Using tools in unconventional ways to make good art (or music).

**Mark Oliva** · 03-19-2010, 01:23 AM

Ascension's comments about how he's getting bored with his own maps led to my reaction here, although the reaction is general rather than having anything to do with Ascension's work.

I've been making and publishing RPG maps for a long time, but I'm still in my first year in the Cartographers Guild. I like being here, but when I look at some of the maps people post, I often wonder why they made the map to begin with. Cities, towns, villages, settlements, castles, monster lairs, etc., etc., all come to be for a reason. Something caused someone to start building there or settling in there, and once the site was claimed, things were built or refurbished to fulfill and satisfy the needs and goals of those who dropped their anchor there.

When I look at many although certainly not all of the graphically impressive maps posted and discussed here, I am left with the distinct impression that I'm seeing a generic object that the creator intended to be able to drop in anywhere. That's doubtless unfair to the makers of many of the maps that leave me with this impression, but the information that I would need to take my impression of a map from being purposeless to purposeful simply is missing. In some cases, quite frankly, I feel rather certainly that what I'm seeing is indeed a generic map. I wouldn't know what to do with one of them in our RPG material.

Other maps of cities and villages are unreal. Certain facilities are necessary for a city or village to function. Grain mills, sawmills, wainwrights and other artisans facilities are necessary, not just inns. Many otherwise fine-looking maps show no trace of most of these things.

Another problem is that people get too tied to their software's tools. Our project group's work in the Northern Journey adventure several years back suffered severely under that problem. We mapped NJ with CC2 and CC2 Pro. When I look back at those maps now, I'm embarrassed at the straight-jacketed generic CC2 look all of them have. I have the same reaction to most of the CC3 maps I see here. Many CC3 users seem to have great difficulty using symbols (objects) and fills (textures) from sources other than ProFantasy. Most CC3 maps I see here have a ProFantasy assembly line look to them. CC3 can do more than that. A lot of CC3 mappers need to go on a symbol-and-fill mining expedition in the Dundjinni forums, at RPG Map Share, etc. One needs to work with a palette of tools that one has assembled rather than just one manufacturer's stock graphics.

Dundjinni maps suffer less than those of CC3 users, mostly because the DJ community itself has made such an incredible number of mapping tools and shared them with one another. But there is a DJ pitfall that sometimes betrays which program was used to make these maps too. DJ despite all of its other qualities remains a tile stamper. Some DJ maps suffer from the use of textures with too little variety, creating fill pattern redundancies that identify the map as DJ work.

The best quality maps on this site in terms of being individual artistic creations seem to be those made with Photoshop and The GIMP. I haven't found anything that betrays to me which program was used to make these maps.

Our project group is not at all immune to the problems I'm mentioning. After finishing Northern Journey, we switched from CC2 Pro and (briefly) CC3 to Fractal Mapper 8. At the time of the switch we also decided to try to escape falling into the trap of our maps having an FM8 look in several ways, the most obvious of them being by seldom if ever using the symbols and fills created by NBOS. Instead, our maps work largely with objects and textures that we've created, supplemented by those we've found on our symbol-and-fill mining expeditions.

This attempt has not been entirely successful. We're now finding that our work is coming out of the mill with too much of a generic Vintyri Project look, which leads us to send things back for more work much more often than we would like. Thus is a disadvantage, because we really need to spend more time developing our gaming material and less time mapping. On the other hand, we don't want to worry about looking back after five to 10 years, as we did with our Northern Journey maps, and being embarrassed with what we see in retrospect.

I also see a bit of a problem within the Cartographers Guild itself. I have to try to avoid speaking with a forked tongue here, because our own tutorial material strongly recommends using elements of the real world as mapping prototypes. We think one should do this but not overdo it.

I have the impression that real world rules sometimes are overemphasized here. We also need to remember what we're mapping, why we're doing it and what the roots of our material are. Some maps on this site are from the science fiction realm and others deal with modern or early 20th century environments, but the great majority of the works I see here are pure fantasy RPG material.

Most non-cartographic fantasy RPG material grew out of the work of novelists - Professor Tolkien being the ultimate example - and most novelists' creations had their roots to some extent in the various mythologies of the real world - Professor Tolkien again providing an excellent example.

A great many of the mythologies describe a world that defies the real world mapping laws of the Cartographers Guild on one level after another. Our Jörðgarð setting, for example, has a huge area based upon the Icelandic Elder Edda, in which the world's 11 great rivers all flow from the spring Hvergelmir atop Upphaffjall Mountain. A trip to Hvergelmir would drive the river police insane. Fortunately, the river police have no jurisdiction in our setting.

The mountain police, if they exist, also would go up the wall (literally, perhaps) if they were to encounter Prof. Tolkien's Mountains of Mordor. Nonetheless, these mountains are a fantastically good element of Middle Earth.

The real-world-rooted rules set down here and the river police are both good and bad things. Both are excellent to the extent that they help a cartographer design a logically functioning area. They are bad in that they tend to constrain one's own fantasy in designing things for an unreal world that is, in the most literal sense, fantasy. These rules are a good starting point, but for some mappers, cartographic burnout might come less often if one established and clearly understood the logic of his or her own fantasy RPG world rather than trying to shape it according to the logic of the real world.

**Redrobes** · 03-19-2010, 08:01 PM

Its possible that the person playing that guitar was completely self taught without access to any books or video footage to work from much less a tutor showing 'proper' finger positions etc. In that sense they are playing with a unique style driven from a need to get the best sound out not to pass the next grade. I think thats important.

In terms of purpose I see that lacking a lot in many of the maps here. Sometimes you just have to go wild cos there really would be no reason at all for dwarves / goblins or whatever to drive 90 degree 5ft passages through solid rock with no purpose other than to confuse adventurers but in that same vein its what people expect and enjoy from a gaming session so thats whats driving them to make them like it.

The tutorials are great mainly because many of the people who arrive here cant make a map at all and want one. For those people the tutorials are great. Ok its a cookie cutter - pick your cutter ! But its that or nothing. For those here who are great artists or virtuosos with their apps maybe they should try hard to push themselves out of the comfort zone.

With the rivers and stuff - we always say that these only apply when your trying to get your rivers looking like real physical rivers. Theres a special get out clause for magic in all the policing ! If you want to have a mountain with multiple rivers all flowing down then thats great but its not realistic and maybe that's exactly what your aiming for. We have had maps here of lands floating in space with waterfalls off into nothingness etc. I think its just that many people come here wanting a realistic campaign world to run in.

Also I don't think its just Mordor thats crazy. Andiun rolls about 3000km all down the map with mountains at the top of the map and the Mistys down the middle. It implies that if the water is falling in height then the northerly mountains would be absurdly high. The misty mountains are there purely to get Bilbo underground by necessity and therefore find the ring. Otherwise he would have gone around them, lived a quiet normal life and not had any books written about him.

With apps the problem is pretty simple. Were all too lazy to make up lots and lots and lots of tokens to use so we use the ones that come with the map. The real artists here have the advantage of being able to whoop up with quality whatever they want but though I can by tedium strain out something that's at best a bit naff those are my options. The Dundjinni forums have helped loads of people out there its true and you see some tokens popping up a lot cos they are good. What can we do there - dunno really. But again, most people want some battle maps to run their next session with and will reuse the same tokens for convenience.

The only answer I can give to some of these problems is to use some software that does not draw the map for you but suggests things that you could put in based on realism and maybe to somehow AI up some tokens for required items. But how to do that generally I have no idea at this point. We might be able to do something where the scope is more limited like cities and we have been doing that to some degree with terrain but its not an easy task.

**Mark Oliva** · 03-20-2010, 02:37 AM

I think we're in complete agreement on most points. I'd like to underscore though that it wasn't my intention to complain about the way that folks do things but rather to throw up some ideas on what might lead to the kind of burnout that Ascension was describing, a kind of burnout that I've experienced at times too.