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[Harry Baldman]

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.)

My go-to example for fun-looking historical maps is al-Idrisi's Tabula Rogeriana (warning: large) - the mountains especially have a particularly fun look to them with how he's denoted and colored them.

[heydude6]

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)

You are way too modest my friend. Perhaps I just speak from inexperience, but that looks incredible. It's lacking in detail in many places, but that texture! It would take me a long time to learn how to draw something like that.

How did you achieve the pastel look?

[wierd]

Color layers and the airbrush tool in photoshop?

[heydude6]

Sadly I don’t have photoshop.

[deathpunch578]

Sadly I don’t have photoshop.

you could use pastels for a physical map like this (will be time consuming but can look good)

[Draignean]

Sadly I don’t have photoshop.

Color layers and an airbrush tool in GIMP?

[Jimmy]

Yeah, I used a version of Photoshop for the texture layers, but any image editing program that supports layers and opacity will do the same job. Just google up a texture of your choice (I think I used leather for the water) and dump it into a very opaque layer above the colour. Then just fiddle with the gamma of the image until you get the tone you want.

[Mesa]

Map discussion? How convenient!
I've got this world I've been hacking away in the past few weeks, for an Open Legend campaign. (After canning my previous soft sci-fi campaign after realizing how much of a craving I have for fantasy, and also because worldbuilding at a galactic scale is TOUGH.)
It's, uh, quite big, and not really campaign-ready yet...though I might be tempted to run a PBF campaign of it, if there's any interest in exploring floating islands 'round here.




I also caved and decided to get into Pathfinder, or at least see what it's about. My time (and Chrome-assigned RAM) lately has been wholly consumed by the Pathfinder SRD, and discussing the pros/cons of each of the Pathfinder roll20 character sheets (the community one is...uh, overwhelming to say the least*, while the Simple and Official variants look a lot easier to wrap one's head around).
Currently in the process of building a brass draconic bloodline half-elf sorcerer, though I'm slightly tempted to opt in for the Dragon Drinker archetype - I don't know if it's any good, but it sounds fun, and goddamn I'm all about that.


* - when a friend who's been playing the game for ~1.5 years tells me they hate that sheet, there's clearly something up. Even though another friend highly recommends using it because of all the things it helps track, even if it's harder to get into upfront...

[Mephisto]

So I joined a D&D group. D&D is better than no gaming at all, I suppose.

Let's do a quick rundown of the party makeup that was PMed to me.

Forge Cleric
Lore Bard
Divine Soul Sorcerer
Mastermind Rogue
Some kind of Paladin
Some kind of Wizard
Monster Hunter Ranger
Way of the Shadow Monk
Celestial Warlock (one of the rotating GMs; he's running next week)
and one more who I forget who she plays (exact wording)

Since there's probably not going to be meaningful RP, I was considering just making a "for the lulz" character. Halflling (or other small race) college of swords bard, lizard person druid who either summons or shapeshifts into various lizards and has the goal of going back to his roots (aka learn to summon/shapeshift into a triceratops), gnome zealot barbarian or some shit.

Ooh, or remake Krod the rogue.

[Kagus]

So, I'm honestly fairly new to the PnP scene. Only ever played a few one-offs and the occasional campaign that lasts for all of two sessions (all done over IRC). It's a hankering I really haven't been able to satisfy, and while I know of one person in my extended social circle who plays, I haven't really had much contact with him beyond the one time he got drunk and said he'd set up a campaign that everyone was invited to (this never happened, due to his fateful return to sobriety). Also, y'know, meatspace groups are scary. I hear you can catch cooties from those.

Played a couple variants of D&D (which I'm comfortable with due to entirely too much time spent in Baldur's Gate and, later, the Incursion roguelike), an ill-fated attempt at WFRP (aren't they all?) which I quite liked, despite never really actually playing, and a teensy one-off experiment with Gamma World, which I immediately fell in love with thanks to the character creation (but which my go-to DM wants nothing to do with).

Does anyone else do IRC games? I thought it worked out fairly well, aside from the difficulty in adapting the game to be without directions and distances, since we were playing without a map.

It also somewhat opens up the international play borders, making it easier to fill out a group (even if I am in something of a troublesome timezone), and, well... I kinda feel like I could use all the help I can get. Heh.

[Mephisto]

Does anyone else do IRC games? I thought it worked out fairly well, aside from the difficulty in adapting the game to be without directions and distances, since we were playing without a map.

That's where you go theater of the mind! If I were to do another text-based game, I'd choose something without tactical combat. Blades in the Dark, other PbtA games, Shadows Over Sol, Foreign Element, Feng Shui 2, the list goes on.

[Rolan7]

Incursion!  I see it hasn't updated in a long time, but the source is on Bitbucket.  Definitely the closest roguelike to DND 3.5, and so much potential...

I originally played PNP over IRC, but not DND.  Call of Cthulhu worked best, from what I remember, and  I think World of Darkness would too.  Like Mephisto said, anything that doesn't rely on tactical (grid-based) combat.

I always found RP easier in text, really.  I'm no good at voices, OOC is clearly marked or in a separate channel...  It feels more natural to type out long flowery descriptions than to make everyone listen as I try to adlib them outloud.

[Kagus]

Honestly was never that deep into the RP aspect of things... I mean, of course you're going to want to try and act/make decisions in-character, but everything I've played so far has been fairly laid-back as far as role-playing was concerned (no separate OOC channel, nor forced RP. Didn't have to type out ditties when activating bard song, unless we really wanted to, hehehe).

I was always more attracted to the advanced mechanics and the freedom of choice when looking to solve various problems than to the idea of acting out a specific character. And I may have a problem when it comes to obsessive theorycrafting and chargenning...


Last I checked, Incursion was on... I think version 7Y? One of the forumites picked up the source code and started putting up patched versions on github a long time back, dunno if he stopped or not. But yeah, definitely one of the best roguelikes I've ever played. Love the living world aspect of it.

[pikachu17]

So I joined a D&D group. D&D is better than no gaming at all, I suppose.

Let's do a quick rundown of the party makeup that was PMed to me.

Forge Cleric
Lore Bard
Divine Soul Sorcerer
Mastermind Rogue
Some kind of Paladin
Some kind of Wizard
Monster Hunter Ranger
Way of the Shadow Monk
Celestial Warlock (one of the rotating GMs; he's running next week)
and one more who I forget who she plays (exact wording)

Since there's probably not going to be meaningful RP, I was considering just making a "for the lulz" character. Halflling (or other small race) college of swords bard, lizard person druid who either summons or shapeshifts into various lizards and has the goal of going back to his roots (aka learn to summon/shapeshift into a triceratops), gnome zealot barbarian or some shit.

Ooh, or remake Krod the rogue.

A low-intelligence NG Tiefling Paladin of Conquest who didn't actually understand the oath s/he took?
Mounted Combatant goblin Barbarian, specialized in humanoid mounts? (The group is 5E, right?)
If you don't have to stick to Vanilla stuff, Mind Flayer fighter?
Dwarf wizard of divination?
Goliath Cleric of trickery?

[Kagus]

Be the one guy who remembered to bring a goddamn wagon.