Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

Any D&D/D20

Shadowrun

World of Darkness

Palladium

Other (feel free to post about it)

[Jimmy]

Yeah, as a fellow GM I recommend going extremely heavy on the exposition button. Unless everything's written down for review later, if you're giving players info they'll need later you're probably only gonna get them to remember half of it at best. If they're anything like my players, most of their attention's focused on coming up with terrible puns and atrocious wordplay, or simply scarfing snacks before the next combat.

[heydude6]

Anyone have advice on creating a world map? I tried to find a ultility online, but they either didn’t give enough control or they cost money.

[wierd]

What LoD do you want?  I've had decent results from Bryce3D+Photoshop and some other goodies. 

[Mephisto]

So excited. My first actual game in... over a year, actually, is tonight. And it's not D&D/PF.

DCC, here I come.

That... failed before it started. GM and players were no-shows.

[heydude6]

What LoD do you want?  I've had decent results from Bryce3D+Photoshop and some other goodies.

My main problem is drawing good land masses, rivers, and roads. You now how land masses aren’t perfectly smooth curves? Well I want to figure out how to give it that proper jagged look.

When I draw roads, they look way too much like straight lines. And my rivers are completely nonsensical.

TLDR: Not high, but not amateur MS paint either

[wierd]

Bryce3D is a terrain generating/rendering application. It allows you to import a heightmap, then it renders it in 3D.  One of the vantage points you can take a picture from is "Straight down"-- which can give you the topological features layer for photoshop.

You dont have to be all that fantastic at generating heightmaps. DF's legends mode export functions will export terrain data as a suitable hieghtmap for you, and you can thus use DF as a proceedural generator.

Bryce is however buyware, but is not that expensive. There are probably free alternatives. I will look.

*EDIT
Terragen4 has a "Free for personal use" version. I will download and assess functionality for purpose.

[wierd]

Ok, It "kinda" works, but Bryce is easier to use, and has better options, IMO. It's only like 20$.  Terragen is a real PITA, and the render size is deplorably small. Not really well suited for this, IMHO.  Bryce works so much better.

[Harry Baldman]

Set all of your games in the trackless steppe populated by nomadic tribes and bodies of water that are actually wandering dragons.

EDIT: Or just draw teeth instead of mountains and see if your players question it.

[Trekkin]

So, making another map and I've discovered that I cannot draw mountains for shit.

Looked up guides for map making online, everything's fine except mountains. No matter how much I follow guides for them, I just cannot draw any remotely satisfactory looking ones.

Would you be satisfied with a topographic map of your world?

[Trekkin]

What time would that be? Are you looking for stylized mountains that just vaguely indicate mountainous terrain in the general area or representations of specific peaks?

[Mephisto]

EDIT: Or just draw teeth instead of mountains and see if your players question it.

And then do the three Bs of gamemastering - Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit.

Those look like teeth? That's because they are! There's a minor religion based around the idea that our world is actually the head of a long-deceased god.

[wierd]

Believe it or not, you can probably get a very nice looking map out of DF's data exports using photoshop ALONE.

I think I made an example once some time ago... let me see if I can find it...

[Jimmy]

I had this same problem and decided to just draw my own map. It's hardly professional looking, but at least gives players an idea of where they can go adventuring. Took a few hours over a couple of days to draw the map, colour it, label the towns and add a bit of texture, but I'm no professional artist.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

[wierd]

I have one I made using Bryce + photoshop many many years ago.

Spoiler: clicky (click to show/hide)

[Tawa]

I've always been a fan of just drawing my own maps. It's pretty fun, in my experience, and if you know what you're doing you can make some pretty good looking ones. My most recent outing, which I think I'll be using more as a supplementary map than the main one:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Just throwing this out since we're apparently sharing maps, by the way. I know it doesn't actually have mountains on it, the location of the mountains is just described in the lore I wrote up.

My personal recommendation for mountains: if you want the kind of map you could get in the early 1500s, go for a Carta Marina sort of look and make the mountains basically a big pile of rocks sticking out of the ground. As a general rule of thumb, maps looked kinda shitty until the 17-1800s or so; the realistic look a lot of fantasy maps go for when drawing terrain features is a pretty new thing. If you're making a political map, it could be a good idea to omit geographical features entirely (a la Paradox games.)

Not suggesting you cover the map in reindeer warriors and ridiculous sea monsters, of course; just throwing out a mountain design suggestion.

side note: the ORCADESXXXIII make me deeply uncomfortable for a reason I cannot seem to put into words.