whole deckplan really helps when imagining what it's like to be in these spaces.   And also there's a lot of people out there running their own games who feel compelled to design their own ship plans which are neat to see online.  There's also a maps thread over on the sfwf with plenty of fantasy if you're interested.
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Dec 18, 2022 18:46
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So I've been revisiting the old Wilderlands supplements I did an incomplete FATAL and Friends on a few years back. While the setting itself notably has a lot of cruft from the era that has not necessarily aged well, I do think the campaign map is pretty solid and the idea of a big, dumb hexmap with a bunch of pre-statted towns is pretty useful. That and I've become fixated on running a science fantasy stone and sorcery type setting in Worlds Without Number and this has a bunch of ideas to steal. This goes alongside me reading some of the old Talislanta books at the same time, another RPG I think has a pretty solid campaign map associated with it. Then the gears in my head start turning and I realize the central desert/wasteland of Talislanta fits really nicely with the section of desert on the western edge of the Wilderlands map. Thus I give you...  The Taliswilderlands I still need soemthing to fill out the top left and bottom right sections, but I think it works surprisingly well from a cartographic standpoint...
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Mar 8, 2023 21:09
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I also love maps! Does anyone have a good airship map? Multiple levels would be great but aren't really necessary. My players are almost certainly going to steal one and it would be nice to have something ready to go.
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Apr 12, 2023 23:41
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| # ? Apr 27, 2024 22:58 |
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I also like drawing maps. I appreciate that computers can generate me a dungeon in seconds, but I love the feeling of rolling dice and seeing what each passage will lead to. I've used a ton of random dungeon and world generators that I have accumulated over time. They all generate unique dungeons and worlds based on the parameters of the guide and the differences can be fun to play with. For instance, one level I would use the 5e DMG to generate the level, then I would switch to the 2e DMG for the next. My favorite world that I've settled on building is this one. I started making an overview of a megadungeon with How to Host a Dungeon. This was a lot of fun and I made a bunch of these before I picked this map. I kind of like this game, it gives you a history for why a megadungeon would exist that the player generates, kind of like a manual Dwarf Fortress.  I'm still working on this but this is the world map that I made based on this megadungeon. I tried to simulate the "great void" in the core of the world by showing the land spiral towards a large center mass. I used This Book mostly and have been working through it slowly.  Also, been making the actual grid maps for the dungeon using various books. This level was made with Central Casting. I kind of like this generator because it has you complete a room all at once, most of them have you draw the outline of the dungeon and then add the contents afterwards. 
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Apr 13, 2023 15:41
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