Sirrob01

Well I’m finding the new projects page very useful, it lets me see what I could be working on and provides motivation to get a project finished so I can cross an item off. Seems the old Psychology of crossing items of lists still works on me. If it helps me finish more things I’m more than happy to use what helps.

These are the initial maps for the world my D&D group will frequent, half the fun for me as a DM is building a world and being able to throw whatever I need into a setting without me feeling like I’m breaking one of the predefined settings.

The World is called Etana and the main continent/island the group/s will start on is Mytivia. For the moment we are running 2 seperate sets of characters a primary set with full storyline and RP elements and a secondary set who are pretty much used for trawling around dungeons and receive double the experience award you normally receive as per 4ed. The Primary set will affect the geopolitical landscape were as the secondary set will be used for off the cuff adventures were I literally just sit with a laptop a pen and a piece of grid paper and make up some dodgy monster bash on the fly :).

A little info on the maps, the world map has been done in Winkel Tripel Projection, well as close as I could get doing it by eye in Gimp. Very few details are on the world map at this stage as I want to be able to use player input to add features details and names, it’s their world as well. The smaller continental map of Mytivia itself shows the major cities and main roads.

The Continental map was made using a combination of inkscape and gimp. I had to move the map to gimp as inkscape began to have serious performance issues with the 200-300 mb file. When the map is open in Gimp it is 50cmx30cm @ 300dpi with a rather large number of layers and can take along time to refresh, but I gave the map a lot of space so that I can zoom in and add more details later on. I suspect I may just end up copying segments of the map out however and making more zoomed in local maps in a new Gimp file to help with performance.

All of the icons etc I drew up in inkscape with the exception of the Compass rose which I downloaded from wikimedia commons. Again names of some places etc have been left off so that my players can suggest names and help build the world up and they feel more attached involved with the game world.

I’m fairly happy with the resulting maps, although there no were near as good as what some of the people churn out across at the Cartographers guild. If you want to learn anything about mapping check out their forums.

I’ll post up more detailed/geopolitical information about the world later on as time permits, I have far chunk of info written down and some still in the old brainbox. In the long term I’ll put all the info into a wiki so I can sort the information in a more logical fashion rather than just a pile of loose Blog posts and make it easier on me to reference when DM’ing.

Click the images to load the large version

Etena

Mytivia

I think I might do some miniature painting next 🙂