Wyvern
Wyvern
About
- Username
- Wyvern
- Joined
- Visits
- 3,082
- Last Active
- Roles
- Member
- Points
- 5,300
- Rank
- Cartographer
- Badges
- 24
-
Show me your science fiction maps!
Not sci-fi, since they were all done for the Nibirum Community Atlas, which is all fantasy mapping, but they were done in the general style of planetary-system mapping, so may still be of interest. However, I did a series of maps for said Atlas back in 2018 - Forum thread here, Nibirum Solar System start page here, with a sample map to give you an idea, just for the inner planets:
All these maps are also in my Forum Gallery here.
-
Community Atlas: Barrows of the Ferine Magi area, Feralwood Forest, Alarius
Back for another visit to Alarius for the next segment in my sort-of Dungeon24 mapping (now so delayed, it's increasingly likely to become "Dungeon25" soon...). I noted in the topic for my immediately prior maps, set in the Whispering Wastes of Haddmark, Peredur, that this was scheduled for somewhere in the Feralwood Forest region of northeastern Alarius:
That's a big area, so from the start, I expected I'd be needing to prepare another area map, as well as that for the dungeon. Examining the Feralwood Forest map, it didn't take long to zero-in on a suitably intriguing-looking area, the Barrows of the Ferine Magi:
Since the base map for the dungeon was derived from the third of the four generated using the Inkwell Ideas Dungeonmorph "Explorer" dice set, I'd again be aiming for a similar black-and-white design look to the previous couple of dungeon and area maps in this series, including that for this new general area one, which would be done as a hex map once more. So I generated a suitable hex-gridded version of the area, from which to start thinking more about the setting:
The hexes here are each six miles across in their north-south dimensions.
During the latter stages of the village mapping for the Whispering Wastes, I'd already begun thinking about what might be in this area, as there are no settlements, roads or watercourses shown, just the woods, the central region of dead land, the three barrow markers and the obelisk.
Ordinarily, I, and perhaps many of us, would assume the over-sized barrows were simply markers indicative of a large area, within which might be numerous burial mounds. However, having earlier been working with some of Ricko Hasche's delightfully pictorial maps, where the images for places and features are often hugely over-scaled compared to the physical land area, had set me wondering as to what if those were indeed to-scale depictions of the objects/places involved. An eighteen-mile high obelisk might be pushing things rather, although it could still be taller than might seem "normal". The concept of ten-mile-diameter round barrows though started to take hold.
While the dungeon map to be fitted now to one of these barrows was of the usual quite small size, that needn't prevent it being within a gigantic barrow mound. Burial chambers inside real-world barrows can be very small, compared to the overall barrow's size, for instance. The place-name and that vast tract of dead land all around the barrows also needed to be considered; wild magic from the wild magi that got out of hand in a big way, say.
From that, it was a short step to declare much of the inner zone drained and now devoid of magical energy, so no magic will work there, surrounded by a one-hex-wide ring where wild magic holds sway (the pale white circuit in the next image), and where using magic can be especially dangerous and unpredictable. This is Alarius, after all, perhaps the most magical of Nibirum's continents, so safety catch off! Outside that ring, things are more "normal", albeit creatures from the wild magic zone still might have wandered off there, of course, or indeed into the inner zone, unless they required magic to exist (a magically-powered construct would fail at the border, for instance).
The white small circles on the image above show the randomly-chosen hexes in which there is something of note. The three barrow entrances have also been marked thus, and the location of the obelisk.
What of the barrows? Are they burial mounds, perhaps ones gigantically enlarged by the magical event that blasted the woodlands around them? Or the squashed remnants of once-soaring mage towers? Or something else entirely - such as spacecraft magically ported-in from another dimension? That latter concept intrigued, and in a greatly modified form became the basis for the eventual dungeons (yes, yes, three barrows so now there will be three identical-form dungeon maps from the dice-set base one too!). This drew on ideas from the 3rd edition "Hyperborea" RPG by North Wind Adventures (formerly "Astonishing Swordsmen & Sorcerers of Hyperborea"), whose tagline is "Swords, Sorcery, and Weird Science-Fantasy", the "Metamorphosis Alpha" RPG by James M Ward (in both its original TSR and current, largely unchanged, Goodman Games formats), and especially - thanks to its degree of oddness - Monte Cook Games' "Numenera" RPG, which runs with the concept attributed to Arthur C Clarke, that "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic", in a world setting of the distant future, where tech is essentially treated like magic. That idea is also an aspect of Metamorphosis Alpha, set on a small-country-sized spacecraft lost among the stars, whose inhabitants have long forgotten they were once its crew and passengers. Thus the "magic" that still functions in the barrow-dungeons is really all technology. For anyone concerned about that in a stricter fantasy setting, I also adopted the Numenera idea that many smaller devices are one-use items. Thus things in the barrows mostly still work most of the time. Things portable enough to be removed may only work once.
So expect a degree of weirdness in the map notes to follow. You have been warned!
-
Searching for symbols for WW2 and modern military vehicles, artillery etc.
If what you're wanting to do is use online images to make your own vehicle trace-drawings for conversion to symbols, it's worth checking the military museum sites (especially if you're hunting for more obscure vehicles) and also scale model websites - including model kit manufacturers. A number of manufacturers now have PDFs of their kit instructions online that you can freely download, and they sometimes have illustrations showing top-down views for the paint and decal schemes for instance, which might be another starting point.
In terms of constructing the symbols, I'd suggest having a set-up where the lines, base colour, camouflage patterning and any markings are each done as a separate Sheet in CC3+ (or more likely "layers" in non-CC3 graphics programs), to make it easier to swap those for different theatres and times. Also, @Lillhans' comment about separate tank turrets is an excellent one. I'd suggest too using Sheet overlays for the top of various AFVs that have different variants using the same lower chassis and skirts, again to make those easier to swap-out without having to keep redrawing each time.
-
[WIP] Community Atlas - River Watch - Druid villages
While these are fascinating explorations of different seasonal map depictions, are they really appropriate for a site around 25°N latitude on Nibirum? This puts the locations near the northern limit of the tropics for the planet (equivalent to the Tropic of Cancer on Earth). This would also mean the snowy mountains are a little too prevalent, I suspect.
Sorry if this is a bit late to be useful. I've not been paying as much attention to the Forum here recently as I might, so it's only just dawned on me.
-
August Mapping Competition - Building Floorplans - Win Prizes
Hopefully before folks get too involved in their mapping for this, it's worth reflecting that Vertshusen is situated around 65° South latitude on Nibirum, which means it's about on the Antarctic Circle (for Nibirum, this is at 65°S). So in summer, the Sun never sets, and in winter it never rises. For those less familiar with such locations, it may be worth examining some of the architecture and building layouts used in settlements in such places today on Earth - Alaska, Northern Canada, Iceland, northern Scandinavia and northern Russia (there are no southern hemisphere equivalents on Earth) - some aspects of which might require a nudge or two from magical elements to replace the technological ones, given there really weren't many substantial, permanent settlements around the Arctic Circle during medieval-equivalent times on Earth.
-
Live Mapping: Starship Deckplans
-
Community Atlas 1000th map Competition - with Prizes [August/September]
The fifth map in my Whispering Wastes set is the weird necropolis setting of Osalin Village:
I've added some fresh notes about it to my WIP topic, and there's a higher-res map in my Gallery for this place too. Meanwhile, the FCW and PDF notes files are here:
-
Sinister Sewers - Style Development Thread (CA207)
-
[WIP] The Dancing Princess (Community Atlas, Artemisia, Spiros Isle, Helinesa)
Looking at the base drawings you're working from, and dependent on how close a copy you're trying to make of them, it's worth studying things in some detail before going further, and thinking-through exactly what's being shown.
For instance, it looks to me as if the full width of the vessel at the waterline hasn't been included in the top-down plan drawing. There should be a sliver of the broadest part of the vessel's sides visible below the cannon barrels, which obviously isn't shown on the plan view.
As a perhaps more significant element, the masts are not all vertical, but at a slight angle (hence why they're not illustrated as circles on the original plan view), they're not all of the same dimensions, and you seem to have missed the bowsprit entirely (or rather, you have a broad linear piece of wood texture at the angle and placement as shown in the drawing, but drawn as if it were merely a flat piece of the deck). The latter will be especially problematic, as the original drawing doesn't seem to indicate its full length (it should extend well beyond the bows, for instance). There's the further complication that it should have at least one yard suspended below it, partway along, to carry the spritsail. You may have to busk this from the 3D model images in Remy's posting, I suspect - much as with the features of the upper parts of the masts, i.e. any crow's nests (which should probably be shown as the ship's highest "level" in an FRPG drawing). If you're intending a vertical cross-section for the ship too, you'll need to think-through where the yards are on the main masts.
There are other features that would benefit from further consideration (beyond what Sue and Remy already noted) - e.g. the hatch covers - but this is already running longer than I'd intended, and I haven't time for more currently!
-
Community Atlas 500th Map Voting Thread - Please vote
I second Sue's comments; this was an extremely difficult vote, as there are just so many fascinating maps produced in such different styles.
Hopefully, everyone contributing enjoyed their mapping, and perhaps learnt something fresh along the way.
It's certainly been a delight reviewing them all again now!
Get voting folks!












