The Crossing

This is a work-in-progress look at my current mapping project. This is the intersection of four major routes in an underground complex. I'm envisioning it as a high-security area, with temporary warehouses, guard quarters, side-tunnels with arrow slots covering the main passages, and a central fort that covers the actual intersection.

This is a look at how I lay things out in InkScape. As you can see, the colors are nothing like the final map. Instead they're chosen to be easily seen and distinguished from each other. I just dropped a background texture behind the whole thing in Gimp so it's a bit easier to make out. I'm also testing out creating both a 70px / five-foot square, full-color map for roll20, and a pdf-friendly gray-scale map for print. We'll see how that goes. I've been doing most of my test maps in 30x30 five-foot grids, which is a bit confining, at least for me. This is a 60x60 five-foot square map, or 150x150 feet vs. 300x300 feet. A bit more elbow room!

• The final version of this map is now available as Koslac's Crossing on DriveThruRPG.

The Wilds - Dangerous Wall of Text!

Lots of details in this turn, including some info-dump on the various things found by the party on their last trip to the Cold Caves.

tldr: Left the Caves. Went back to Auslaug. Told their story. Got paid. Learned some stuff about their treasure. Split up loot.

The Entry

Another mapping project, this one is the entrance to an underground complex. The main hall includes guard rooms, waiting areas, a ballroom-type space, and a bunch of additional rooms for staff and waiting supplicants. I'm pretty happy with this one except for the short stairs leading up to the balcony area that overlooks the main reception area and the stairs down on the east side. I'm not sure they hold up, nor do I think the balconies are quite right.

The Wilds - Bring Out Your Dead

Had a bit of a low-response turn this weekend, so the corresponding turn is short. The good thing about play-by-email games is that everyone can participate on their own schedule. That bad thing about play-by-email games is that it's easy to push things off. My players and I seem to run through a cycle of ups and downs in this regard. Anyhow, here's what's going on...

Dungeon?

In a fit of madness last night, I pulled out an ancient D&D map and copied it into InkScape room by room. This was the first level of a small dungeon I created back in 1978 or 1979. There are about 30 levels total in this monstrosity. This particular level was originally drawn on two sheets of four-lines per inch graph paper. There are some details missing, like a bunch of scribbled markers for puddles, moss and mold, but it's mostly intact. The original was also rotated counter-clockwise 90 degrees, but this fits the page a bit better.

Villa Map

I've been working on my InkScape and Gimp skills this weekend, trying to get some consistent quality, and improve my speed. Today's project was inspired by my Daruna game. The players recently spent a big chunk of their cash on some property outside Shalish, a villa and small orchard that had fallen into a state of disrepair. This doesn't exactly match up to their villa, but it's designed along the same lines. Squarish outer structure wrapped around an open central courtyard. This was about an hour and a half's work. Unfortunately I was dumb and saved this after a plug-in I was trying out flattened all my layers, so changes are going to be painful. Anyhow, here's a map!

Note that this *should* just plug and play in Roll20 as a map, but I'm not sure what blogger is going to do with it. Guess I'll found out in a minute...

Edit: Bleh. Blogger randomly resizes the image. That's no good. Hmm. Or not. If you click on the image above, you should get the correctly sized 1039x1039 image.

The Wilds - Around and Around

The party is back in the caves, and continuing their explorations. I forgot to post Monday's turn, so here's a double-header that covers the party's adventures this week. Highlights: water, weird tentacle monster, deep crevasses, and a decision... When we left, Rawon had just spotted something moving in the water.