Tag: map

Gold Canal Sources

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My entry for 2019’s One Page Dungeon Contest, a high security prison sort of thing named The Gold Canals of Irid’s Vault was named one of the thirty winners.

As per past tradition here, winning means sharing the sources. Just like the final project, these are released under a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license. The source files in the archive include:

  • The 3d model used to block out the basic shapes (Cheetah3d .jas format) and some renders thereof (png)
  • The flat, grid-based floor maps, which got transformed into isometric maps (Illustrator)
  • The resulting isometric sources (Illustrator)
  • The composite drawing with the maps and text (Illustrator)

Download here: gold-canals-sources.zip (23MB)

Vector demonweb

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demonwebFor various important reasons (ok, not really, I just wanted a skin for my new phone) I needed a crisp version of the map in the Queen of the Demonweb Pits, but all I could find were various beaten up, not great resolution scans. So, I built a quick vector based version.

This should scale to any size you like. There wasn’t much in the way of quality control when I made it, so it very likely has errors. Let me know if you find any. I also don’t own the correct weight of Franklin Gothic to exactly replicate the labels of the original. Let me know if you use these files to make something else.

Seed: Goth Gulgamel

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Goth Gulgamel IsometricSince the Bundle of Holding is offering a great deal for the Ptolus setting for the next few days, this seems like a good time to post something I’ve been working on, but am not going to do much more with: a revision/hack of one of the dungeons within that setting.

For reasons explained in more detail in the documents below, I was a bit unsatisfied with this location. I was also intrigued by Justin Alexander’s article on “Jaquaying the Dungeon”, a method of using design ideas from the dungeons designed by Jennell Jaquays to make dungeons more interesting. I was also keen on messing with isometric maps in Adobe Illustrator.

As with all DivNull Seeds, this is work isn’t entirely finished, but is in a decent enough state to be used. Feel free to pick up where I left off, but please share the results with everyone. With most seeds, I’ve posted things I’ve learned along the way, but this one, I kept a log of progress on the Cartographer’s Guild which contains most of the stuff I want to remember. That forum thread also lists the goals of this project.

I targeted legal-sized paper for most of these maps, as it is the largest paper most home printers in the US can easily use. I also tried to set up the battlemaps to use as little paper as possible, with locations rendered separately. In play, I would tend to only put the parts of the map the characters could see on the table at any given time.

I also decided to try to make a couple of poster sized maps (the large centerpiece location, for example, is a 24″×36″ poster), and used on-line print services (Vivyx printing in this case) to make hard copies. This worked pretty well, though uploading could be a challenge (had to resort to downsampled PNG files in one case).

The upshot of these last two points is that you might need to experiment to print these things.
The files for this are pretty large, so please download and read the first one before deciding if you want to download the rest. It is a guide that tells you about the location and what I’ve done with the place. If you’d like the Adobe Illustrator and InDesign sources for these documents, drop me a line here and I can get them to you.

Thanks to Monte Cook for allowing me to make use of his intellectual property, yet again.

Murky Dealings

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Dealings mapI am entering Murky Dealings into the One Page Dungeon Contest 2014, even though it turned out a lot different than I had original intended it. As with my prior entries, I’ve left specific details deliberately vague. When I actually use a published dungeon (one page or otherwise), I usually only make use of the skeleton anyway, and replace the rest with campaign-specific stuff. I assume everyone else does the same thing, so just try to provide a feel to a place and let the reader fill in the blanks with stuff specific to their own game. (In the past, this approach has irritated some judges, but so be it.)

I also think this is more in keeping with the system neutrality which supposedly governs the contest, making it easier to, for example, use the map in a sci-fi game. Settings which don’t allow flying will make this dungeon significantly more difficult (would work well as a final challenge for a modern tomb raiding type game, for example). Another variation is to play with just how dark is “dark”. If you ran it in the Ptolus setting’s Utterdark, for example, everyone would basically be totally blind between the rooms. Even if it is normal darkness, the “see in the dark” magic of most fantasy systems will (intentionally) only be able to see one or two rooms nearest to the one you are in, sometimes none.

I continue to use vector software for maps, though this one also made use of a 3d modelling system to get the shapes right. This dungeon is significantly shorter than what I’ve done in the past, and better suited to a single night’s play. Like my 2012 entry, this is also another attempt to build a dungeon that is not a directional graph.

Seed: Bladechapel battlemap

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Bladechapel is the headquarters of a knightly order dedicated to fighting evil threats from other planes in Monte Cook’s urban setting, Ptolus. Since no detailed plans of this fictional building seem to exist, and I wanted to confront my players with devils and demons ransacking the place during a zombie plague (long story), I set about making maps of my own. While I have progressed reasonably far, I’m to the point where I likely won’t be updating it any further. The map is functional, but not what I’d call “done”. As such, I’m releasing what I’ve got as a DivNull seed.

Bladechapel

When it comes to maps, I prefer using vector tools like Illustrator over raster tools like Photoshop. This makes me a bit of the odd man out when it comes to making battlemaps, which is largely a raster pastime, but one of the reasons I wanted to make this map in the first place is to see how far I could push the vector tools. I posted progress notes for this map to a gaming cartography forum, if you are interested in more step-by-step stuff. My take aways from this project are:

  • One big goal was to learn how to use Illustrator’s mesh tool. Mission accomplished there. It is powerful and capable of doing things you can’t do any other way, but a bit clunky. I didn’t get really great at using this tool, but I least I understand what I’m doing now.
  • Live tracing seamless textures can build decent fill brushes that give objects more depth. (Vector maps are often very flat and blocky.)
  • Really decent textured fill brushes push Illustrator CS5 to the breaking point. On more than one occasion, I used up all the memory that Illustrator’s 32-bit limit could handle, causing it to die a horrible death. This transformed the project from learning about vector mapping to tiptoeing around the limitations of the software I was using, and is a big contributor to my not finishing the map. The newer 64-bit version might not have this problem.
  • Illustrator has the ability to print by tiling the output across multiple pages in an easy to understand way, but doesn’t extend this functionality to exporting PDFs. If you want to export to a multi-page PDF, you have to create individual artboards, and overlap them manually. The artboard tool makes this possible, but could be easier (allowing selection of multiple boards and editing, say, the X position of all of them at once would be very helpful, for example). I didn’t know any of this before starting this project, so learning it has been useful.
  • I also mostly just ran out of time. My desire to run a game using this map, and the pace of the game itself, overshadowed the need to do the map “right”.

I wound up with maps of five different “floors” of the building, in the end. They are big, as battlemaps go (roughly 50 squares by 60 squares, at an inch per square). Maps are available in two different formats. The PNG files contain the whole floor as a single image, at 150 pixels per inch. The PDFs divide the map onto pages of legal sized paper (the largest paper that the majority of home printers can handle), with a bit of content overlap. Note that all of these files are huge. You might want to look at the bladechapel-key.pdf file first. It gives a decent overview of the building layout and such.

Sources for this map are a bit tricky. I’m not going to post them, because the Illustrator sources are gigantic (the ground floor is over a gigabyte); however, if you are really want to play with them, drop me a comment to this post and we’ll figure something out.

Many of the objects on these maps (tables, chairs, etc.) are bitmaps intended for use with Dundjinni, and credit for them goes to their creators. Likewise, the name “Bladechapel”, “Knights of the Pale” and other aspects of this map are ©2006-2007 Monte J. Cook, used with permission. The textures originated from Seamless Pixels. Everything else should be considered released under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License:

Creative Commons License

First Age mosaic map released

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In the game of Exalted, there was a long past First Age, when everything was awesome (except for the growing psychosis of the demigod rulers of the place) and Creation was much larger. No maps had been produced of this time, but DivNull has released one to Lore 5, created as if it were a tile mosiac that might be found in a tomb or ruined palace.

This was a raster project done in Photoshop, with much of the heavy lifting done by a demo of Xenofex. This could be improved in a number of ways, particularly by adding a bit more depth.

Rathess map released

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Rathess is an abandoned city in the game of Exalted, formerly the most important city in Creation. A small, not very helpful map exists in the books, but a bigger one was needed. DivNull’s version has been released to Lore 5, a site that collects content for Exalted.

This is another vector map made in Illustrator, using a lot of its texture and transparency capabilities. The map used a technique to overlap pattern fills with different periods, to prevent the repetitive “pattern” look. It sort of worked, but not entirely.

Chiaroscuro map released

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Chiaroscuro is a large city in the world of Exalted, marked by the ruins of ancient glass buildings, shattered by a great battle. No map exists in canon of this city, so DivNull has produced one. It can be found posted to Lore 5, a site that collects content for Exalted.

This marks DivNull’s first publicly released map since the Sixth World. The map is vector based, produced with Adobe Illustrator. Not the best work, frankly, particularly the colors, but served its purpose.