Mappening is what's happening...

And once again, my nemesis is revealed...

As the son of an architect, I grew up with a lot of graph paper around the house: big reams of it, small pads, just about any measure of the stuff that you can imagine. Yet I never really felt compelled to use any of it for mapping purposes until I started checking out older versions of Dungeons and Dragons. I always get kind of jealous when I look at the fairly amazing geomorphs that folks like Dyson and Risus Monkey put together because I've always been awful at putting my ideas about a building or a city down onto paper. Everything always ends up too symmetrical or too empty. This might not mean much when designing a loosely-structured western town or an asteroid haven for space smugglers, but it matters a hell of a lot when you're marking jugs for a Dungeons and Dragons heist.

The map that I'm holding in the picture above is the Temple of Manymon, a potential heist site that supposedly holds the bottled soul of one of the land's greatest poets in its sacred wine cellar. This is the product of three hours of draw, erase, conceptualize the space, draw again and erase again. I was intentionally trying to avoid making the temple too symmetrical and blocky, but ended up running into my second problem. As much as I do like the exterior structure of the building, I have no idea how to stock the damned thing. The only thing that I really have so far is the giant eyeball altar in the middle of the temple and the Greek-style open colonnade entrance. Maybe I should get back to space, where my head's clearer...

The Frustration of Map-Making (Or Established Settings vs. Homebrew)

I'm really hit or miss when it comes to making maps. My method can basically be condensed into "Start drawing and see where it takes you." If I don't like the way something looks, I erase and redraw and generally, that's worked out for me. But with the deadlines for beginning both of my D&D campaigns (Library 4th Ed and college friends S&W), I have become incredibly frustrated at my inconsistency.

I've been working on my campaign worlds for both of these games: the aforementioned Discworldian darkly humorous fantasy world and a more console RPG-inspired one for the 4th Edition game. Progress has been slow going on the library game. I've drawn a handful of maps that have yet to fit my specifications and with my first week in library school starting today, I've been looking more and more at the published campaign setting of Eberron. I'm a huge fan of Eberron and its pulpy, high adventure feel. I like the appeal of an established campaign setting as a ready hook for adventures and inspiration, not to mention that I appreciate that Eberron is a world definitely inspired by the kind of games that these kids have already experienced. But I'm afraid that it will be an overwhelming prospect, with dozens of character options and the framework of an entire world to lay out in broad strokes.

Right now, I'm kind of stuck between a rock and a hard place. I'm overwhelmed by the prospect of an established campaign world, but my attempts to jumpstart my own setting have been lackluster at best. I just feel that if I can get one good continent map out, the whole Library D&D world will fall into place. But right now, I'm just not sure if I have the time.