I love maps. I mean seriously. I love them way more than you think I do when I say I love them. Take all the love you have for any map, ever, and I swear I love maps more than that. Let me show you how much I love maps.
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| Inverted Earth |
This is one of my more elaborate hexographer mapping projects. It's extremely time consuming and sometimes exhausting. Maybe I'll blog on it in detail sometime. It's huge. Doing the Euro-Asia Sea may just kill me. All those brown lines are mountains that make the Himalayas look like a joke.
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| Scion |
This is another "unfinished" project I did with Fractal Mapper. I used the Manual of the Planes as a concept for a physical map. One of the rare times I let land be on the edge of a map (I like complete continents). I actually ran a game in Arcadia and Acheron using this map.
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| Heredis |
This is Mo's favorite map (that I made). I've actually run some stuff using this map. It was another fractal mapper map I did. It's essentially complete. I could add too it, but I likely never will.
Beyond these little projects I have dozens of other maps. I have an entire folder for map on my computer. We are talking about hundreds of maps ranging from single buildings to entire worlds. I have one map that puts all the TSR/Wizards campaign settings on a single Earth-sized planet. The detail on that one leaves something to be desired and I'd love a high-rez version. I've tried a few times to put as many maps as I can into a single world, but usually the size of the project just crashes whatever program I am running. I know some ways around that of course (and on this machine it's not as much an issue).
So when the first step of a sandbox it "Map" I get a surge of happiness, followed by a surge of terror. I have to pick
just one map?
Just gonna say, I've always really liked your maps. I remember once you took an old CD, snapped it into pieces, then tossed them on a piece of paper and traced their general shapes where they fell THEN BUILT A WORLD AROUND IT.
ReplyDeleteIt's not something I'm good at, so it's one of those things I'm always wide-eyed and "oooh!" about. And I love that you're good at it.
I actually moved that drawn map into Fractal Mapper. I never finished it or even got very far with it. It was one of many projects that had more concept than development. I mined the concepts numerous times, for example much of that map made it into the Heredis map.
ReplyDeleteBut that's a problem with building world-sized maps. The concept is huge and the ability to flesh it out at all is daunting. This is why most maps for novels are small parts of one continent. Anything more is just more than the story needs.
It doesn't make the creation process any less fun, it's just not a simple project. It can take months or years to finish such a massive project (on your own, game companies employ teams for world-sized projects).