Found a neat online random map generator. Here’s a sample map I just created:

It can do more than just physical maps; you can also manage nations, cultures, and so on with the program. It’s really neat software; do try it out.
Found a neat online random map generator. Here’s a sample map I just created:
It can do more than just physical maps; you can also manage nations, cultures, and so on with the program. It’s really neat software; do try it out.
I actually didn’t except this, but the Cartographers picked my suggestion for the February/March challenge: Map a river! I guess this means I actually have to submit something for a change… and so should you!
Earth 2174 maps with minor fixes:
No big changes in these. I did try to come up with more changes for southern Africa, but I found nothing that I could use. I guess either something will present itself once I write a more detailed timeline, or Africa may indeed become a fairly quiet area. They sure would deserve that.
I love to use props and hand-outs in my games. For my Call of Cthulhu games, I always made up one-page “newspapers” as the campaign progressed. This is a trivial matter with any decent word processor and a fancy gothic font for the newspaper logo.
Then of course that game had the use of hand-outs built-in. For other games, I created maps or documents. These are trivial to create, too – thanks to modern graphics software, cheap printers, and huge libraries of samples and clipart. You can age them by washing them with coffee or tea, rip off the edges of the paper, and perhaps even use a candle to singe them to make them look less like printer paper.
However, I’ve never really used physical props – back in the day I simply didn’t have money for that, and I never did much research into it. If I were to game again, I’d certainly change that. There’s a lot of cool stuff available, and some of it is even really cheap.
This is what I’ve come up so far. I am sure there are many more ways to add cool props to your games.
What props have you used, or do you want to use in the future?
While I am on the topic of maps… The Map of Thraeton that I showcased last month is now done. That is, as done as it’s going to get without detailed world-building – the place names are mostly placeholders, and so on.
I think it came out quite well, if I may say so myself.
This is my entry for the Cartographers’ Guild’s “just for fun” competition for March, the River Challenge:
The basic template of the landmass and some pre-defined lakes and rivers was provided by the guild’s community leaders, and there are various rules on the number of rivers the map needs to include.
I honestly did not enter this one to win – the guild counts far better artists than I am amongst its members – but rather I took the opportunity to try out a “fancy mountain” style. As you can see… it still needs some work. 😉
Today was an art day:
I spent a lot of my spare time working on maps. Here’s what I have to show for my effort.
First off, Thraeton now has mountain ranges. I experimented a little and came up with the following abstract style, which I like a lot.
Detail view:
I am currently working on climate – wind, ocean currents, climate zones.
In between, I revisited that world which started it all, and which gave the name to this website: Enderra. I began by recreating what geography has already been established over the past 17 years. As you can see, this is not the entire planet just yet – the entire “new world” in the west was never mapped out, so it’ll be added later.
I also experimented with drawing pretty national borders. These are very rough, and I’ll have to redraw them as the map evolved, but as a stylistic experiment I think it was quite a success:
As always, I work in Inkscape.
Here’s a little bit of a bonus and post scriptum for NaNoWriMo. I didn’t just design a fallout shelter, I also sketched out a city.
Saint Brendan, so named after St. Brendan the Navigator, is a large city located in the US State of Acadia. The city rose to prominence as a trade port after the discovery of the Northwest Passage and benefited greatly from the increase in trade with East Asia after the World War. It is New England’s largest city, with over six million people living in the metropolitan area. This makes Saint Brendan the fifth-largest urban conglomeration in the United States, before the Delaware Valley but less populated than the Dallas-Fort-Worth Metroplex.
Major industries are transportation, financial, and high tech. A large military presence secures the strategic location.
Saint Brendan is an amalgamation of San Francisco, New York, and a few other cities. I decided to use a fictional city for several reasons:
I am a firm believer in recycling material, so expect Saint Brendan to pop up again in more detailed form.
A bit of a follow-up because I was told off-blog that the map is a little hard to read without any explanation… the different shades represent different heights. Here’s the basic idea, not to scale:
The colors are the same as in the map.
As the oceans weren’t as deep as Earth’s, the continental rise also isn’t as deep. Still, with the greatest depth in the ocean at 1-2km, this still means at least a hundred meters for the continental rise, and that’s quite a slope. Places where this slope is greater will be natural barriers for migrations, caravans, and invading armies; locatations where the slope is not as steep, not as high, or where it has been worn down by erosion or other factors will be natural choke points where the before-mentioned can travel, and so they may be of strategic interest. Something to keep in mind when I draw the map in greater detail – and it shows the importance of thinking about such things: The more you work on something, the more ideas present themselves…