Going to Never land

One of the most important things to remember when you make maps is that it should be fun. If you don’t have fun, well you won’t continue doing it. One of things I like the most is to make maps for my kids. It doesn’t matter if it is for a RPG session or for an imaginary world they want to play in. If they ask for a map I always try to make one for them.

This spring my oldest daughter turned six and she wanted to invite all her friends for a pirate party. At the moment Jake and the Never land pirates are her favorite show on TV, and of course if you have a pirate party you have to have a treasure hunt.

My kids loves to have treasure hunts and I have made maps of our house that I use when we go treasure hunting. Sometimes I include a riddle to make it a bit harder for them to find the treasure. Because the truth is that they nowadays are so good at reading the maps of our house that they find the treasures in no time. So I have to make it a bit harder for them.

But this time I decided to make something completely different that I hadn’t done before. Jake and his pirates are living in never land, but it is quite hard to get there for a party, so I decided to make a map where I turned our house into Never land. To do this I used Profantasy’s Dungeon Designer 3 program and the Jon Roberts Dungeon style from the 2011 annual (It is free to download by the way). I really like that style and it is very easy to use.

Do I need to say that the map was a real success. The kids loved it and they really played it out well, as if they were in Never land. The treasure was easily found after some exciting adventures and everyone enjoyed the booty, golden coins with chocolate inside. What more can you ask for if your six years old

Another style coming up

Lately I’ve been working hard on a new style for Profantasy. As you can see in the test map of the style it is a black and white style that hopefully will work very well in print.

I have always been very fond of the old fantasy maps like the ones you found in the hobbit and the lord of the rings, black and white and very clean looking. Recently I’ve also made some old school dungeon maps so I thought that I’d like to have a black and white style that would work with these.

First I only had some mountains, forest and rivers and simple icons for cities/towns but when I was asked by Profantasy if I could turn it into a style for them I decided I had to expand the number of symbols and textures that could be used. I’m still convinced that you should keep things as simple as possible with this kind of maps, this is really a style where less can be more. Let the negative space in the map do its job. But now this one won’t be just for me, and there might be a million reasons why someone wants to include some symbols that I wouldn’t. So I decided to work through the list of symbols that are the most common in the styles released by Profantasy. Then everyone can decide for them self what to include.

The first map I made in the style had quite a lot of water in it, and while looking at the map I felt that the water area of the map was a bit empty compared to the land area with all its symbols of trees, mountains and hills. So I decided that I would add in some monsters like you have in old maps. The inspiration to the included monsters is from an old Swedish map called the Carta Marina. In this map the sea is full of strange and scary monsters and snakes. Of course there had to be a ship or two as well that fearlessly sails through these dangerous waters.

Making these monsters and ships has been a great challenge for me, I haven’t done anything like it before and I really had to push myself to the next step to make them. But it has been great fun and I must say that the monsters are probably the symbols I’ve enjoyed the most to make in this style. They’ve also inspired me to some more ideas for future maps, but more of that in a later blog post.

The style is not completely done yet, I still have some small things to finish up and I need to make a compass and a scale bar. But you should all be able to see the finished result this summer, if you subscribe to the Annuals.

Dragon’s lair

Quite recently I made two maps for a Swedish RPG called Fantasy! It is an old school game that goes back to the roots of the RPG hobby. This means maps in black and white. I found it very enjoyable to make those maps. It is something special to just use black and white while making maps. You just have those two colours nothing else. No grey areas just those two opposite colours, it is a bit like working with negative and positive spaces and try to make it look as good as possible.

After finishing the maps, which I had to do in a very short space of time due to a deadline coming up, and I came in rather late in the project, I felt that I wanted to push this style a bit further. I felt that I could make much more of it, that there were a lot more boundaries to explore here.

The map in this post is a very early version of the more developed style I’m now working on. It is of a dragon that has moved in to the entrance of a Dwarven underground kingdom. A perfect place for a short evening scenario where the players have to rid the entrance of the dragon, so that the Dwarves can start using it again.

For the style I’ve also decided that I will make some more monsters, not just having a dragon. This is a way for me to try to develop my drawing skills as I’m not very used of doing monsters or creatures. I used to do a lot of drawing while in school so many years ago. But since then I’ve nearly only done map art, like mountains and trees. So you can say I’m a bit rusty.

I thought it was time to try to push my skills a bit forward and challenge myself with something else then mountains. So at the moment I’m trying to make a list of creatures that might come in handy, except dragons, while making old school maps. I’m trying to focus on larger monsters here not the ordinary orc soldier.  The picture below is of a great spider, spiders are always fun to throw at your players. Any suggestions of other large monsters or creatures that like to reside in dark dungeons or catacombs?

Morcar

I was really looking forward to this month’s annual (April, 2013) by Jonathan Roberts. His earlier ones are two of my absolute favorites.  I must say though that at first I was a bit disappointed when I looked at this month’s style. If you look at the earlier overland map annual he made the symbols are in my opinion some of the best ones I’ve seen so far published by Profantasy. Every mountain, city and hill icon are like small pieces of art, and the new symbols in this month’s annual doesn’t really reach the same standard. Still they are looking great and a there are a lot of useful symbols that I missed in the first overland style from Jonathan, like the cliff edges. The thing here is that Jonathan has spoiled us with such great maps and products that the expectations you have on a new style from him are probably impossible to live up to.

Already before I received this month’s style I had decided on making a map in the style to try it out. Some time ago I was asked if I could make a colour map of the campaign world from a Swedish old school RPG called Fantasy! (great game by the way), so I thought it would be a great way trying out the new style. In the end I however used more symbols from the old overland style then the new one, but some crucial pieces in the map are from the new one.

As always it is easy to quickly build up a map in CC3, as long as you do it in the right order. I think that one of the great advantages of CC3 is that it lets me make maps in styles I normally can’t. For me to make a map in the same style as Jonathan Roberts without CC3 would take ages, if it would be possible at all. Now I can accomplish it in about a day’s work, which is absolutely amazing.

As always when I work in CC3 I like to bring up the map in Photoshop to make it more unique and give it a bit of a personal touch. This time I’ve added some colours, especially around the area called Ankhar on the map, and I also painted the rivers in Photoshop. I wanted the rivers to be more irregular in form then what you can get in CC3.

I’m very pleased with the result and now with more symbols to use with the new style from Jonathan I definitely think I will return to this style in a not too distant future.

The Etrakien Calendar

If you look back in history we have always had systems for how we count time. Days turn to weeks, weeks to months and month to years. When it comes to my Etrakien world I started to think about how they divide the year. An easy way, that many use, is to just convert our calendar to your fantasy setting. Twelve months made up of approximately four weeks.

But I felt I wanted something else, I wanted a system that kind of felt unique for the world, a system that also had some logical connection with the metaphysical universe of the Etrakien world. After some thinking I decided on the following.

The Etrakien universe consists of seven worlds, once created by seven gods called Archonts. These worlds where just bleak copies of the original world, created by the original God. So the numbers seven and eight are very magical for the Etrakien world. Because of this I decided that an Etrakien year consists of seven months that all have seven weeks. Every week has seven days which makes the total number of days per year to 343.

But every seventh year there is an extra week of seven days called the eighth year. Those eight years will together build up what is called a cycle. So when you ask a person in Etrakien what exact day it is he will answer something like this, – It is the fourth day of the third week in the fifth year of the 28^th cycle.

When I was thinking of the calendar I also thought about the moon.  The moon has always been important and we generally have had a good knowledge of the moons cycle. How many days it is between the full moons and so on. In the Etrakien world there are actually two moons. One moon has a cycle of 28 days between its full moons, the second one can only be seen during the eighth year, and is regarded as a very strong foreteller of how the next cycle of eight years will turn out.

The very few times that the two moons will be full together during the eighth year are regarded as times of great change to come. How often that happens however I still have to count on

Making a Compass rose in Artrage

The other day I decided to upgrade my version of Artrage from 3.5 to the new 4.0. One of the new features in the program is that you can draw in symmetry, or as it is called in Artrage Paint symmetry.

First when I bought the program I didn’t think much of this feature but after some testing I’ve realized that it really has some great potential. For example I started to experiment doing compass roses, and to my surprise the symmetry paint feature is a big help.

Here is a quick tutorial on how to make a compass rose as the one in the picture at the top of this post.

First of all start up Artrage and click Tools-Paint Symetry-Paint Symmetry, as in the picture below.

This will give you the default symmetry where the picture is divided into four squares. This means that if you draw something in one square the stroke will be repeated in the three others. If you like to have a compass rose that only shows N,S,E and W this will do fine. If you however also want the rose to include NE,SE,NW and SW you have to increase the symmetry segments to eight instead of four.

To do this you do the following. Point with mouse at the circle in the middle of the picture and click with the left mouse button. This will open up a new menu as seen in the picture below. Select Set number of Segments and put in the number you like, the maximum number of segments are twelve, but in this case we only use eight.

The work area will now look like in the picture below and it is time to start drawing. At first do some test strokes that you later delete so you understand the logic behind the symmetry, it’s not that complicated. Making a compass rose shouldn’t be too hard, making a good looking one might be a bit trickier.

I can see a lot of things where the symmetry feature can come into good use. Like when you do simple icons for cities or towns for your map, or making intricate borders. Well I think I have some more experimenting to do

Making a new symbol set

When I grew up one of the first maps I really remember, if you don’t count maps of the real world, is the maps in Tolkien’s books. I can still recall when I first laid my eyes on the map of middle earth in the Lord of the rings. I was on vacation in England with my parents and I was eight years old. We went to a flea market and there they were, all three books. I remember looking in them and I was lost forever. Just seeing those maps made me understand that these has to be the greatest books ever written, so I bought them for my own money. The funny thing is that I didn’t know how to read or speak English, but that didn’t matter I could just look at those lovely maps and fill them with life from my own imagination.

Since then I’ve always been very fond of black and white maps, and then I mean black and white maps, not the ones that are black, white and grey. So when I was commissioned to do a map for a fantasy world that will be printed in a book I decided to try to do a map that really looked like those old maps from Tolkien’s books. But just making a map wasn’t all I wanted to do.

As this project might expand to more maps than the first one I decided to make a new symbol set that I could use for this map and future ones. Earlier I’ve made two style sets for Profantasy and from that experience I’ve learned a lot, especially how much quicker you can make the maps once the symbols are done.

First of all when you make symbols for a map style it is good to try to write down what you need. What different type of terrain will there be? Mountains, hills, cliffs, trees, cities, villages, volcanos etc. Write them all down on paper, or in a document on your computer. Now you have a plan on what you need, next step is to start drawing them. When you’re done and satisfied with a symbol, tick it off from the list and continue with the next. Some symbols like mountains will need more than one symbol, so in this case you just make as many as you think is necessary before you tick it off in the document.

Another important step is to test the symbols. I usually have a test map where I copy and paste the symbols into, to see that they will fit together, the map in this post is a document like that. Here I’ve tested that the mountains and trees will look good together. In my first try I realized that the trees outer lines weren’t thick enough, so I went back to the originals and made the lines thicker. In this way you will be sure that when the symbol set is done everything will work together.

Making a symbol set will take some time, but after that you’re done making maps using the symbols will be so much easier.

My first city in CD3

Since I’ve been quite busy lately with a commission I haven’t had much time to to do some mapping for my self, or blogging. But while cleaning out some old files from my computer, you always need more free space, I found this little town map, the first map I ever did in CD3.

When I first started with City Designer 3 (CD3) I started out doing maps in the black and white style that was a part of the 2010 annual from Profantasy. For some reason it felt much easier to start out doing black and white maps then coloured ones.

After having used CC3 for a long time I actually found it quite easy to learn CD3. But as you usually say, easy to learn but hard to master. And there are really a lot of small things to master here.

The black and white style is really great to use and there is a good variation of houses and structures included. But always when it comes to cities you can’t have too many symbols, and after a while you really wish there where more of them. I’ve had the idea of making some myself, I just need some more time in my life .

Where cities grow

One of the things I like most with making maps is when you have to decide where your different countries and cities will be placed. But how can you do this in a convincing way? Where shall you put your cities? As always we have to look at our own history and learn.

If you look back in our history nearly all early cities started out close to water. Before we had good roads waterways were the highways for travel and transportation. To be able to start up a city you needed a surplus of goods and food, so not everyone needed to work. So that some people in the community could start doing the administrative tasks to keep it all together. Living close to water made those things easier to happen.

When that happens a smaller tribal village can evolve into something larger, a city, and in the end a great kingdom or empire. Of course this description is very simplified, but still you can say that this is the foundation behind the growth of a society. Maybe you have to add in things like learning to write, minting coins and technological advancements in building techniques. But without a surplus in production those other things will never kick off.

So how can you use this knowledge in your mapping?. Well when I make my maps I usually wait to plot out borders for countries and their cities until all the terrain is done. When the terrain is done I try to locate places in the map where larger cities might lie. If you look at the example map below I’ve marked out some locations with red circles. Those places are where I probably would put the larger cities in the map.

But not all cities are located close to water, so where should you put the rest of the cities?. To find out this the next thing to do is to draw roads between the large cities. When you’re done have a look at the map for crossroads, crossroads are typical places for a city or town. A place where people travelling to and from different locations meet, and goods can be sold. In the example map below I’ve added some roads and cities at the crossroads.

We now have a good base for our kingdom with some logically planned cities and towns. Next step is to continue adding in more towns, but this time towns that might not feel logically placed in the beginning. When a kingdom continue to evolve other more rare resources gets more and more important, like gold, silver, iron etc. Try to add towns in places close to where they can acquire resources for the kingdom. Also think of how the goods will be transported to the main towns. If you place a small town in the mountains where they mine silver and you have a river close by they would probably found another town next to the river so they easily can transport the silver, instead of transporting it all by the road. In the example map below I’ve added in some towns where they can collect resources.

You can continue this way and add in more and more towns. After adding the towns you add in more roads, more roads means more crossroads that leads to more towns. If you try to build up your map this way the placing of your towns will feel logical which will give you a better and more believing map. And while mapping you might even come up with an idea or two for an adventure.

Writing a world Bible

When you make maps for a made up world you reach a point where you actually have to start to think about the world beyond the maps. What kind of world is it that you’re creating?

I’ve worked on my Etrakien world for about ten years, it’s been through a lot of different phases, things have been added and things have been thrown out. In the beginning it was more of a classic fantasy world with forests full of Trolls and Dwarves hiding under the mountains. But through the years the world has slowly changed in to what it is today. The problem however is that I’m not really sure of what exactly the world is like today.

A lot of my ideas and thoughts has been written done in different forms over the years. Some things I have on paper, some in different threads on forums where I’ve put up my maps for display, a couple of documents are on Google drive, still some on my hard drive. Some I’ve actually lost due to a hard drive crash some years ago.

So I felt that all this information had to be collected into one document, a world document for the Etrakien world where all the up to date information could be found. But how do you do this in the best way? What do you have to think of to make your world as believable as possible? Because I want my world to feel real, that if you read about it or play a game in it, it should feel plausible, like it could exist.

For a long time I’ve looked all over the Internet for information about world building, how do others do this? So far the best thing I’ve found has actually been the Kobold Guide to Worldbuilding, a brilliant little document where different authors from the RPG gaming industry gives their view on how you create your own world.

This little gem gave me some great ideas on what to think of while writing about my Etrakien world. It covers some good essays on world design, creating religion, magic, technology etc. Everything you need to be set up for a great start. Of course I also have some ideas of my own, but this guide has really helped me to put my ideas together.

So I decided to start with a blank document titled “The Etrakien world”, or to be more precise “Den Etrakiska världen”, because I’m writing it in Swedish, and in that document collect all the information I have that I want to keep together with new things I come up with.

First of all I tried to think of what is different with the Etrakien world compared with our world. A lot of things are alike, after all the world is based on my knowledge of the classic Rome and Greece, mixed up with some influences from the Hansa and medieval Europe. It includes mainly humans, like us and they like to wage war, make love, be rich and just survive for another day. So what is different and how would that affect the world?

First of all there are two other known humanoid races, one that mostly is seen as a slave by the others and the other is more equal to the humans, or in their own eyes superior. How will a world that has enslaved nearly everyone of a humanoid race develop ideologically? Will it become like Germany during Second World War that divided people in “Untermenschen” and “Übermenschen”? Does everyone in the world think that is ok?

There is also magic in the Etrakien world, or mostly there is magic that is wielded by the priests and clerics of the different religions. How will a world where the priests actually can perform miracles through powers they have been given by their gods look? In medieval times the church had the European population in a tight grip without being able to perform any real miracles. What will happen if some priests really can bring people back from the dead or heal wounds etc. What kind of power will they have in the world? And what happens if someone that’s not a priest learns magic? Will they be persecuted like the witches in our own history, that didn’t even know how to do real magic?

As you can see the questions are many, but I feel I have to get them down on paper. As I’ve said before, if you have a story to your map it will be much easier to get a great result that looks believing, because then your map will tell a story and not just be a flat picture of land, sea and mountains. And by writing my World Bible, as Scott Hungerford calls it in his essay in the Kobold Guide to Worldbuilding, I hope that I can achieve that. Maps that tells a story.