Urgent Help Requested

[DNA Cowboy]

Hey All

I found your guild after doing some research on cartography and the design and development of interactive maps.
Our particular problem is Kickstarter-funded rpg The Shroud Of The Avatar by none other than Richard 'Lord British' Garriott.
For anyone who doesn't know RG he almost single-handily developed the role playing game both paper and computer iterations.

However, there be mutiny among the crew over a sudden and what look likes to be a permanent change from a fully-interactive zoomable 3D map to a paper map basically (very) similar in concept but extremely poor in execution to the Game Of Thrones opening sequence, the problem is that it completely throws the player out of game immersion.

With this in mind I wonder if you might look at the maps and offer some comments about what can be done to improve what looks to be a childs idea of a map.

Many thanks


current map

previous prototype


Shroud of The Avatar Map Debate

[SumnerH]

Richard 'Lord British' Garriott.
For anyone who doesn't know RG he almost single-handily developed the role playing game both paper and computer iterations.

Garriott had almost nothing to do with paper RPGs directly, though his computer RPGs probably had some influence on later designers. Paper RPGs were well established before him (in particular, Dungeons and Dragons was already around, and indeed Garriott cites it as one of his inspirations).

Even in the computer world colossal cave, dungeon, dnd, orthanc, and avatar already existed before his first game of any influence or popularity (Akalabeth) had a real release in 1980. He did develop some pretty great RPGs (Ultima IV in particular is one of my favorites of all time), but saying he almost single-handedly developed the RPG is overselling him by quite a lot.

[eViLe_eAgLe]

I would recommend to go with the 3d design, 2D randomly genned maps don't look as good as ones made in 3d.
My two cents.

.. Assuming I understood everything correctly, which could be wrong.

[Lingon]

Like evile_eagle I find it a little difficult to understand everything, but I guess that's the problem in the first place here! If you decide to go with the 2d, non-interactive, drawn map, I think I could help. If you'd be interested in commissioning a cartographer to remake the map, please take a look at my portfolio in the link in my signature, and send an e-mail to the adress you'll find there if you like my work!