D&D Setting Campaign maps
I've been developing an atlas of campaign maps for a d20 rpg setting for some time. I explored several different styles before settling on a hybrid of topographical and relief maps. I’ve always loved topographical maps for their detail but trying to cover a large map area with so much detail was to daunting. Instead of standard contour lines I chose to differentiate elevations using color and use semitransparent layers to represent additional information such as forests, swamps, farmed land, etc. Habitations are depicted by fairly standard symbols but because I developed the maps in Adobe Flash I was able to make these hyperlinks, which when selected, would populate a popup window with additional information retrieved from a database, including things such as population, demographic information, a brief description of the place and even a small isometric image of the settlement in the style of George Braun’s, “Civitates orbis terrarum,” if available. I’m particularly fond of these depictions of European cities from the late Middle Ages for their use of color and simple detail. I’ve been experimenting generating these in Sketchup, but am still a long way from perfecting the process.
The maps are simple, constrained to a large degree by the limits of Flash’s very basic vector based drawing tools, but overall convey all the important information.
I was also a fan of hex based campaigning from Judges Guild maps of CSIO fame (I’m that old) and wanted to keep some of that flavor but avoid the tedium of drawing duplicate player maps. This way, the computer stores a map of the “known” world for each user and maintains it from session to session. Each hex is 5 miles across and each complete map depicts an area 200 miles by 150 miles. I’ve got about 30 maps developed to one degree or another so far and am enjoying the process immensely.
Anyways, I’ve been lurking here for some time and thought I should put a few excerpts of what I’ve been up to and see what people think. Will add more as time allows.
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