Tabletop RPG, russian bad jokes and other

This is the Island of Elsath. Part of a full 70+ page DnD 5e adventure, that comes with items, NPCs cards, maps, minis, monsters and more.

Man, I can’t believe I ended up making nerd maps for dorks who play dungeons and dragons. Just a few years ago I thought I was on the fast track to a future of bashing nerds and knocking their books over, but here I am drawing badass islands with rad forts on top, and next thing I know a whole pile of wimps wearing wizard robes are using them for their dumb dice games with goblins and elves and stupid stuff like that. I’m not going to stop though, because that would be admitting defeat. Maybe I can get some cool guys to make a The Fast and The Furious game and they could use my maps, and maybe the dice would be wrenches or bullets. And instead of goblins there would be Paul Walkers.

My new Roll20 map art set is now in the marketplace!

Some Maps I did for an old Dark Sun Adventure “The Last Stand” for Dungeon Magazine #110 back in May 2004.  Everything was inked on vellum and then scanned and colored in Photoshop, text was done in Adobe illustrator.

Cheers!

A bunch of rough samples for a private commission for a huge set of poster maps for a forthcoming new fantasy roleplaying game  I did awhile ago.

Cheers!

Building The City of Caldera, step by step, another map I made for Lou Anders, “Thrones & Bones” series of novels.

Some people were asking for advice on how to make maps for the RPG games and it turns out I have a LOT of thoughts about maps.  So, I decided, “Hey, why don’t I put together some of my thoughts into a guide for people who would like to make their own maps for their RPG games but don’t know where to start. That sounds like a good weekend project.”

Then I started actually organising my thoughts and putting together an outline and… well, it ballooned into a project and a half.  So fair warning I have a lot of time commitments so this series is going to take a long time to put together in its entirety but I still think it’s worth doing.

For some background, I’m a geologist who specialises in making geological maps. Basically, my job and speciality is making functional maps for a very specific purpose and also being completely obsessed with earth science. That’s going to be reflected in the guide, in that I’m going to 

a) repeatedly make the point that functional/useful is more important than pretty even though I LOVE pretty maps and 

b) give tips on “realistic” vs “full-on-fiction” approaches to world-building so that those who aren’t worried about the nitty-gritty of realistic climate generation, for example, can skip right on by those sections and still make fun and functional maps for their world.

As this intro already gives away I’m a very verbose person naturally.  It’s something I take great care to edit down in my paid professional work but in this series, it’s likely I’ll be only doing one or two editing passes, so the verbosity is going to remain in… so… I apologise in advance but hopefully, it’s not too big a price to pay for the content.

My hope is that this guide will help GMs of all art skill levels (from chicken scratch to “I art for a living” but don’t know how to start with maps) make maps that help them build their own worlds, run their games and that they enjoy using. I’ll also try to address any specific questions that people send me with regards to making maps or help with the specific maps they are making.

An outline of what I plan to cover can be found here and will be regularly updated with links as I complete sections: https://oldearthmapping.tumblr.com/post/172704733221/rpg-map-making-outline

So here’s to Map Making and let’s get started!

[Simplified map of Vancouver in watercolour that I drew/painted as a mood-setting and practical prop for my Fate: Dresden Files game.

I’m working on a drawing of city for a homebrew Pathfinder game tonight and I realized halfway through the process that you might like to see how I sometimes create larger, more complex maps.

There is a secret world at the bottom of coffee cups and in this case, cups of hot chocolate. Once it’s all dried and cracked, narrow streets and wide avenues appear that are just waiting to be defined.

Sometimes entropy shows urban areas in other ways, like it does in this cracking road sign I took a picture of at Disney in Florida a few years ago. Look for inspiration everywhere - you’ll find it.

Untitled, Mixed Media 2014

Mike Lim, 2014

In 2014, the Department for Culture, Media and Sport announced that the United Kingdom’s Creative Industries were worth £8 million an hour to the UK economy; to place such a definitive value on our creative resource, recognises its potential to be lost.

Untitled, Mixed Media, 2014 questions whether the continued application of financial mechanisms to the Creative Arts is devaluing their inherent worth. 

Where Britain was `Great’ - London will be Greater. Amidst widespread cultural capital gains during an era of Creative Obesity, a speculative boom spreads within London’s Creative Class. The recently formed Worshipful Guild of Arts rapidly expands within the City of London as cultro-economic dependency grows. However, when it is revealed that certain prominent London artists are buying their own work at auction to inflate their hype, the integrity of the London Market collapses. Investors pull out, unable to trust existing value systems returning instead to material cost. As cultural credit dries up, London’s economy crumbles with it, ushering in an age of Cultural Austerity. 

I drew a new wrapping paper design – Dragons of the Magic Land