Sunday, April 19, 2020

Off The Map 0

Back in my early days, I spent a lot of time drawing maps. Large maps. 24"x36" maps. My dad was (and is) in construction, and there were a lot of house plans around. Different iterations, bad copy, whatever. But they were all blank on one side.

The first map I ever draw was the island "continent" (it's really just a big island) of Raem. I'm still proud of that map. For my second map, I wanted something that reached beyond the edges of the paper. That was the Shadowood (36x24). Followed by the Eastern Shadowood (18x24), and Southern Shadowood (36x24). Then the Shadowend (36x24), and the Eastern Shadowend (18x24). Amk'hilur; Dranamar; the Middle Lands; the Lost Kingdoms. (For those keeping track at home, from north to south is Shadowend, Shadowood, Southern Shadowood, Amk-hilur. A solid 6' of map top to bottom. I literally ran out of wall space.)

I think I'm missing a few, but they all connected.

I'd always intended to run a campaign in the Shadowood, but when it actually happened, I suddenly veered north and set it in this little throw-away corner of the Shadowend map, in a country called "Larenyss" (which I'd named after the book "Lavondyss", itself derived of the mythical city of Ys.)

That big map wasn't really suitable though, so I drew a regular page size version, 8.5 x 11, but at the same scale as the big map. Every map since then has been a version of that narrow view.

Which is a very long way of saying, there's an awful LOT "off the map"

When this quarantining and all is overall, I'm going to take them in and get them scanned. It'll be cool.

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