The Road Less Travelled

When I designed the site I set up a section for Maps so everyone could get oriented with the world Archer and Hieronymus are traipsing across. Well, the idea was good, but the material needed some work to make it acceptable for sharing.

First, the main map for Bulinnarm is on a huge piece of poster board that I remember drawing back when I was stationed in 29 Palms and attending Electronics and Radar schools. It's a great map showing the three continents (Bulinnarm, Alexiandromor, and Ulax) in all their glory and with many of the major details already filled in. This is the master map, from which all others are derived.

Below is just one of the scans (Builinnarm region) made of the master map which I am enhancing, expanding, and detailing this week.

Bulinnarm scan from master map (click to view at full size)

Next up, I have a complete expandable notebook filled with D&D adventures, drawings, dungeons, and maps, lots of maps, for the areas in which I ran several campaigns through the world. These provide even greater detail on specific areas of the map. As my characters pass through those regions I expect to add some of this detail to the new master maps.

The new maps are done using vector graphics software (Acorn, from Flying Meat). For those that don't know what that is, it simply means that there is almost no limit to the amount of detail I can add to them. In addition, they are resolution independent, which means they can be scaled easily without losing any detail. Lots of work, but the final results will be worth it.

Below is the work-in-progress for the Bulinnarm area of the map. Still lots of detail to add and I'm figuring out the capabilities of the software as I work, but so far, I'm liking the results.

Bulinnarm in vector graphics (click to view at full size)

I hope to post Chapter 9 - A Busy Night as well as one or two of the new maps this weekend.