Map-Makin’

I’ve been on winter break from college for a few days now, and it’s basically been: stay up ’til 7 AM, sleep until 2, maybe eat and then work on Dungeons & Dragons stuff on and off the rest of the day (with movie distractions).  Back at school I’m running a game as DM for a group of friends that I’ve gotten together (though we have yet to begin).  Throughout today I came up with the above map using Photoshop, though that one has the civilization and campaign groups of layers turned off (roads and towns, key places etc.).  I made the map for in-game reference, so that I can easily keep track of where in the kingdom the PCs are as well as where they’re going.  With Photoshop’s layers I can turn on and off different features of the map; I could turn off all the geographical info if I wanted and only see cities and towns, or turn off just bodies of water or trees etc.  Maybe it’s not completely necessary, but it really makes me feel more organized, and the more organized I feel the more smoothly the game will go.

I learned the other day that Photoshop is fucking EXCELLENT for creating maps for D&D, since you can lay a grid over any image and have your lines snap to that grid.  I’m so fucking pleased with this discovery.  Instead of whipping out potentially hard-to-keep-track-of graph paper I can just keep maps in organized folders on my laptop.  I don’t need to rummage through a binder! I can also overlay higher-up floor levels onto the floors below them, so I can keep things consistent floor-to-floor, something that I’ve had to do on paper in the past.  Which is a real bitch.  Photoshop is really, in a way, the map-making software I’ve Googled for on more than one occasion, with no real luck.

My plan is to get enough D&D stuff finished so that we can start playing sometime in late January, maybe the beginning of February.  The campaign will (at first) revolve around finding creatures for a retired explorer, who saw them years earlier during his travels and now wants the opportunity to study them.  Doing this, the PCs will stay within the confines of the kingdom for a while (unless they want to leave for some reason, in which case I guess I’ll be improvising), but they’ll be jumping all around it.  I plan on expanding it (also real easy in Photoshop), but right now that’s not a priority.  It might even grow to a world map of sorts, eventually.

My group is full of newbies, which is fine because I don’t have much experience running games.  Yet I’m pretty sure I have the most experience playing out of the seven of us.  It will work out, I think, as long as I can keep up with providing things to do.  That’s really my goal over this break, to get a lot of things done so I don’t find myself ever scrambling to keep up with the players.  I intend to make at least rough diagrams of each location to help me visualize them, so that I can give a good spoken description of each one.  Below is my diagram in Photoshop of the Unruly Mule, the local tavern that I want to introduce, with top and bottom floors overlapping, and the grid I used turned on.  The name of the tavern is an inside joke, the tavern’s cousin being the “Crazy Ass” from a previous campaign.

So yeah.