Hey there patrons, lovely to chat with you again. Today we've got some maps up for showcasing.
Floatsam Island
The first map is of two islands in The Dardens (Tides of Death) has been created for me by Mapmaker's Guild! Let's get into the story of how this map came to be.
I was minding my own business one day, when Mapmaker's Guild reached out to me saying (and I'm paraphrasing here): I'd love to make a map for you to do some cross promotion, here's some samples of my work. Also, how would you feel about making a bunch of maps for me? There were some technical and distribution issues to work out, but as soon as that was smoothed over they set to work and produced this lovely image from my previous sh*tty hand drawn maps.
Don't get me wrong, I love sh*tty art. It's great. If something is worth doing, it's worth doing poorly, afterall. But I have these new campaigns coming up and I wanted something nice looking. Between 2 new campaigns launching, Vellum about to enter its Kickstarter phase, moving into a new house, and a few other offline life complications, there's just not enough hours in life to make all the maps I want. So we started with this one, and boy did it come out good. You'll notice more islands than I had put in mine, but that tracks with the lore of the area.
I had ask Mapmaker's Guild if they were interested in doing some more maps for me, but time is short and future maps by them are probably not going to happen :( However, if you like this map it is available on the Mapmaker's Guild patreon page.
Now for the question I know you're asking: Which of these campaigns is going to be revisiting The Dardens and Floatsam Island?! Voyages of Dusk and Dawn will be heading there as their first destination. Floating Fortress (FloF is the preferred shortening but do what you will) has potential to visit a lot of places down the road, but they certainly won't be starting there.
Ferrodia
The second map we're showing off today (the last 3 images in our header) is made by me featuring assets by GrizGuts, one of our community members I commissioned to make me some custom tiles. If you like the tiles, they're available on https://grizguts.gumroad.com.
This map is old. It comes from the long-ago days of the Rollplay campaign that kicked off my career as a DM. Back then, my map making was a lot faster because forests were just a tiled dot, hills were a tiled dot, and mountains were gray blobs. While I had been playing D&D for years by that point, I was still exploring how I wanted to display information, and these old maps are... oof. Rather than noting the most important places and the most well maintained roads, I put down all tails that could be taken and then marked every village along those trails, as well as some random villages in the middle of nowhere.
While I consider this map to be badly inaccurate (see old maps down below), it not totally wrong. The important things from this map hold true:
Mountain range with a break in it
Lake
Dried up lake (desert)
Denser part of forest
Outcropping with a major port town and light house
Lake in the middle
Forest ending before the river
The second Ferrodia map is a big concept image that is wildly oversimplified. Island, lake, four rivers, 1 city, 3 towns, PCs start location. I really like making overly simplified concept images because I have the memory of a goldfish, and if I start on a map one day, I might not remember the direction I was going to take by the next day. So super simplified "this is the general way" style maps are really nice. They also double as maps that could be sold / handed out to players, because old world maps were baaaaaad.
Examples of maps from long, long, ago:
Europe, Africa, Asia Cloverfield - 1581
Island of California - 1666 (there was a good while where people thought California was an island)
Mediterranean - 43
Still, even if bad maps should be this historical norm, I like to make nice ones. So I've started to flesh Ferrodia out in style. What you see in the 3rd Ferrodia map is the placement of all the mountains, and most of the hills. I have a ton to say about this region, but I think that's another post.
gl hfNeal / Koibu
p.s. September got away from me, but I have a lot to talk about. There should be extra posts coming soon.