Celebrating 2020 - The Year of Blackmoor - 50th Anniversary of Blackmoor and of Role-Playing!
Blackmoor - The First Fantasy Campaign: Today Dave Arneson and "Drawing Your Own Map."
He says for those who want to draw their own map, but do not know where to begin, here are some suggestions.
I have zero artistic talent and my maps are very rough and dirty. I often just use plain old style computer paper and pencil and just sketch it out with a few lines and word pictures. But now there are these wonderful stamps and anyone came make a great map, not the map the artist makes that you just drool over, but far superior to what I could do otherwise and an awesome product in its own right. Go to GAME STAMPS a map-making tool for role-playing games I am really happy that I backed this Kickstarter!
I have only used a regular pencil. Colored pencils would be a waste for me as I am color-blind.
This is a handy way to do it, if you want to randomly generate your map although I prefer to just decide what goes where myself.
Now under item four is a long detailed section of excellent advice and inspiration for making your map. Here a much abbreviated look at it:
Cities are surrounded by farms, out a little way will be walled cities and more farms and then villages (some Castles with Villages) and farms, then Hamlets and farms IMO all farms will be within range of a market where they can sell and buy or they can trade for items they need, but will be mostly self-sufficient.
He talks about how to decide when there are ruins, and info about roads.
Summary of Population location.
What to do when an encounter is indicated.
The above chart has a lot of great information to help get you started.Wish I had had this when I started out.. Fortunately I had read a lot and had ideas from that and a ton of old movies, but still this would have given me a quick start.
Tomorrow Blackmoor Dungeons.
Blackmoor - The First Fantasy Campaign: Today Dave Arneson and "Drawing Your Own Map."
He says for those who want to draw their own map, but do not know where to begin, here are some suggestions.
I have zero artistic talent and my maps are very rough and dirty. I often just use plain old style computer paper and pencil and just sketch it out with a few lines and word pictures. But now there are these wonderful stamps and anyone came make a great map, not the map the artist makes that you just drool over, but far superior to what I could do otherwise and an awesome product in its own right. Go to GAME STAMPS a map-making tool for role-playing games I am really happy that I backed this Kickstarter!
I have only used a regular pencil. Colored pencils would be a waste for me as I am color-blind.
This is a handy way to do it, if you want to randomly generate your map although I prefer to just decide what goes where myself.
Now under item four is a long detailed section of excellent advice and inspiration for making your map. Here a much abbreviated look at it:
Heavily Wooded - how to generate the percent wooded, the number of hills along with size and shape. Check for water and for human habitation.
Very Hilly - generate the number, size and shape of the hills, check for water, check for wooded, check for human habitation.
Wooded and Hilly - how to combine the previous two items.
Open Area - goes into all the different features as to what is present.
Swamp - check for presence of various features.
Rivers and Streams - flow towards coast or away, lake, swamp, larger lakes, lake outlets, spring fed, and other things.You can of course work up similar things for Mountains, Desert, Tundra, High Plains, etc.
Cities are surrounded by farms, out a little way will be walled cities and more farms and then villages (some Castles with Villages) and farms, then Hamlets and farms IMO all farms will be within range of a market where they can sell and buy or they can trade for items they need, but will be mostly self-sufficient.
He talks about how to decide when there are ruins, and info about roads.
Summary of Population location.
What to do when an encounter is indicated.
Tomorrow Blackmoor Dungeons.
When I stumbled across it I found the chart on how to divide a hexagon into 100 subregions mind-blowing.
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