Better Fantasy Maps

@allenvarney tweeted this excellent article by Ken MacLeod making a plea for fantasy maps that at least reflect the variety of real world medevil maps.

When we look at the ancient and mediaeval worlds, we see if anything a greater diversity of forms of rule than we see today. In fantasy, where we might expect a wide play of fancy, we see nothing of the kind. There are good monarchies, legitimised by prophecy or ancient artifact. There are evil empires, usually in the east. There are barbarian tribes. Here and there, if we're lucky, there are city states ruled by merchant princes. There are plenty of exceptions - Pratchett, Gentle, Pinto, Mieville - but that's the rule.

This is a really great article, and I can't think of anything to add except to solemnly swear that I will do my best to give the world better fantasy maps.

Process Process Process

I'm working on some nice color maps to tie some of the microdungeon stuff together. No details today. I'll have some sneak peeks in a week or so.

But meanwhile my mind is being blown by the art of Scott C, especially this post where he provides a look at his process. Inspiring!

Will Trade Dungeons for Layout Skills

I really want to make some easily digestible PDFs of my dungeons, but I just don't have the time to do it. In fact, just keeping up with posting has been a bit of a struggle this week. Is there anyone out there with a modicum of desktop publishing skills who'd be willing to take the dungeons from one month and package them as a PDF? In return, I'll make a custom to-order dungeon and send it to you wherever you live.

I want a PDF with each dungeon and its description on a single page. If it has a decent cover, so much the better, but that's not required. The PDFs will be made available freely from the blog.

Kev's Map Tiles

On the topic of map tiles, I just discovered Kev's Dungeon Tiles. These are a nice set of modular dungeon tiles that are available for free download. Kev is adding more sets all the time.

Looking at these, I can see that you could probably lay out a small microdungeon with these tiles, fitting the whole thing on a decently sized gaming table.

Map Tiles

I don’t include grids on my microdungeons because I want to leave details like that up to the GM. A microdungeon map isn’t a square-by-square representation, it’s a guide. Think of it as a quick sketch of the dungeon, or the hand-drawn map you might find on the Orc chieftain. It represents the layout, but not the proportions. That way each GM is free to size the rooms in a way that fits the encounter.

But I do admire a nice grid map. There are a lot of good map products out there, but personally I’ve been spoiled by John Harper’s gorgeous DIY maps. He used these when we first tried out 4th Edition D&D, and it remains one of the most memorable games I’ve ever played in. His tutorial is very easy to follow, though you probably want basic to moderate Photoshop skills.

The blurred-out backgrounds are a very nice touch (virtually the entire short campaign took place on vertiginously high towers and buildings). As I recall, the example map in his post was a particularly rough fight with some darkness-producing teleporting badasses who almost had us fleeing half way through the fight (we persevered, however, saving the plane from Vecan’s graps. Again.)