Palace of the Wind Sultan, Part 1

Maps for Wednesday's heist game. 2 more maps coming tomorrow afternoon.

Outside

 Level 1

 Level 2-3

Another Wilderness Map

So I decided to get some new colored pencils to see if they'd show up better than the ones I used in my previous scan. Turns out, they do. This map was once again done with the article, "The Wilderness Architect" (Parts 1&2, Parts 3&4). 

Click to enlarge

Map Key


Green = Grassland/Farmland
Dark Green = Forest
Light Brown = Hills
Dark Drown = Forest
Blue = Water
Purple = Marsh/Swamp (of which there are none)

Dot = Village
Circle = Small Town
Solid Box = Castle/Stronghold

Solid Line = Coastline
Dashed Line = Road/Trail

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By the look of the map and the placement of the villages surrounding it, this estate in located somewhere on the boarderlands, with civilization to the north east and north west. A great body of water lying to the east. The "True Wilderness" area lies to the south and west. Alternatively, I would always flip the map around, but  you get the general idea.

What I'm not quite satisfied with still, and why I haven't finished stocking the villages and castle, is the method in Underworld and Wilderness Adventures for actually populating civilized regions. First, I'm imagining civilization as a relatively mundane world, so chimera and basilisk guards are a bit much, and better saved for the wilderness. It also generates NPCs a little too high level for my liking, especially for more civilized regions. So basically, I need to write some new tables that will create a world more in-tune to the concept I'm imagining.

Overall, though, I'm quite pleased with how this map turned out and the terrain generation methods of "The Wilderness Architect." Next time, I'll fill in the rest of the area and share the new tables (once I get them written). Stay tuned for more

"The Wilderness Architect," Test Map

"The Wilderness Architect," Parts 1 and 2
"The Wilderness Architect," Parts 3 and 4

After going through all the effort of explain "The Wilderness Architect" articles, I might as well show what I have from it, even if the scan didn't turn out very well, but it should give you some idea how these things turn out at a slightly larger scale.

Click to Enlarge

"The Wilderness Architect", Parts 3 and 4

Contained in issues of two and three of Fight On! magazine "The Wilderness Architect" is something I've never really looked at before. That is until yesterday. Written by Victor Raymond and inspired by a series of articles of the same name published in White Dwarf #25-27, these two articles give instructions for randomly generating a robust and compelling wilderness map for use in the original Dungeons and Dragons game.

For those of your at home interested, but done have a copy of Fight On!, check out an earlier version at the OD&D 74 Discussion forum.

Parts 1 and 2 [link]
Scroll down for parts 3 and 4

Drawn and generated by Victor Raymond

Parts 3 and 4 of "The Wilderness Architect" described detailing the wilderness and civilized regions around the city and stronghold. These two are much denser than parts 1 and 2, and I will spending a little more time describing them and hopefully picking up on some of their interest.

Part 3: When creating a stronghold, the starting point is always the monetary investment, as such this is where Raymond begins part 3: with taxation. Based on an average annual venue of 10 gold coins per inhabitant from the town/stronghold and the surrounding villages, "The Wilderness Architect" instructs the referee to design the sites fortification as described in Underworld and Wilderness Adventures. Figuring out the costs of the walls, castle, etc. with 1 to 3 year's worth of taxation depending on the age and prosperity of the region.

After that, it's time to determine the presence of any other strongholds in each direction, typically between 1-5 and anywhere from 10 to 120 miles away. Raymond also discusses the placement of elven, dwarven, and halfling strongholds, but doesn't go into concerning their exact placement (as it would depend on the referee's particular map).

Part 3 continues with a table of encounters in civilized areas, where dangers are less, but opportunities to rob wealthy merchants and random nobles are never far off. While humans reside in towns and castles, various barbaric humanoids (including bandits, berserkers, and the like) may dwell in caves or even have strongholds, towns, and villages of their own out in the 'true' wilderness areas. While only a dozen or so monster are listed, it should be easy incorporate further monsters with the basis of detailes already laid out.

Then we come to actually placing things of interest and monsters in the wilderness. The gist of this section is to take every 20 by 20 mile area and roll for it like it's a dungeon room. Monsters would indicate some sort of lair, treasure indicating ruins (in which the treasure is stored and guarded), etc.

Finally, part 3 gives some information on a more top down, intelligence design sort of view on wilderness creation. I'm not terribly interested in that now, so I'll allow you to peruse it in your own time (because there's some good stuff in it, too.)

Part 4: The final section of "The Wilderness Architect" is all about making your wilderness come to life. The key here that Raymond expresses is not to let anything be ordinary. You haven't just entered into another plain, old forest, but one where roots are knotted and winds howl menacingly, swooping enough the brambles. Give specific places names, but not too many places. You don't need to name every mountain, but name a few. Don't have too many gorges, one is enough. Very terrain details and keep them unique (if possible).

Another way is to think about whose come before. Was there an ancient civilization once residing in these parts, or it is part of a loose confederacy of brigands? Have there been settlers sent this way? Adventurers? What information have they brought back - surely something must be know of what lies in each direction.

Raymond also suggests the use of weather and metaphor to create certain feelings. Types of weather for different seasons should be written up in generalities, while simple expressions of theme should be detailed as well.

"The Wilderness Architect" ends with the notion that, like in a dungeon, the players won't find everything: that's normal. That and it doesn't help to have everything happening at once, a few ongoing is enough - don't overdo it (certainly one of my personal difficulties).

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And so ends my summary and thoughts on "The Wilderness Architect." I highly recommend checking it out, even if briefly. It's a wonderful piece of work that deserves recognition, but is hardly mentioned in discussion.

"The Wilderness Architect", Parts 1 and 2

Contained in issues of two and three of Fight On! magazine "The Wilderness Architect" is something I've never really looked at before. That is until yesterday. Written by Victor Raymond and inspired by a series of articles of the same name published in White Dwarf #25-27, these two articles give instructions for randomly generating a robust and compelling wilderness map for use in the original Dungeons and Dragons game.

For those of your at home interested, but done have a copy of Fight On!, check out an earlier version at the OD&D 74 Discussion forum.

Drawn and generated by Victor Raymond

First, an interlude. Wilderness mapping (and mapping in general) is something I've been quite poor at. Overly critical of my work, any hint of a problem in intelligence deign has always been a nag in the back of my head.  While not always a major problem, I have given up many of project for this very reason.

Over the last couple of years, since discovering the plethora of Old School blogs and other resources on the net, I have found a decent solution to this problem: random generation. Yet when it comes to mapping, I have been dissatisfied with any methods I have designed previously. Victor's article manages to correct these mistakes, however, and breathe new life into any wilderness region.

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What's most intriguing about "The Wilderness Architect" is that the terrain generation of individual hexes is based on the hex before it. On the d6 table, five of the six results are related to the last, such as (3) "Terrain stays the same as the previous hex", and (4) "Even chance of adjacent terrain types" (Fight On! #2, page 56) This makes mapping more unified, with groupings of forests and grasslands that resemble designed maps, but are much more organic and inspiring.

My one issue with terrain generation is that large bodies of standing water are much to prevalent when creating a large map and tends to create too many inland seas for my liking. One or two is fine, but in my test run of the "The Wilderness Architect" I find myself 'cheat' and rerolling a fair number of water hexes.

After generating terrain, comes the town or stronghold. Using and combining with the Dungeons and Dragons rules from Men &Magic and Underworld and Wilderness Adventures, Victory creates a series of tables and guidelines for creating areas of civilization within the generated wilderness, including number of inhabitants, surrounding villages, as well as the location of the local (mega) dungeon.

High and mid level characters will control only castes and strongholds as per OD&D, but towns and cities as well. Instead of rolling for just one high level character in cities and towns, Raymond suggests generating a greater number of mid-level characters. If the town or city also contains a castle, roll for the castles inhabitants as well. Finally, civilized areas may also contain a mid to high level thief, depending on the size of the area: 10% in a small town, 25% in a large town, and 50% in a city.

--

Through these tables and excellent advice, the world is given a real sense of character. There are large forests, sweeping grasslands, areas of massive deserts, etc., but with a good amount of rhyme and just enough reason. While I will be modifying these tables slightly for my Elsys campaign setting, they are an excellent basis for any aspiring referee.

Parts two and three form the third issue Fight On! tackle the more intimate details of the civilized lands, relationships within the kingdom, and the areas of vast wilderness beyond.

After six sessions, and the seventh coming up tomorrow, I though it might be a good idea to start fleshing out the world beyond the Vats of Mazarin. There are a few things I knew about the world from the starts. 1) the Lycenian Empire once conquored great stretched of land. 2) Perithian and the Vats were in the jungle near the boarder of the known world.

The world that I drew up turned out to be much larger than I had expected. Originally, I had conceived that Lycenia would be a month's journey to the North of the Vats. Now, not only is it about a month to the north, but two months to the East by sea over the Orinthian Ocean.

The are only two major settlements near the Lycenian colony. One is an overseas Viking settlement to the Northwest, currently unnamed, and the kingdom of Kenet to the to East. For the most part the land to the south is inhabited by scattered tribes, archeological teams, and would-be foreign princes, none of which have any real, lasting influence on the colonists besides the constant threat of invasion and the ability to trade native for foreign goods (typically steel weapons for various vanity items).

There is also a group of islands to the North East known as Telepthos, which are inhabited by pirates, natives, and enormous building-sized lizards.

As of now, here is the basic map I've created (click to enlarge):

Playing with Hexographer: A New Map and a Brief Key

I was playing around with Hexographer yesterday and created this new map. I'm pretty happy with how it turned out, so I'll go ahead and post it here.

Brief Map Key:


Glyndwr: A walled city and kingdom of 3,000.

Cayr Pavill: A fortified castle and kingdom of 2,700.

Cayr Efflur: A small kingdom of 2,400 centralized in a fortified castle.

Camelot: A small forest village of 300, generally forgotten by the three major kingdoms.

Sulis: A farming village of 500, in constant contest between Glyndwr and Cayr Pavill.




Ruined Monastery: The ruins of a Monastery dedicated St. Gaxyg the Grey. (See FO! issue 1 for the adventure by James Maliszewski)

Tower of the Drowned Jinx: The ancient tower, once the estate of the suicidal queen of Mandragora.

Malchester Keep: Once part of the Kingdom of Efflur, no controlled by a band of ogres.

Tower of a Thousand Faces: A many faced tower located in the center of the deadlands.



Darking Wood: The eery forest separating the world of Men from the faerie realm.

Midmere Forest: The northern, less creepily-inhabited forest.

Mardrake Marsh: Once the mighty kingdom of Mandragora, now writhing, goblin-infested swamp. (pretty much stoled from this blog)

Wintertops: The domain of a small kingdom of frost giants. (name stolen from the Dwimmermount campaign map)