Random Caverns Produced by Gozzy's Random Cave Generator
http://www.gozzys.com/article.php?cm_id=11

Over at Gozzy's Cartographic Emporium, there is a nifty Random Cavern Generator that we used to produce the map up above. The generator gives you a few choices in terms of number of openings, background, floor type, whether or not you want an overlay grid, and size. It's a very nice, and very handy tool, and it's free, so why not give it a try?

Node-Mapping

During the early paleolithic age of gaming, back when we had to draw our own rocks, the creation of dungeon maps was a process done by hand using pens, rulers, graph paper and all the art supplies you had on hand. A few stalwarts got fancy and used Zip-a-Tone, Scraps of salvaged Rubylith, rubber cement and photocopied bits to make fancier-shmancier maps, but generally one just got a sheet of paper and drew the frikkin' thing out. People still do this, though in an age of Hexographer, Dundjinni, Campaign Cartographer, GIMP, Artweaver, Photoshop, Illustrator, etc. one sometimes wonders why. Unless you're one of the mad mappers who contracted the need to draw your own geomorphs and design things like would-be Piranesis like so many of us did.

So don't get the wrong impression--we do a lot of maps around here, have been since the Seventies and will be until the day they pry the pen from our cold dead fingers. Maybe even past that point if all goes well...gotta love the internet...

We love maps.

But sometimes you need something less detailed and more tactically adaptable. Sometimes you go with a Flow-chart approach and just create a set of nodes and draw lines to show the connections between each of them. One major advantage is that you can easily swap-out the doors with teleporters, make the connection into a shaft or a pit-trap, even make use of a table of random doors like the very nice Megadungeon Doors random generator over at the Beyond the Black Gate blog.

A flow-chart dungeon isn't new by any stretch of the imagination. We were using this approach for smaller, one-off lairs and the like back in the OD&D days and we knew quite a few other DMs who were using something similar back then. It's an Old School concept that nobody owns and is well worth revisiting and reconsidering in conjunction with the One Page Dungeons idea, or the more minimalist sorts of approaches to things like going back to index-card character sheets, etc.

The nice thing about using a Node-Based mapping scheme is that you can develop the connections either on the fly or completely at random, and if you include a selection of suitable description text options, you can really lay down some decent versimilitude with minimal fuss and bother...once you've built the tables, etc.

This is something that we'll be talking about a bit more next week.
Until then take care and have fun gaming.
Be Well,
Netherwerks

Useful Resources: More Mapping Stuff

Creating maps is a lot of fun, at least I enjoy the process.  It helps to really bring a campaign or a setting to life in a way that a few cryptic passages just don't.  Even Robert E. Howard sketched-out a rough map of Hyboria to go along with his seminal essay on that land and time that never existed but will ever persist in the imaginations of all whom his work has touched or influenced.  Maps are powerful tools and can be inspiring works of art, often both at once.

But not everyone wants to draw fiddly little details for hours on end with colored pencils, smelly markers or borrowed crayons.  Some folks like to go all digital on such projects.  There's freeware/trialware graphics software like Gimp, Inkscape,  Artweaver, Twisted Brush, or even more dedicated mapping software such as Autorealm, Hexographer, Dundjinni, Profantasy's line of RPG Cartography software, and the Greenfish Random Relief Map Generator which I discovered via this article at Welsh Piper's awesome site, the freeware Hexmapper, and of course you can find out about more resources via RPGmapshare or The Cartographer's Guild.

The Random Relief Map Generator from Greenfish just might be a nice complement to the Dizzy Dragon Random Adventure Generator.  Running a completely random campaign might be fun, at least for a while...

You can also find a range of options for simply making your own graph, grid or hex paper for free at incompetech's site, or the Print free graph paper site, though the Incompetech site is much better overall.  We're currently building our own hex-grid from scratch so we can number or letter it as we see fit on a project-by-project basis.

The Roleplay-Geek blog has a post on How to make your own Fantasy Googlemap with MapLib without needing to be a code monkey which walks you through the process of using Google Maps and Maplib to make realistic and versatile maps for your campaign.  It is a different approach, and one that seems rather interesting, personally, as it could very well solve a few of the problems we've been wrestling with for Riskail in particular.

Useful Resources: More Mapping Links

Holly Lisle offers a ton of workshops, tutorials and tips on all aspects of writing, including her Worldbuilding methods and her method of developing a fictional world via map making.  Her main site is an amazing treasure house of useful resources, good advice and some just plain fun stuff.  Very highly recommended.

Strange Maps is a blog that displays and examines and analyzes ... well ... uh ... strange maps.  Yeah.  Just what the name says.  Some of the maps are really thought provoking.  If you're at all interested in cartography and maps...this is a blog worth checking out.

 The Map Room is a gateway into a lot of very strange and wonderful things, such as maps of Kamandi's world, or subway systems for places that don't exist, and so on.  The main site has links to hundreds of blogs dedicated or devoted to all things map-related.  It was by clicking through this site that I discovered a site that provided a handy guide to a lot of Historical Celestial Atlases available out on the World Wide Web.

The Theban Mapping Project allows you to explore the entire archaeological zone of the ancient Valley of the Kings in Egypt. Zoom in to see individual architectural details of temples and palaces as well as the topography of the area. Mouse over sites to get additional information about them.  This site has a database of over 2,000 images that you can examine, over 250 detailed maps and models, and 65 narrated virtual tours--including a 3D recreation of tomb KV 14.  Plus there's an atlas of the Theban Necropolis.  Very cool stuff.  Looking through this site's maps has forever changed how I approach mapping-out certain styles of tombs...especially amongst the various deliberately-forgotten cryptoria and unregistered necropoli to be found along the banks of certain of the River Gate Networks...

The Cartographer's Guild is an online community created by (and for) map makers and map aficionados. It's a place where every aspect of cartography can be exhibited, examined, and discussed in the forums by practicing professional designers, artists, and enthusiasts alike. It's a wonderful place to discover tutorials on various aspects of map-making, to see what other map-makers are doing, and to show off your own work when you're ready.  The Guild is a great resource for anyone interested in designing or finding someone to possibly design a map for them or their game.  Highly recommended.

Actual Lost Cities are very interesting places to examine and explore, even virtually.  The Shunya website has a lot of very nice photos of a variety of real world 'Lost Cities' as well as a range of articles on all sorts of topics...some of which might prove interesting or useful for those engaged in some good old fashioned worldbuilding.  The page for Ahmedabad, (Gujarat, India) has a number of photos that have inspired a whole section of the First Tier of Devukarsha...

 The 1748 Nolli Map of Rome is now available as a dynamic, interactive, online tool. You have direct, personal access to this amazing map of deep historical significance, so why not go click around the thing a bit and see what you can find lurking within the nooks and crannies of the Eternal City...the amount of detail is truly humbling.  It's an intriguing blend of ancient and modern approaches, combining the original etched maps of Giambattista Nolli with satellite photography to develop an interactive map that sets a standard for mapping-out a large-scale city.  What can contemporary map-makers do with this approach, this sort of technology, in creating the maps of fictional spaces and mythic cities?  Very inspiring.

And just so you don't think that we're only interested in digital mapping, here's a link to The Hand Drawn Map Association site, where they feature, you guessed it; hand-drawn maps.  There's also the Play Generated Map and Document Archive Project to consider.  Who knew that all those hastily scrawled maps used in games back in the day were aesthetic objects from a revolutionary period of experimental  efforts aimed at communicating shared imaginative spaces?  Cool.

More to follow...

Mars Needs ... Cartographers

In the course of building-up the maps for the Great Rift, the various Basins and Abyssal Gorges, the Etched Plateau, High Tombs of Yuddoth and so forth for Riskail, I've been searching for some decent references to work with, especially for the way that craters actually form, and the manner in which canyons erode into shape.  One rather useful source for this purpose has been the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment of the University of Arizona in conjunction with NASA and the JPL.  These very nice people have made a selection of 15 pages filled with 236 pictures taken by the Mars Reconaissance Orbiter which you can find at their site.

They also provide an array of Digital Terrain Models that might prove useful as well, down the road, if not immediately.  If you work in 3D then these might be of more use to you.  We've only just acquired Bryce in order to dip our toes into the 3D end of things...which means more tutorials to go through.  yay.  No guarantees when we'll start producing anything 3D-ish for the blogs.  You will be seeing some new stuff in a very different style/technique fairly soon however.  But more on that when it's time to show, not just tell.

In the meantime, the Ares Valles Cataract is particularly striking and very, very Riskail, so finding this site has been a real treat and oh so very helpful.  The Descent of the Phoenix Lander is also really cool. 

Ten Handy Planetary Photo Resource Links

• NASA/JPL Planetary Photojournal
• NSSDC Photo Gallery
• A Selection of some of the best Planet-Photos NASA has available
• Photojournal for Mars
• NASA on the Commons Flickr stream
• GoogleMars
• A Handy List of Places Online to Find Planetary Pics
• Loads of photos of the Moon
• Planetary Imagery via the Smithsonian
• NASA's Planetary Image Atlas--search for any/all available images

But wait, there's more: Solar Voyager is a very nice website devoted to Space Art and there are some very talented artists showing off their work on that site--the tutorials are also a nice resource.  NovaCelestia is another, related site devoted to high quality space art that we definitely recommend to anyone interested in this sort of thing.  And of course, we have to mention Digital Blasphemy, one of the absolute best of the best space art sites out there, bar none.  Yeah, we could probably assemble another set of ten or twelve space art sites for you, but we're still recovering from a nasty bout with a fever that just wouldn't go away, so this will have to do for now.  Maybe we'll come back and flesh things out a bit more, later.

We're seriously considering setting up a recurring feature for Useful Resources...let us know what you think.

Underwater Caves and Beer

By chance -- perhaps the 'Guinness' (Coconut Porter from the local brew-pub actually, but I thought that would get too complicated for the non beer-inclined) offered up to Dame Fortune last night did some good after all -- as I just spotted this post on Under Water Caves at Dungeons & Digressions, a blog that I have found a lot of fun to follow, particularly as I am working on the Urban Spelunking Section of my Riskail project and doing a batch of geomorphs and other maps and more maps.  So many maps.  Maps.  Maps.  Maps.  You can head over to the floridacaves website and dig through all their cool stuff, or if you are in a hurry, or under a tight deadline, Ze Bulette has provided a wonderful pre-zipped and copyright-free set of a selection of these maps of Underwater Caves that you can download from his blog for free just by dropping by and clicking on the link provided.  That is just too damn cool.  And handy.  Thanks dude!  And I thought that Minnesota had a lot of caves and underground sites to explore.  Maybe I'll find a suitable location for the Spawn of Dagon out of Kuttner's Elak of Atlantis in one of these caves, or maybe not.  Unlike Lovecraft, Kuttner's work is still under copyright, I believe.  Though I thought I remembered them being included in one or another edition of Call of Cthulhu...

But honestly, I'd rather find a cave full Canadian liquor left-over from the days of rum-runners and of bootleggers.  Mmmmm Beeerrr, as the Great Homer of S'imp'Sahn would mutter in the throes of his unspeakable ecstasies.

IA!  (mumble mumble) FTAGN!  (mumble mumble) Something else suitably unpronounceable, etc., etc.

Why do I smell donuts?