Thursday, August 21, 2014

Taking suggestions on where to go next.

I know it has been about 3 weeks since the last update. There's been a lot of change around the home so I haven't really had time to devote to mapping.

But I also realize that right now I can go in one of two directions. I can "go broad"which means to just continue mapping a larger area at the same scale and in the same way. with respect to mapping more broadly, which hex orientation would people prefer? Straight up north or Stolen Lands slanted? I'd like to just work off one set of maps regardless.

Or I can"go deep" and fill in some detail about the river kingdoms already mapped. By this I mean creating and explaining some thematic maps (geology, geography, vegetation, fauna, population) for the River Kingdoms. These would be tools for GMs to reduce their prep time and have a little more depth. They would also be completely unofficial.

So, which is more desirable?

Tuesday, August 5, 2014

A selfish map

In the Kingmaker Campaign I'm currently involved in we're just about to start Book 5. When my GM heard I had resurrected the mapping project, he wanted to know how close I was to being done because he wanted to use my maps in the campaign.

As such I've spent the past few days retooling and focusing hard on the Kingmaker area. The resulting map is about 90% complete and encompasses all of the Stolen Lands, Brevoy, Pitax, Mivon and the western edge of Iobaria. I believe all the roads, cities and trails have been added and I've included the borders as of the start of the campaign. I feel good about most of the hex assignments, but there is always room for debate there. (Is it hilly forests or forested hills?)


It's saved as a MASSIVE illustrator file so that I can add / remove / hide layers. Indeed, the file is so large, I can only save it as a bmp file which itself is about 20MB. I made this jpg from the bmp. I don't have a slow compiuter ;) If someone knows a way to make illustrator layers more open-sourced (i.e. work in the GIMP or something like that, please send me an email.

The beta version of my Kingmaker map. Inspired by several Paizo maps and descriptions.

A little bit about the map. The city font is "Ale and Wenches" while the landmark font is "Bryn Athyn Condensed italic". The scale is 12 miles across (side to side) a hex - just like in Kingmaker. I don't have all the landmarks labeled and there needs to be a legend. 

Farms. They don't say where farms are exactly in the game, but they give general indications and I extrapolated from them. Pitax's farms are sometimes vineyards (its really more of a "cultivated land" hex). Mivon isn't a big farming nation - it makes its living off of the eels, whereas Touvette is all about farming. It would not take much arm twisting to get me to add farms there. 

And a reminder about the Slough, and swamps to a greater extent. The darker swamp symbols are deep enough to be navigable by flat bottomed boat at least. The lighter ones, not so much - though a DC 15 or 20 Profession: Sailing might get you through (check with your GM). Although the River Kingdoms maps don't have any additional swamps listed on them, the text frequently mentions that swamps aren't infrequent. The geography and paleo-history of the area argues for it as well. So I've included a few. 

That's all I have now. you should be able to biggify this map above by clicking. Enjoy!