RPG Cartography – Another RPG Blog Carnival entry!

Posted on April 29, 2011 by Tolrendordm

  Well, it’s almost the end of the April RPG Blog Carnival on RPG Cartography, so I definitely wanted to contribute another entry. So far, I’ve blogged about my enjoyment of creating my own cool battlemaps, and also linked to my original entry on Maps and RPGs, in which I explained my love of maps and how they inspired my adventures.

In this post I want to share with you some examples of my old-style ‘mapping system’, which dates way back to the solo Basic and AD&D campaign I ran with my brother in the 1980’s. In those days obviously there was no fancy mapping software, so hour upon hour was spent drawing maps by hand. I even wrote a ‘Using the Maps’ guide to my system! Please take a look: World of Tolrendor Mapping Guide.

Looking back on this, it clearly reflects my overwhelming need to ‘organise’ information in meaningful (at least to me…) ways!! I’d be very interested in hearing how others approached this, either ‘back in the day’, or in these technological times…

Obviously however, this is really an excuse to share some of my old maps that fitted into the system I devised. These were all drawn 20+ years ago! Hope you enjoy them!

A World Map:

World map 1: North-Western Tolrendor

The intial world map of Tolrendor. It’s a bit hard to see the grid lines (i.e. 80 square mile grid), but you can clearly see the Area Map grid reference.

My 4E Tolrendor has undergone some topographical revisions, but it’s still basically the same world!

 

 

An Area Map:

An original hex Area Map D4 – one of the key campaign areas of my long-running solo campaign. It shows my typical simple icon based style using colour pencils.

A detailed map of the Caerdal Vale, nestled just south of one the great northern mountain ranges of Tolrendor.

 

 

 

Urban Area Map:

Camlan: Urban Area

This map shows the whole of Camlan city, labelling the key districts and landmarks. Further detail is broken down into 4 Urban Street maps, due to the size of the city.

 

 

Urban Street Map:

Camlan: Street Map A3

The bottom left corner of the city is shown in this Urban Street Map. You can see the use of both City Geomorphs (the square spaces that just indicate a geomorph number and the direction) and also a reference to an Urban Super Detail map. I used to hate drawing all the tiny buildings!      Urban Super Detail Map:

This part finished map shows a small part of the city in great detail – in this case a whole block that is the main base of the ‘Brotherhood of Stealth’, the powerful thieves’ guild of Camlan.      City Geomorph:

Each square = 5 yds, although these days I’d probably grid these to enable easy printing out of a battlemap.     Well, I hope you’ve enjoyed this diverse set of maps as much as I’ve enjoyed digging through my reams of notes and maps to bring them to you! Its brought home to me how much of my enjoyment of our RPG hobby centres around the Maps!!