I have been asked to run another Labyrinth Lord game at home, but this time I will be including some of the extended family, i.e. my oldest daughter Anna's real dad (she's technically a stepchild) and his girlfriend, both of whom are old gamers from way back. This isn't as odd as it sounds as they come over to the house just about every weekend anyhow and Anna's dad and I are friends, pretty good ones in fact.
Anyhow, enough about my mixed up life.
Not one to take anything lightly, I have begun cobbling together a new setting to run this new campaign in. I've already run Anna through the basics and she's run them herself with her friends, so now it's time to amp it up a bit. We're not taking the dial to eleven just yet, but I thought that adding such things as separate race and class as well as a few tweaked rules wouldn't be a bad thing. I want her to see that RPGs are what you make of them and not let her develop a "rules are everything" attitude while she's still learning what gaming is about.
I started by putting together a quick, possibly overly detailed map...
The map depicts the central area from whence all adventure shall spring. It shows the human-settled lands of the southernmost part of the main land mass of a land called Elwyren. Here I have laid out several cities, towns, and villages. There are roads, forests, rivers, mountains, hills and even a swampy area. There is even a great chasm that creates a natural barrier in the north which is flanked by two man made walls that breech the gap between the chasm and the mountains that border it. All of this should frame out a nice starting place for adventures.
There are some other ideas in mind for the setting, but I'll go into these in a future post.
-Eli
[Editor's Note: I mistakenly put in the wrong world name for this setting. I have since corrected the post to bear the proper name of Elwyren.]
[Editor's Note: I mistakenly put in the wrong world name for this setting. I have since corrected the post to bear the proper name of Elwyren.]
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This is a good looking map. I like it when people put that extra work in their overland maps to draw all those little hills, mountains and the edges of their forests. It feels like craftmanship, which is a good thing.
ReplyDeleteAlso, my first thought looking at it was, 'why are there railway tracks?' So it appears from the post they are roads. Still! :)
An excellent little map. I very much like the line-drawing style you've used. Did you use software to create the map, or is it hand-drawn? If you used software, could you tell me which program (and what art-set) you used?
ReplyDeleteFirst of all, thank you both. I love drawing maps and hope to someday post others that I have done. Many are in pencil and on lined notebook paper so a bit difficult difficult to scan.
ReplyDelete@Melan - I use the railroad track to stand out against the rivers and because dotted or dashed lines tend to get lost in the jumble. I tried using a series of X's but that got clunky too except when I used a computer program. Which leads me to Brian's question...
@Brian - This map is hand drawn and then inked. I have had great luck with a free mapper program called Autorealm in the past. In fact, I had mapped out five continents of a game world before I lost it all in a systems crash.
-Eli
What's up with that zig-zag feature starting at 7-8? Man-made?
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure I see what you mean, though I think you are referring to the marks at either end of the chasm. If so, those mark defensive walls built to fill the gap between the chasm's ends and the mountains on either side, reinforcing the natural barrier to the north created by the chasm itself.
ReplyDelete-Eli
Yup, that's it! Thanks!
ReplyDeleteI love those hex maps! I remember drawing out a load of them for Traveller back in the day, as well as Star system maps...
ReplyDeleteThanks Eli
ReplyDeleteNice map! Are the Uhul going to make an appearance?
ReplyDeleteThey may very well!
ReplyDelete