This week it’s all about the dungeon, and I’ve been covering ways of creating dungeon maps without actually drawing anything. These tips should work whether you’re a natural doodler or you think pencils are the devil incarnate.
Weekly Tips 2 – How to design a gatehouse, using grids and building isometric maps
Castle Defence – a classic gatehouse
Castles are built for more than one reason – people live there, guards are stationed there and often they are political power centers for the region. But first and foremost they are built to keep people out. Continue reading “Weekly Tips 2 – How to design a gatehouse, using grids and building isometric maps”
A Week of Mapping Tips – City Icons, and drawing Mountains
Last year I started a series of quick mapping tips, meant to be read over lunch, that would cover a series of different questions. These are posted daily to my Google+ and Facebook pages. Rather than post them up everyday on here, I’ve opted to collate them on a weekly basis and plan to post these up on Saturday mornings for easy reading over the weekend. This week it’s City Map icons, mountains and creating aged paper map handouts. Continue reading “A Week of Mapping Tips – City Icons, and drawing Mountains”
Journey to the world of Illfrost
This month sees the release of the World of Illfrost, a new world for 4e D&D. Its icy grip is perfectly timed as winter descends our own frozen north. I worked with the guys at Illusionary Press to create the world map and the maps for the first adventure.
To give you a taster, Illusionary Press are giving away a primer for free over on RPGNow. Continue reading “Journey to the world of Illfrost”
Wayfinder Boardgame – Free Download
A new edition of Wayfinder, the perennial free fan created magazine for the Pathfinder game, is out. In issue #6 the Paizonians have headed north to the frozen lands of the Linnorm Kings. The magazine is filled with treasure, monsters and adventure – all rendered with some truly beautiful art. The Wayfinder series gets prettier and prettier with each iteration and is starting to put some pay for products to shame.
Amongst the decidedly nordic themes of the magazine are a number of games of skill and chance. One of these is a game called the Great Hunt, where players compete to kill the Great Wyrm, or each other, whichever comes first. Continue reading “Wayfinder Boardgame – Free Download”
Pirate Ship Map: Keel Haul the Mutineers!
Piracy is in the air this year. Open Design is now well underway with Journeys to the West – an anthology of adventurers set in the exotic unexplored western ocean – and Paizo is set fair on a course for the swashbuckling adventure path Skull and Shackles. But what good is a pirate (or, ahem, privateer) without a trusty ship?
Well, to resolve that particular problem, this month I’ve put together a pirate ship map that any peg legged terror of the ocean waves can be proud of. After some feedback on my previous ship map pack, this one comes in a number of formats. The pack contains 2 maps of the full ship, one with the ship underway with sails billowing and the other with the ship resting at the harbour quay. In addition, the pack contains fully detailed maps of all three interior deck levels, with captain’s table, storage and crew hammocks. Continue reading “Pirate Ship Map: Keel Haul the Mutineers!”
Death and blood in the city of ice
You might have noticed something of a theme over the last few weeks. The map packs I’ve been putting out have had a decidedly frigid air to them. These packs come from the critically acclaimed Breaking of Forstor Nagar adventure I worked on with Rite Publishing (it’s swept 5* reviews across the board – I’m actually still a little in shock).
This month we finished the lot and released the full set as a map pack bundle, with all 8 map packs for the sale price of $9.99. Continue reading “Death and blood in the city of ice”
A Quick City Map Tutorial
Today I’m covering a quick way to layout a city and make it look pretty and easy to read. As with the previous post, this originally appeared on my G+ and facebook pages.
- 3 steps to an attractive city map
The challenge with a city map is to lay out information on districts of the city as well as specific locations. The two can easily get confused, especially if you have a very detailed texture showing roofs and individual buildings. In this style I’m focusing on just showing the different districts. Individual locations of interest can then be placed on top by using icons, or something more elaborate.
1. Lay in the roads.
Here I’ve used a fixed width round brush, with a slightly wider width for main roads than minor roads. I’ve also used Photoshop’s layer styles to give the roads a dark outer glow to make it easier to read them. They’re white on a light background, but that won’t be an issue for long.
2. Define the city blocks
Here I’ve use the magic wand to select all the negative space where the city blocks are going to be. You can also use Select Pixels and then Invert Selection in photoshop. I’ve then shrunk the selection by 3px (though that depends on the resolution of your file of choice). The selection is then filled with black and this layer is set to overlay. I’ve also given the layer a layer style which is an internal stroke set to colour burn at 70% opacity. The result is that we can see all the city blocks, and the roads are visible as the negative space between the city blocks.
3. Delineate the different districts
Again we use the magic wand tool to get the selection of the city blocks in a specific district (you can also just get the selection by using the magic wand on the layer from step 2). Now, with one layer and one selection for each of the district, fill with the patter of your choice. Here I’ve used a striped pattern. I’ve set the stripes to a colour and used a combination of overlay and colour burn layer modes to create the effect.
Voila! An easy to read city map with clearly differentiated districts – all in less time than it takes to eat lunch. As ever, let me know if there are any questions in the comments section, or let me know if there are topics you’d like to see covered.
How to draw hills on a top down map
Today – how to draw simple hills with photoshop or Gimp. This works best for large scale maps, like world maps or regional maps, where you have a lot of terrain to cover.
- Lay in the shadows with a large fuzzy brush. In photoshop or the Gimp I’d suggest doing this on a layer with the blend mode set to overlay.
- Lay in the highlights with a slightly smaller fuzzy brush. Avoid sharp edges. You want hills to be rolling, and in contrast to the sharp peaks of a mountain range. Again, here I’ve done this on an overlay layer.
- Add colour (here I’m a layer with the blend mode set to colour) and leave the hills slightly browner than the flat plains. That helps to differentiate them – and means that even with subtle light and shade they’ll be easy to read at a glance.
A couple of other things to keep in mind:
- Lay in the rivers first. As rivers drain the water out of hills, they will determine where the hills should go.
- Less is more when it comes to shadows and highlights here. Your mountains should have the darkest shadows. Make sure that your hill shadows are quite a bit more subtle.
I hope that’s useful, chip in if there’s a particular topic you’d like to see covered!
The Amphitheatre
Through December I’m releasing the remaining map packs from the Breaking of Forstor Nagar.
Today it’s the turn of the Amphitheatre. This stands as a testament to better days in the city, when people would come to watch performances, or stroll amongst the statues. But now that the city lies besieged and ruined it acts as the scene for a desperate encounter where the PCs must make difficult choices that will determine the future of a number of hapless souls. Continue reading “The Amphitheatre”