Pages

▼

Sunday, January 18, 2015

The Wilderness Around Felltower II - Rough Sketch Map

This is part II of my slowly running series about the wilderness around Felltower. For Part I, click here.

This is the rough sketch map I have so far of the wilderness around my megadungeon.


photo FelltowerAreaSmall_zps924b3e08.png

My drawing is laughably bad, but it at least gets across the relative location of things. I can try to clean it up over the next week or so when I have spare minutes and get a better map than that.



I toyed around with Fracal Mapper a bit for it, but I have the free version and I can't save. Plus, the learning curve isn't shallow enough for me to just start mapping. Hexographer looks okay, but I hate installing lots of JREs on my computer just to run programs (my experience with Java is largely centered on the words "Java Runtime Error" and "Java Vulnerability", not "How awesome is Java?") Either way, with software I spend a lot of time learning the software and less time mapping.

Besides, I'm not sure I want to do a hex crawl. I have some good hexcrawl rules I can use. But I can forsee lots of issues with trying to hex map the terrain, have players try to skirt the whole "each hex costs" or "you are in this hex" questions by edging around features or whatever. It's possibly just easier to have a map and scale and a ruler and go with that. I'm not sure yet. I've played with both but never rarely with an exploration angle.

So for now I'm still sketching on paper.
at

7 comments:

  1. AnonymousJanuary 18, 2015 at 4:27 PM

    I like it.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Charles SaegerJanuary 18, 2015 at 6:46 PM

      Yeah, I don't see much wrong with it. I'd just do a second draft on hex paper and be done with it unless I wanted to make a little more formal map (for which I use Hexographer due to its ease of use and low cost). There are some details near the dungeon, and some general guidelines for the rest.

      Delete
  2. AnonymousJanuary 18, 2015 at 4:29 PM

    I have avoided doing a detailed surface map to avoid doing a non-dungeon campaign.

    I have tried to make the dungeon as interesting as possible and the non-dungeon world as bland as possible, except where the histories of both intersect.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Peter DJanuary 18, 2015 at 4:43 PM

      My players have gotten very interested in the wilderness, so I can't keep it bland unless I want to discourage their choice of potential adventure locales. Thus, I'm forced to map!

      Delete
    2. UnknownJanuary 18, 2015 at 6:19 PM

      That's a slippery slope. First they will want to explore the wioderness and then they will want to go to other towns and then they will want to explore other lands.

      Delete
    3. AnonymousJanuary 18, 2015 at 6:38 PM

      And then they will want to play Fate.

      Delete
    4. Peter DJanuary 18, 2015 at 10:13 PM

      That won't happen.

      They can go other places if they want. The monsters and treasures are in the megadungeon and around it, to a significantly lesser extent.

      They want to hit the orcs - and I quote - "where it hurts" - by raiding their base. That means a wilderness trek.

      Delete