Map of Mars: Dying or In Progress Terraforming

A couple of weeks ago, I made up a map of Mars after terraforming. Recently, I was inspired by +Michael Gibbons and his B/X Mars collection to do up a different sort of Mars. One in the veins of a dying Barsoom, or, a futuristic Mars in the midst of terraforming. With this, I went back to Grand Designer, tweaked some things a bit, then ran it through G Projector and GIMP for some touch up. Hope you all enjoy!

Screenshot of a dying Mars, slowly gaining its reddish hue

A Mercator map of a dying Mars for a more gameable experience.

Sci Fi Planetscape: NESS 02

Planet created using Grand Designer

Above is the second planet in the solar system of my M-Space game, but this can be useful for any game out there that needs an airless, volcanic hell hole. The planet's geologic activity is beginning to slow down and many of its volcanoes are now simply dormant. The mountain peaks etch around the surface, with darker basalt mares stretching between them. Several micrometeor impacts dot the surface, with a couple of larger impacts from the past here and there. 

Landmark Tags

"Continent Sized Basalt Mares"

"Long Volcanic Chains"

"Massive Impact Crater at Equator"

Possible Adventures Here

In orbit lies a sort of elephant graveyard with ship-sized corpses of alien space whale. Their bones have a lot of helium 3 stored away that could make a killing.

One of the mountains has an ancient volcanic base inside. Alien origin, what wonders could be held here?

Water is found deep in the equatorial crater. Could there be basic life here? Or maybe pirates are hiding out here, waiting for an unsuspecting miner.

The planet is designated NESS 02 in my game as a way to keep it a blank slate for my players to name it. All of the planets have this designation for that reason, with NESS meaning New Earth Sky Survey. While it may sound boring, that's mostly the point. To encourage my scouts to make some cool names for their new system.

Below are some more maps. One more gameable, and the rest more for looks and decoration. I'm still looking for a method to make the texture map a dymaxion hex map like you see in Traveller/Cepheus Engine. I think that might simply not be possible without some severe editing skills in GIMP.

A mercator option that's more useful for a game

A normal and holographic orthographicl map of NESS 02

Adventures on Chicken Island (First Draft)

Currently, I'm running a sci fi game using M-Space, a version of Mythras set as a sci fi game akin to Traveller. You can see a lot of Traveller/CE DNA in the game, so I'm able to, with some conversion and elbow grease, add aspects of Traveller/CE into it. But that's not what this is about. This is about the map I made for my players of an island affectionately called Chicken Island by my players.

Because it looks like a chicken, I guess.

This is the rough draft coloring of Chicken Island, one anyone can use for their sci fi or fantasy game. The hexes are 10 km but can easily be converted to 6 mi for those playing OSR games like ACKS. I drew the original by hand and scanned it with my crappy HP 2-in-1. After running it through Inkscape and then GIMP to make the lines smooth and bold, as well as the back ground transparent, I overlay the hex map on it and began coloring. It was a quick job sadly since I didn't have a lot of time to really get it done. But so far, I am happy with the way it looks. My players are currently adventuring on it, now that they have their first planetary colony making its foundation. I think I may have to do a bit of an explanation of the setting and maybe an adventure recap for them. I'd love to do some solo gaming with this, but for whatever reason, I can't seem to keep my focus on it for more than 20 minutes at a time.

I have a lot of bread to make for the restaurant party on the 4th, so that's it for tonight. I may have to post pictures of the hot dog buns at another time. Below is the larger scale map for anyone that wants to look at it.

WIP: Terraformed Mars Planet and Map

A quick post to start off my July, here's something I've been working on in Grand Designer, a planet generator program on Steam I got on the Sale. I imported a NASA height map of Mars, did some editing in GD, then exported it in G-Projector and GIMP for alternative maps. That's a lot of Gs. Enjoy!

A full in-space render of New Mars (courtesy of Grand Designer)

The texture map I made in GD, which can be used to create all kinds of maps

Orthographic map created by G Projector with above texture map.

A hologram version edited in GIMP to make it seem more like something from Star Wars or XCOM's hologlobe

This was an exercise to something I want to do in my Sci Fi TTRPG. I want to make pictures of all of the planets in my setting's solar system for my players. It makes for a really cool play aide and really gets them immersed into the game. I plan on posting more of these in the future. What I'm trying to find is a way to convert my texture map into one of the dymaxion maps you see in Traveller/CE. G-Projector doesn't do that sadly.

In addition, I'm setting forth a challenge to myself. I want to do thirty posts for every day this week, ending on the 31st, when I turn thirty. I think it'll be a good challenge and I look forward to trying it out. Thirty to thirty!

Sci Fi Campaign Map: WIP

A quick little post here. I've been working with GIMP and some tutorials to create planetary maps and textures for the sci fi game I wish to run. These are mostly going to be play aides for the game, to really give the players something cool to look at. The map is still in the rough draft. I need to blend the textures better, do some more texture variations, and redo the ice caps to not be crappy. I may redo the map in a higher resolution, but so far I like the way it looks.

This is the planet NESS-89-03. It's purposefully given a sciency name so that players can rename it to something they prefer when they colonize it. The planet already has several nicknames, including New Earth, Promise, and Zion. There are two main land masses and one large island chain/sub continent. The planet is a little more temperate than Earth, and NESS 89-03 has a shorter year but similar day cycle. It orbits a bright orange K-Class star in its habitable zone as the third celestial body in the system.

What makes NESS 89-03 stand out is that it has Earth analogous fauna and flora. However, the atmosphere is saturated with poisonous fungal spores that are hazardous to human life. This miasma will take some getting used to for the players when they arrive to NESS 89-03.

I'll post up a completed planetary map once I am finished. Also, if anyone has any links to GIMP tutorials that can help with this, please feel free to post them.

Thivola Regional Map

Thivola Regional Map: 1 hex = 24 miles opposite corners. Sub hex = 6 miles

So here is the regional map of the setting I am running my players in. This isn't anywhere close to the final draft, as everything is too saturated and such. But, this is usable enough to where I can give it to my players and we can use it.

I will be placing some more icons on the map as the game continues and demands it. At the moment, the red triangle is the city of Kosna, the dilapidated frontier city that the players are currently at. As you can see, they are at the edge of a large forest. They've encountered some interesting locals both new to the players and familiar. There are some roads on the more zoomed in Province map below. These roads lead to some of the keeps that lie on the frontier. Two of the ones that the players have encountered were housing not the locals, but other people. The first one had a tribe of onbu, squat grey fey creatures that were robbing the locals on the roads. The second one had a mercenary band of orcs performing a sky burial for a fallen comrade killed by a pack of Iemesch. 

In addition to Kosna, there is the black square in the upper area by the merging rivers. This is the capital of the frontier province, Rikantu. This is very much a large city and a great place to get some items that would normally be out of the price range for the players. This is also a good place for some more urban styled adventures. Dealing with guilds 

At some point, I do plan on putting the map through the GIMP and work on it. Clean up the line art more, color it in a much better way, better icons. For now though, this will suffice for my game.

Thivola Provincal Map: 1 hex = 6 miles opposite corners. Sub hex = 1 mile

Above is the zoomed in Province Map, colored with pencils instead of GIMP. This is the actual map that I use currently for the day to day adventuring. Currently, my players are stranded in the mountains that are two hexes to the right of the city of Kosna (the red and black triangle). You can see that I've put in some roads and icons in here for the keeps and such. The way I have been doing my 'zoomed in' maps is that I try and break up the globs of terrain more as I zoom in. So, looking at the Regional and Provincial maps, you'll notice that I broke up the glob of forest some. I did this by adding bare patches of grasslands as well as some forested hills and such. I like doing this because it makes the terrain more realistic and more varied for the players. Though drawing it was a bit of a pain, but it was certainly worth it I feel.

I plan on populating it some more as the month progress. One of my biggest blocks right now is the trouble of finding stable work. Sadly, it's taken up a lot of my time to search for a job that can help pay to keep the lights on. The other thing I want to work on is the largest Atlas map, where I can get into some of the real big changes in area, like rainforests and deserts and such. Plus, I do plan on adding a sort of confederation of free city-states for the players to interact with and possibly even rule in, if that is their sort of thing.

That's it for now. I do want to detail some of the adventure sites on the Provincial map for the next blog, as well as talk about how the "Adventure in One 6 mile Hex" is going.

Atlas Map of South Western Thivola (WIP) plus Campaign Stuff

With my 5e/ACKS mashup coming in less than a week, I've been taking a lot of the side work I've been doing the last couple of weeks and getting it all together for Session 1. Setting notes, NPCs, towns, people, monsters... I have quite the treasure trove of stuff ready for this game. While I've played 5e, I have only ever run it once, so I haven't gotten into creating my own races and such yet. Still want to get my sea legs with the current ruleset before I start creating. But I imagine it won't take too long.

Below is the Atlas sized map for South Western Thivola, the continent inspired by South America.

This map in particular is inspired by the Chilean-Argentinean area where Santiago is. The north western part becomes a desert due to the coastline mountain range blocking the trade winds and due to it getting ever so closer to those Horse Latitudes. Further north, there is a plateau similar to the Altiplano. I plan on having a variety of deserts up there. The barren wastelands, the dried up lake turned salt flat, and some sandy dunes. The mountain range is Etapu's Spine, named after the people's founder god of the earth and forests, Etapu. I plan on widening it some more as it goes more south. On the other side of it in the north lie the beginnings of sub tropical wet forest. Further north and east, I'll probably put in some more rain forests and swamps.

As you get more south, the terrain, climate, and vegetation changes to be more green and hilly. The mountains get closer to the coast. The climate becomes more temperate with Mediterranean summers. More rivers and some swamps here and there. This is where the players will be starting their adventures. On the other side of Etapu's Spine, I plan on widening the mountain range to be about 200 mi wide. Very much a montane/alpine area. Then, it will lead to a more arid, steppe-like area of nomadic tribes and such before hitting the coast on the other end.

From here, I have a great variety of terrains and climates that will make exploration and travel interesting to the players. While they will be starting in something a bit more familiar, they can end up in some deserts, rainforests, alpine, or even tundra. All in a geographically close area.

I do have more zoomed in maps for campaign use. I have a Regional Map with small 6-mile hexes that create large 24-mile hexes. I also have a Provincial Map with small 1-mile hexes that create a large 6-mile hex. And finally, I have the Local Map, which just focuses on a single 6 mile hex broken up into 43 1-mile hexes and half/third hexes. Below is a mostly finished Provincial Map. The players will be starting in the large triangle.

I'm bad at coloring within the lines

You can see that from the center to the upper left, my style of drawing changed drastically. I went from doing more symbolic mapping to more iconic mapping. I may redo this at a later point to keep the style consistent and to use a hex map that isn't so dark.

While this campaign is using 5e for the basic rules, I've been using ACKS for a lot of the nation building. You'll notice in the Atlas map that there are some pencil marks that encircle certain areas of the map. These are provinces of the empire ruling over the northern area. The cities are the capital holdings of the nobles in charge of these provinces, built up by ACKS's empire building rules. It was pretty interesting putting the rules to work. Setting up populations and big cities and the empire's metropolis capital in the mountains. The players will be adventuring on the frontier area, away from a lot of these big cities. However, with enough travel time and horses, they can get to one of the capitals in four days. Great if they want to buy and sell expensive stuff, or want more urban adventuring and a break from the wilderness.

I'll get more into detail with the mapping and campaign as the week goes by. Till then, let me know what you think about the maps. 

First Map in Years

It's been a good couple of years since I've done any kind of D&D mapping on the computer. With the move into a bigger home, I am able to carve out my own little space for work on art, D&D, and writing. With that, here is my first map in three years. I present The Ruined Keep. The concept and layout was done with my random dungeon dice generator, then I simply embellished and drew it out.

A link to the full sized version is here. Looking for any and all critiques from viewers. I hope to get back into drawing again.