Maps and Graphics
These files are all made with Campaign
Cartographer 2 Pro (CC2) and its add-ons, including City Designer, Dungeon
Designer, and more. Additionally, I use the Mappa Harnica toolkit
occasionally for the simplicity of using some of its commands. Mappa
Harnica though uses a color palette
that may have trees looking pink in the .fcw's if you haven't downloaded it. I have
used almost no custom symbols but that is likely going to change now that I'm
starting to find a need for them and understand how to go about making them. I do use some symbols from the Forgotten Realms Interactive
Atlas too, but by and large everything is done "out of the box".
These represent a fairly broad range of my efforts with CC2.
Many are very recent, but some are now quite old like the Forgotten Realms maps.
I have made a heck of a lot more maps and drawings than what you see here.
For various reason these are simply the ones that I've chosen to make public and
available.
I have long avoided making certain maps I've drawn available because they would put
intellectual property into publicly available areas that I haven't felt comfortable with
doing. I AM comfortable with public display of whatever's here which is
why you see so many Judges Guild city maps (and I enjoy doing them).
Even though Judges Guild still sells some of the products they come from (or at least
revisions of them) in all these cases either scans of the original maps (or
large parts thereof) are
already available on the JG website as free downloads, or they have allowed OTHER
people to post versions of these maps on their forums, or else the product is actually NOT
in print and no one is in danger of losing money (except possibly in E-bay sales) as a
result of it being here. Aside from all that, none of them will replace
having all the original material - you can't run Tegel Manor
or CSIO using ONLY the maps here (you still need a copy of the originals or
their updates), though
you can run them with MY maps instead of the originals allowing you to keep the
valuable originals in better condition. Spelljammer is out of print,
my works are not completely true to the originals, and
if anything they would add usefulness to old material that might be purchased
rather than preclude sales.
The thumbnails and associated .png files are mostly just to provide
visitors here with an idea of what the actual CC2 file contains before they decide to download
the .fcw files which are the real point. The .png's generally don't do full justice to the
actual CC2 file but I don't care to clog up my limited web space with
graphic files any larger than I already have here. If you
want to see more details but don't have CC2 I encourage you to download the free CC2 Viewer from Profantasy
to view and print the original CC2 files.
Eventually, I will be migrating to using CC3. Even
though I currently have it, it will certainly be a while before I start making
real use of it. When I do, this particular page will
probably change as I start to convert everything to CC3 for better or worse. CC3
now has a
free file viewer, but will apparently require inclusion of additional graphics
to be included with each map file for it to work.
Comments and criticism are always welcome: mailto:duanevp@earthlink.net
NOTE: A lot of these maps I've drawn of Judges Guild Cities made use of some of the excellent tools of the Mappa Harnica toolkit. Without the custom palette from that you'll see a lot of hideous purple trees and such when viewing in CC2 or the Viewer. The palette is available at http://www.thechmp.com/MappaHarnica/Files.htm but be sure to back up your original palette file.
Star Trek: TOS era
Destroyer/Scout
Quite some time back (months, maybe a year) I was contemplating running a Star Trek-based game of some kind. So I dutifully dug out my old Original Series blueprints of the Enterprise and set about drawing them in CC2 Pro. I soon realized that those old blueprints had some technical problems as well as simple creativity issues, and research on the web only turned up more. In short, I just couldn't copy over the old blueprints and live with knowing they didn't actually FIT the canon or the model. To simplify the job for myself I actually decided to draw a smaller variety of Federation vessel, which would also let me off the hook if players noticed that the ship didn't quite match to the Enterprise. I could modify things and make up what I liked. Part of the way through I thought of moving the ship to the 1701-A Enterprise but got tired of the project. I think I posted my top view of the 1701-A here for a while. Anyway, I kinda got hit with a bug and went back to the original project thinking this time I'd actually do the Enterprise but I'm not sure I want to. In any case, I decided to put up what I'd done again on the original project. A lot of Star Trek ship blueprints (including versions of what I used for reference) are available at the Star Trek LCARS Blueprint Database. The thumbnail isn't all that exciting to look at (in fact you can barely make anything out), and the full-size png is only black and white line drawing, but I wasn't after incredible levels of detail and accuracy at this point.
The City State of the Invincible Overlord
(V3.2)
This is now Version 3.2. The biggest change is that
I've added all the doors from the original map. I wanted to continue to
keep this to the original style of the map so this required thickening all the
building walls before adding simple door blocks over top of them. The door
layer is hidden by default because it looks better that way at maximum zoom so
you'll have to unhide it and zoom in to see. I still have possible
additions/improvements that I might undertake in the future such as and
adding terrain elevations, but those are mostly just for wasting time.
This project is a translation of the original map and was done
almost entirely by
measurement of the original rather than tracing over a bitmap. I started out doing a
trace-over, but since the original map was very orthogonal I realized my way was
actually easier than trying to constantly adjust to distorted scans. It
turned out very well with very little needing to be fudged from the original map, and most
of the fudging is so minor as to be nearly irrelevant. You'd probably be
hard-pressed to even FIND where I've deviated from the original. In fact,
in some areas I've fixed problems like rooms/buildings with no doors.
My established method for the JG maps (established, of
course, by doing this very
project) is to draw a "wireframe" of all the structures and major elements
and then proceed from there to add color and details. I at first made the mistake of
trying to use the CC2 "house" command without taking time to
vary the styles or color or anything. It sucked. It didn't look right even
when I tried again using various house styles. The CSIO has unusual architecture
where many of the city blocks seems to be made up of strangely, inexplicably interconnected buildings,
stairs, rooms, and even isolated alleys in the interior of a city block. But just
using the wireframe of walls wasn't going to be enough either since it lacked the
character and cohesion I wanted - a visual improvement over the original maps.
It
made this a challenging project at the outset for me because I really had to contemplate the how and why of
the design of the city and its graphical representation.
I hit upon the coded, multi-color idea when I finally tried to put this
one aside to try and start another project - TSR's Rock of Bral map for Spelljammer. It used a technique of having perhaps a half-dozen colors used for
buildings. Although there was no particular rhyme or reason to its use
there it made the maps bright,
interesting, and imparted a lot more character. It's a style that was infrequently
used by WOTC for various maps but was one that I always liked. You can see it
also in the
CC2 map of the City of Greyhawk (found in the download library at Profantasy).
That map again uses color just for the sake of color rather than additional coding
purposes.
When combined with the standard CC2 idea of putting different building
types on different CC2 layers I have done some fairly simple color coding. The colors are
on different layers corresponding to the type of building indicated in the color
key. I have decided that I really prefer this kind of use of color over CC2 house
symbols for these Judges Guild city maps (though I could mix the two with some
effort and possibly achieve even better results). It helps to distinguish individual
buildings/areas in a crowded area, makes finding given types of buildings or occupants
easier on hardcopy, allows you to show some interior walls without any real added clutter,
and it also has the advantage of making it much faster to refresh since it doesn't have
all those symbols to redraw.
This map also has a layer named "Streetlights" which is hidden by
default. The positions of streetlights were marked on the original map and
the layer serves here to show where
the dark and dangerous areas are by showing the effective light radius of all the
streetlights.
The Rock of Bral
Rock of Bral.fcw (zipped)
I think this is about as much as NEEDS to be done to this map, though I love to tinker and may be doing more to it eventually. Just doing the building polys was two long afternoons. Their placement on the original was fairly haphazard, as was their shape. Yet even though I still was quite loose in tracing over it took a fair amount of time because there were so many. I may go back and clean up the "fit" between buildings, but then again I may leave it just as random as it is. Part of my original plan was to show a lot more elevation data than was on the original map. I did that but I initially wasn't sure it looked good anywhere but around the lake. I fixed that by changing some of the color scheme I was using to browns for the higher elevations instead of greens. The grass stands out more and I don't feel a need to try and draw "streets".
To go along with Bral I did the Spelljammer logo.
Enjoy.
sjlogo.fcw
The pictures are individual but the seven .fcw's are all zipped into one file. In order, here are an Eel, Flitter, Hammership, Man-O-War, Nautiloid, Tetra (based on the Quad), and Viper. The Tetra is meant to have a slightly more genie-bottle look to it but they all have differences from the original deck plans to some degree. Use them as you wish.
This is the island of Torsh from the old Judges Guild module "The Portals of Torsh". It's a very plain map with few details - especially considering the scale. The original map is supposed to be 15 miles per hex which makes it a place where, despite having an adventure taking place on the island, it is mostly just somewhere that the PC's would walk around the wilderness getting jumped by random encounters. No, it wasn't a very good module. The only reason I actually did the map is I'm still experimenting with the template. Since all the wider area maps for JG products use hexes, as I translate them to CC2 it only makes sense to use hexes and I intend to translate the entire set of new Wilderlands maps to nice, color, CC2 maps. I also intend to use ONE thing from this module and that is the portal system (with a bit of updating mind you.) So, as a one-day test/practice map I did this one since it was handy. Who knows, I may even use it someday.
Most of the REAL work on it was on getting the ocean offsets working since my Wilderlands maps will need to include both depth and "difficulty" layers. Thanks to mucking about with this map I have a better idea how I'm going to go about it. I also tried a few things with labels since the encounter numbers disappear against the background. The star-shape labels are just the last thing I tried before calling it a day.
Tegel fcw Zip Tegel Village.fcw Zip
With Tegel Manor I first, rather foolishly, put the whole thing in
one file with each floor on a seperate layer - including one layer with side
elevations. I've long since redone that, including some of the "additions"
I'd made, but there is still some minor modification and interpretation to the original.
I finished it up with the appropriate labels from the original map. I also
tried something a little different for representing the doors and windows; something
closer to a color rendition of how the original JG maps handled doors and windows.
There's also a color code layer that visually sections the labeled areas alphabetically so
you can see at a glance where section 'E' is at so you can limit your hunt for room 'E-7'
to that area.
Tegel Village is a map of the area surrounding the manor. I tried
a few slightly different things on it because it actually had a few details that weren't
on the previous JG maps I did. It had "ridge lines" that sort of doubled
as countours, and in addition some actual cliffs. The original map simply did not do
a good job of clarifying whether the various parts were actual cliffs, ridges, mere
contour lines, etc. I did my best to interpret what was supposed to be what.
There's probably a few REALLY small details that could be cleaned up although it does feel
like there's just something missing - something that needs to be changed but I'm not sure
what. Fewer trees maybe... and delete the "shadow" under them, then
sprinkle a bit more around to fill the blank spaces? Or maybe it's the original map
itself. These maps DO change rather dramatically when done up in color like
this. Details that were virtually invisible on a monochrome, sepia/tan map just POP
when you put things in color. One of the reasons I like this style. As it was
there was a lot of blank space once I'd laid out the basic vegetation so I added a few
scattered shrubs and grass symbols.
The small size and simplicity of this map made it quite fast to draw; it took only a few afternoons, maybe 8hrs total. It also helped that I've practically got this mapping style down to a system.
One more old Judges Guild map. This one was a simple trace/measured translation from a scan of the original map. Very little modification from the original. Unlike CSIO or Tegel, Thunderhold was done primarily by tracing over a .bmp. It just wasn't as old-school orthogonal in design, so required slightly different technique. The Sunstone cave entrance and escarpment don't look very good in this one but I don't have a reason to embellish it anymore than you see here. The caves should really be well off the map anyway. Their position just outside the city walls never made much sense to me. It's an old-school anachronism. I've included it here more out of a sense of tradition/accuracy to the original than a belief that it ever really belonged there.
The first is the "official" Wilderlands calendar, which
has 18 months of 20 days in 5-day weeks, with a week-long "festival" at years
end. It also includes lunar phases for which I had to make a few assumptions, such
as that it is a 28 day cycle and that New Years Eve of 4432/4433 was a full moon.
The only difficulty with that is that in a 365-day year you can't get evenly divisible
lunar cycles so every years calendar would have to be edited to arrange the lunar layer
properly. If you don't care for that idea you can either just turn off the
"Lunar" layer or edit it to fit your own assumptions (something Judges Guild
as well as myself would encourage you to do anyway!) Note also that this calendar begins
on the first day of spring, not in the middle of winter.
The second is a compromise calendar closer to the Gregorian calendar of
the modern day western world. It has 12 months with varying periods of 30 and 31
days. January, April, July and October have 31 days, the rest have 30. That makes for a
364 day year, meaning that 7-day weeks and a variety of lunar cycles are evenly
divisible. If you feel you have to have 365 days then shoehorn a
"festival" day into it anywhere you like, or you can rearrange it to a slight
degree by adding another day to one of the months that only have 30.
The advantages of this calendar are that it's very regular,
predicatable and enough like the real-world calendar not to cause confusion and
consternation among players who, in my experience, just don't need or want a really wierd
calendar. It also makes campaign time records easy to follow because there aren't
any days that fall outside of a month as happens with having lots of "festival"
or "holiday" weeks as filler trying to equal a 365-day year. I'll ask the
players if they give a flying fish one way or the other about the calendar. If they
don't I'll use the second calendar, but if they express any interest at all in a more
unique calendar when I tell them I've got several available then I'll use the
"official" Wilderlands Calendar because of the minimal amount of out-of-month
dates.
Next, the Forgotten Realms calendar. It may throw you but don't
"read" this one left to right then top to bottom, read it top to bottom THEN
left to right. It was necessary to arrange it this way to get it to fit decently on
the screen. The lunar phases of the Realms are actually a little "iffy" to
represent on the calendar because the timing of the full moon does slide forward with each
cycle until every fourth year the Shieldmeet is added to re-synchronize the lunar
calendar. It's otherwise 12 months of 30 days each in 10-day long weeks, with 5
added "holidays" for a typical 365-day year.
Greyhawk, the fourth calendar shown, is on a more straightforward,
clockwork basis every year for its lunar cycles. It has 12 months of 28 days in
7-day weeks, with four additional 7-day "festival" weeks adding another 28 days
for a 364-day year.
Last is the Eberron calendar which is probably the simplest game world
calendar you'll find. 12 months of 28 days in 7-day weeks for a short 336-day year.
No festival weeks, no complex coordination (or lack thereof) between solar and
lunar calendars. Actually, the lunar layer of the .fcw for Eberron is hidden, left
for anyone to toy with if desired, but officially is irrelevant. Eberron has 12
moons and each month corresponds to the perigee of one of these moons, but nothing was
stated about the phases of these various moons, if any. I could simply
speculate (and if running my own campaign I would), but the typical wall calendar format
doesn't lend itself to charting more than a few moons at best, so it seems pointless to
bother detailing.
Daily Event Calendar
This is something that I've seen
people ask for a few times on message boards - a log of sorts to record daily
events in a campaign. Since I just saw yet another such request I threw
this together for grins. Dragon magazine many years ago published an
article that had several pages of this sort - monthly, daily, and (given the
rules at the time) even round- and TURN-based charts. The only one I ever
could see a use for (and in fact did use to good effect for some time) was the
one like this. It's intended for a Gregorian calendar, obviously, but can
be used for others as well up to 35 days. The smallest boxes would of
course be used to number of the day in the month which with each month the first
day of the month changes as to which weekday it begins on. This sort of
thing is just mind-numbingly easy to put together in CC2 and can be adjusted to
specifically conform to any fantasy calendar. The alternative, of course,
is to simply use regular notebook paper or legal pads to keep the game records
but where's the fun in that? Naturally, I'll have to make a slightly
different one to conform better to the much shorter month of the Wilderlands
calendar that I use (see above).
There isn't a lot of room to write on any given day, but then
it isn't for recording in-depth description either. It's for entries like:
"24th; Regdar and Tordek travel to Modron to investigate. Mialee begins
spell research. Lidda steals invitation to party." It's unlikely
that EVERY day is going to packed with events that you'll need to record so you
can spill over and not feel confined to stay within the lines - but then there's
always the simple legal pad...
Castle Ravenloft
Ravenloft.fcw
Argh. Nice thumbnail, isn't it? I'd done a rendition of Ravenloft a couple years ago now. I just picked up Expedition to Castle Ravenloft so I decided to revisit it. It has only a few minor alterations to make it a little easier to map in a few spots. But as one of the final touches I decided to add a nice border to the 10 maps and in outputting the .png for the web page here I see them danged leaking multipolies that didn't show up in cc2. I'll probably have to redo the whole border from scratch to fix it. But, I decided to put the whole thing up here anyway. In addition to the map border issue, I also seem to have forgotten to finish the labeling. Do what you like with it in the meanwhile.
