Not all the maps I get asked to do are full colour multi-page affairs. Pantheon Press contacted me back in the spring to ask for some black and white maps for their tarot card based game system – Fortune’s Fool. These maps were for their Grimm Tales adventure – I’m sure you’ll recognise a lot of the references:
There’s a special challenge to maps like these. Each map has been uploaded at 100dpi, so the size you see it on the screen is roughly the size it appears in print. That’s not a lot of space to get a lot of detail in, and when you can only use greyscale you lose more tools for differentiating different features.
The sites were fun to walk through, and I got to design the Manor house from scratch – which had some unique challenges due to the nature of the residents. It’s not often that I get to reference Jurassic Park in design discussions on maps – I’ll let you guess why.
