The Shaman
First Post
I was playing around with Fractal Terrains the other night, fiddling around with different world settings to see what would come up, and produced a world that really caught my fancy.
I had been working several months ago on creating a new homebrew setting - my threepointoh campaign broke up a couple of years ago and I got away from D&D for Modern games instead, but I wanted to work on a fantasy setting for use somewhere in the coming years. I produced a map, again using FT, and was working on cultures and so on, but I was getting frustrated - nothing seemed to "work": I couldn't get the thing to gel, so I set it aside.
The map that popped up on my screen on Tuesday night was intriguing - three continents, two of them joined by an isthmus, one a sea journey of about 1200 miles from the other land mass. I was home from work on Wednesday - contractors working on the bathroom - so I exported the FT elevation map to CC2Pro and printed a copy, then sat down with a red pen and began scribbling. Within an hour I had the major biomes delineated, which lead me to think about cultures. As cultures appeared so did cities and trade routes, then trading products. Rivers, storm tracks, barrier reefs, volcanoes, monsters all appeared across the map, splashed in red ink.
Here are the merfolk pirates lurking along the sea-route to the gold mines and ivory traders of the north - there is the great volcanic plateau that is home to fire giants. Through this mountain pass the nomads attack the caravans crossing the desert - along that coast are the great redwoods the frost giants use for building their dire bison-drawn sledges.
As a GM I lavish attention on maps, but never before, using a random map or one that I generated from scratch, did I have a game-world come together so quickly in my mind. I can see the mosaic walls and golden domes of cities of the inner seas, including the one metropolis that will stand out above all the rest by virtue of its location at the nexus of trade routes and its superior position at the bottom of a long river valley. I can see the trackless jungle where kuo-toa lurk in limestone cenotes. I can see the southern kingdom, isolated, its great ironworks producing weapons for its military societies doing battle with the orc hordes that descend like howling wind from the neighboring highlands.
A good map...that's where it begins for me.
Do maps inspire you too? Or does the inspiration come first and the map follows?
I had been working several months ago on creating a new homebrew setting - my threepointoh campaign broke up a couple of years ago and I got away from D&D for Modern games instead, but I wanted to work on a fantasy setting for use somewhere in the coming years. I produced a map, again using FT, and was working on cultures and so on, but I was getting frustrated - nothing seemed to "work": I couldn't get the thing to gel, so I set it aside.
The map that popped up on my screen on Tuesday night was intriguing - three continents, two of them joined by an isthmus, one a sea journey of about 1200 miles from the other land mass. I was home from work on Wednesday - contractors working on the bathroom - so I exported the FT elevation map to CC2Pro and printed a copy, then sat down with a red pen and began scribbling. Within an hour I had the major biomes delineated, which lead me to think about cultures. As cultures appeared so did cities and trade routes, then trading products. Rivers, storm tracks, barrier reefs, volcanoes, monsters all appeared across the map, splashed in red ink.
Here are the merfolk pirates lurking along the sea-route to the gold mines and ivory traders of the north - there is the great volcanic plateau that is home to fire giants. Through this mountain pass the nomads attack the caravans crossing the desert - along that coast are the great redwoods the frost giants use for building their dire bison-drawn sledges.
As a GM I lavish attention on maps, but never before, using a random map or one that I generated from scratch, did I have a game-world come together so quickly in my mind. I can see the mosaic walls and golden domes of cities of the inner seas, including the one metropolis that will stand out above all the rest by virtue of its location at the nexus of trade routes and its superior position at the bottom of a long river valley. I can see the trackless jungle where kuo-toa lurk in limestone cenotes. I can see the southern kingdom, isolated, its great ironworks producing weapons for its military societies doing battle with the orc hordes that descend like howling wind from the neighboring highlands.
A good map...that's where it begins for me.
Do maps inspire you too? Or does the inspiration come first and the map follows?
