Staying Alive on I-75

Quick plug here, back over the summer I tried out making a Travel Map for Free League’s upcoming 4th Edition of Twilight: 2000 and publishing it via the Free League Workshop in DrivethruRPG.

CENTKYTO is in the same style as the Poland and Swedish travel maps that come with the game, but it is focused on Central Kentucky in the U.S.A. I chose that location because it’s where I grew up, and most post-apocalyptic games revolve around the players playing in the ruins of their hometown.

Also while I don’t know if Free League will be publishing anything set in the states, I figured that this was probably an area that they were not thinking of doing anything for, so it was fair game.

I don’t have a gazetteer or anything to go with it, it is just a map. I figure it can work just as well for a WWIII campaign as it would for a Walking Dead-style zombie apocalypse campaign or a Battle: Los Angles-style alien invasion campaign.

I did include assets and instructions for using the map on Roll20 and Foundry VTTs, which is why it is a bit more expensive than some of the other Workshop maps out there.

CENTKYTO T2k Travelmap on DrivethruRPG

Milton, NM

The Netflix show Stranger Things was pretty inspirational, so I went and created this fictitious small town called Milton New Mexico as a setting for a similar style game. To create the town I used a modified version of the Microscope collaborative setting rules, and all the players were able to contribute ideas to the town's history and various mysteries. I then designed a map to tie everything together and give a common sense of geography. (For the actual game the players all rolled up 9th graders in 1986. I used the Bubblegumshoe RPG rules set.)

The campaign is on haitus but the players have enjoyed putting the clues together about the "strange doings down by the Circle K", and are keen to come back to it in a few months.

Graphpaper & Hexmaps on the iPad

So playing around with my iPad, I went ahead and shelled out the $9 for Sketchbook Pro from Autocad, since it is a very full featured sketching app.  One nice thing is that it supports a simple from of Photoshop layers.  So I have been playing around with it to see how well it can be used for making game maps while I am waiting for the train, or sitting through a boring meeting.  All you need to do is create your grid in a program like Illustrator and save it out as a PNG, with everything other then the lines set to be transparent.  The images should be 1024x768.  Here are a couple I made using illustrator:

Black lines

Old-school cyan lines:

 

 

Just download them, and then transfer them into the iPad Photo Gallery somehow (I just emailed them to myself, and then opened the email on the ipad and saved it out there. But there is probably a smarter way to do it.)

You then open up Sketchbook Pro, and go into the layers flyout:

and then select the 'flower+' icon at the bottom to import the grid image from your photo library.  (since they are transparent PNGs, the app shows them as solid black thumbnails, but they work fine.)

You then can create a new layer and put it behind the grid image layer.  I also lowered the opacity of the grid layer to make it less intense.  you then sketch on the layer(s) behind the layer with the grid image.  the app supports upto 3 layers, so you can have the Grid on top, your background texture at the bottom, and then sketch out the dungeon or terrain features on the middle layer.  i will try and post anything I make that comes out decent.

A Matter of Perspective

So I have been playing around with the one of the comments that James Wyatt, Ray Winninger, and others have said about the creation of a campaign world.  Basically, that pearl of wisdom is "don't bury your players with needless information."  In other words, even though the world building itch motivates many DMs to create lavish 20,000 years of history for their world, along with 15 nations, and epic songs and other legends to populate the world- that urge should be resisted.  The reasoning is 1) you will burn out before the first game session can happen, and 2) the players will be overwhelmed and get bored.

In UX this is sometimes called the "wall of noise". where users are confronted with a web page full of information, but it is all given equal weight.  That kind of appeals to modernist, Bauhausian design aesthetics (everything is a modular part on the page) but it becomes an overly rhythmic interface for the user— there is no useful irregularities for them to see a hierarchy of importance.  And designers are not only supposed to be making a nice looking page, but also guide the user to the most important things.

When a designer is crating a landing page for users who may lack any fore knowledge on the subject, it is good design to make it asymmetrical and kind of lumpy- with the things you want them to do by default all up in their face, and the less important stuff kind of squished into the background.

In Windows, Microsoft encountered a wall of noise problem.  User testing showed that new computer users were flummoxed by the windows 3.1 desktop, and didn't know which of the similar drop downs at the top of held the important to them tools.  The designers had just assumed people knew how to dive in and use this tool they had built.  But when they realized the problem, their solution was to put a big fat Start Button in the lower left corner of the screen in Windows 95.

Back to world building, the basic idea suggested by the experts is for the DM to detail the party's starting area in detail, and then get progressive more vague outside of the town.  This lets the players understand what they should be worrying about, and not get them worked up about the cool kingdom over the impassible mountains, until they are ready to go over there.  Sort of a Bullseye of information centered on the tavern where the players get their quests.

That got me thinking about how to provide the party with their maps.  The most logical approach would be to put some tissue paper over the world map, and draw a set of concentric circles around the starting town, and then draw in map details, with each ring getting more vague and sketchy, until outside the largest ring it would simply be "here there be monsters" or terra incognita.

Which I suppose it would be a good mental model for a party of peasants who had never left their hamlet.  But its pretty rare that you get a group of players willing to start their characters off at such mundane level.  Players want to start off with cool world wise characters, who have ended up coming to the town, like the Seven Samurai, to sort out the local problems.  So it is not fitting to be with holding information form the players, when their characters would probably know more.

So the thing I have been playing around with is perspective maps.  It is closer to the mental model we humans have when thinking spatially, and is more a reflection of where we are, and how we see the world around us. 

Some classic examples 

So playing around with the default setting in the Dungeon Master's Guide, and Google Sketchup, I made a low quality 3D version of Mike Schley'svery cool map of the Nentir Vale.  (which I am using here without permission.)  The idea of this experiment is to show to the players how their characters would see the Nentir Vale mentally from their home base in Fallcrest.

 The 3D map

 

Looking North East

Looking North West

Looking South East

Looking South West

The view looking back at Fallcrest from Winterhaven

 

...and the view looking back from Hammerfast

Now this perspective is hovering about 12 miles in the air, but everything in the map is exaggerated.  (the forests are about a mile tall, and Thunderspire is about the height of Mount Everest, if this was all to scale.)

Probably it would be better to offer the players a 360 Quicktime VR type online tool, where they could look around the Nentir Vale from Fallcrest, and get a real feel for their environment.  And then by the nature of their perceived proximity, they are able to understand the things they should be focusing on.

 

 

Subway Map to the Stars

In my previous post I mentioned that my interest in RPGs lead me into a career of Interaction Design. In this (rather long) follow up, I talk about a particular cartography problem that I have returned to multiple times over the years from one of the classic games.
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