ETCR - Expedition to Castle Ravenloft in DD3

[Shindig]

Here are some of the areas outside of the castle itself, redone from the ‘sepia’ maps to something more usable.

I did put together a map for the town, but it is a bit large for posting and does not fill in areas other than the road, so I am not going to post it here. It was just a quick and easy map to walk the players through the town and allow them to make choices as far as direction. I did not redo the maps supplied for the street encounters as editing out the creature markers from the ETCR maps worked well enough. I did make some maps of the random areas, as well as the church, and am posting these below. These are just to replace the ‘sepia’ versions from the book and are nothing too intricate.

The following areas replace the sepia versions of the outlying areas. This brings us up to speed to where my campaign is actually at. I will be working on the Fanes next.

When I began these, I was feeling fairly confident with the program after completing the castle. I thought, sure, this is outside whereas before I had the comfort of working with a nice angular building, but it can’t be that different. I was wrong. I had to start learning completely different techniques to get the job done, so the first couple I consider learning projects. Also, I purposely did not include grids on these since they were imported to Maptool. It is MUCH easier to forego the grid at first, since they are needed in Maptool and it is annoying having to line up both grids to avoid the ‘double-lined’ effect.

Crossroads was the first. I thought that the path would be too abrupt on the edges so I added dirt and field grass along the side. I found out later that this was unnecessary as the program automatically fades in the path edge, as you can see in the second drawing, Vistani Camp. I don’t think that there was a skeleton on the gallows in the book, but I didn’t have another ‘gallows’ to choose from and it fit the ambiance of the campaign.

Vistani camp came off to much like a circus camp for me, but I was in a crunch and needed to get it done. It was my first attempt at creating a river.

I do like the way the Nymph Pool came out, though. The one thing I like the most about Campaign Cartographer is that vegetation comes out fantastic looking. It is the one aspect about overland mapping that I don’t have to work at too much, it seems like the program does enough on its own. I just have to turn the trees/plants a bit if I use the same template more than once.