A medieval urban sprawl is born...
Saturday 12 March 2011
I've been Dave'd...
For all of you out there following the Citymorph articles I've been posting, Dave Millar has kindly included my morphs in his Dave's Mapper Tool. Admittedly citymorph's need a bit more fineagling than most but the results are very rewarding. 5 minutes spent rotating and swapping the odd tile here and there and hey presto!
A medieval urban sprawl is born...
A medieval urban sprawl is born...
Wednesday 9 March 2011
Citymorphs #017 to #020
4 more Citymorphs for you this week, have you spotted the secret theme yet...
#017 - The Docks
The Bigger vessels need somewhere sheltered to do their running repairs out of mainstream river traffic.
A recent addition to the docks are the three large cranes which are singularly responsible for halving the stevedore labour force which would have been loading and loading the ships that berth here. Needless to say the Stevedores Guild is mobilizing as we speak and there is likely to be an all out strike.
#018 - The Keep
If the city walls should be breached the Morphian Lord has somewhere heavily fortified to retreat to. However, in times of peace it has become little more than a museum in which to house many of the cities archives and is popular among the scholars of the university district. Several enterprising market traders have therefore set up their stalls within its shadow to catch the passing students who are alway in need of parchment, writing instruments and ink.
#019 - The Bath House District
Morphians like to keep clean so the municipal council invested heabily in it's public waterworks schemes. The Great Bath House in the centre is fed continually with clean water and it disgorges it's waste into the river. Only the richest can afford the luxuries of private bathing in these sumptuous surroundings. Downstream are the ever popular public bathing steps where even the common man can bathe in full view of his peers.
#020 - The Bastille
Morphians who fall foul of the law are incarcerated in this prison which rests on a pillar of bassalt giving its inmates commanding views over the city. The Barracks block at the foot of the hill ensures that there is a ready supply of soldiers to keep any unrest among the prison population to an absolute minimum.
The Bigger vessels need somewhere sheltered to do their running repairs out of mainstream river traffic.
A recent addition to the docks are the three large cranes which are singularly responsible for halving the stevedore labour force which would have been loading and loading the ships that berth here. Needless to say the Stevedores Guild is mobilizing as we speak and there is likely to be an all out strike.
If the city walls should be breached the Morphian Lord has somewhere heavily fortified to retreat to. However, in times of peace it has become little more than a museum in which to house many of the cities archives and is popular among the scholars of the university district. Several enterprising market traders have therefore set up their stalls within its shadow to catch the passing students who are alway in need of parchment, writing instruments and ink.
Morphians like to keep clean so the municipal council invested heabily in it's public waterworks schemes. The Great Bath House in the centre is fed continually with clean water and it disgorges it's waste into the river. Only the richest can afford the luxuries of private bathing in these sumptuous surroundings. Downstream are the ever popular public bathing steps where even the common man can bathe in full view of his peers.
Morphians who fall foul of the law are incarcerated in this prison which rests on a pillar of bassalt giving its inmates commanding views over the city. The Barracks block at the foot of the hill ensures that there is a ready supply of soldiers to keep any unrest among the prison population to an absolute minimum.
Monday 7 March 2011
Monday Motivations #10
Article #10 in a regular series where I offer up some ideas for character backgrounds by class. I aim to collect these ideas together for a future pdf publication.
What made your character decide to become a wizard? Why did they leave their home town? Did they leave family behind or are they looking for something? These are all questions players face when generating their characters, with the best will in the world it's tempting to rely on cliché.
BARBARIAN
5. Left Behind - Last year your tribe set out on a raiding voyage and all was right with the world. You pillaged a handful of villages along the coast, and then took the river inland like you had done many times. However, when you rounded the bend near a particularly fertile spot of the countryside, to your horror the townsfolk were lining the banks of the river. They'd never done this before, usually they were compliant and played by the rules, you raided their villages for crops, livestock and the odd wife and afterwards they went about whatever it was that they had to do to make ready for your visit next year. When they started firing wave after wave if flaming arrows at the boat, the chief had had enough and ordered you to turn the boat around. The oarsmen stroked the water with a new sense of urgency but it was not enough to put you out of range of the villagers bows. When an arrow stuck you in the back you staggered to the side of the boat, slipped on the blood of your childhood friend Boggart and tumbled overboard, banging your head on the side of the boat. You came too some minutes later as you drifted downstream, luckily you hadn't drowned, but there was no sign of the boat and you were a long way from home in a strange land full of people who wanted to kill you...
CLERIC
5. Roll the bones - your god demands blood sacrifice every solstice to give thanks for the bounteous crop which will sustain it through the winter. This year however when you performed the choosing ritual and cast the bones to select a goat to sacrifice you were horrified. Instead of pointing to one of the assembled animals it indicated that this years sacrifice would be human and would be the chieftains daughter. You hastily performed the ritual three more times and each time the bones indicated that the god wanted the chieftains daughter in payment for his favours...
MONK
2. World Harmony - Your order shoulders the heavy burden of maintaining a ritual without which the world would eventually stop. Your brothers chant perpetually all day every day, this constant background tone vibrates through everything on the planet and keeps the world in a constant state of movement. People of a good nature will vibrate in harmony those of an evil disposition will vibrate dissonantly. Your job is to journey out into the unknown and detect these dissonants and either train them to resonate harmoniously or to despatch them...
ILLUSIONIST
1. Inquisitor - The king and his descendants have used your kind for hundreds of years to keep the kingdom free of dissent. Your job is to travel from town to village to sniff out signs of rebellion using your powers of persuasion and mind reading. "What happens after you write your report is not your concern" were the words of your old teacher, but you know that the people you report on are never seen or heard from again. When you returned home some months ago, your father's mind was full of rebellious thoughts about the kingdom, you planted a masking which might last a year, but if another inquisitor were to read his mind he'd be able to tell that it was your spell...
2. The Puppeteer - You can't remember when your powers awoke, you've always been able to suggest things to people and they've done what you asked. As you got older the tasks you asked people to perform for you were a means to enrich yourself and ultimately brought you to the attentions of the local sheriff and his mind was not as easy to control as the others especially when he had his mage with him. You read the guards intentions from some distance away, the night they came to arrest you and you've been on the run ever since...
What made your character decide to become a wizard? Why did they leave their home town? Did they leave family behind or are they looking for something? These are all questions players face when generating their characters, with the best will in the world it's tempting to rely on cliché.
BARBARIAN
5. Left Behind - Last year your tribe set out on a raiding voyage and all was right with the world. You pillaged a handful of villages along the coast, and then took the river inland like you had done many times. However, when you rounded the bend near a particularly fertile spot of the countryside, to your horror the townsfolk were lining the banks of the river. They'd never done this before, usually they were compliant and played by the rules, you raided their villages for crops, livestock and the odd wife and afterwards they went about whatever it was that they had to do to make ready for your visit next year. When they started firing wave after wave if flaming arrows at the boat, the chief had had enough and ordered you to turn the boat around. The oarsmen stroked the water with a new sense of urgency but it was not enough to put you out of range of the villagers bows. When an arrow stuck you in the back you staggered to the side of the boat, slipped on the blood of your childhood friend Boggart and tumbled overboard, banging your head on the side of the boat. You came too some minutes later as you drifted downstream, luckily you hadn't drowned, but there was no sign of the boat and you were a long way from home in a strange land full of people who wanted to kill you...
CLERIC
5. Roll the bones - your god demands blood sacrifice every solstice to give thanks for the bounteous crop which will sustain it through the winter. This year however when you performed the choosing ritual and cast the bones to select a goat to sacrifice you were horrified. Instead of pointing to one of the assembled animals it indicated that this years sacrifice would be human and would be the chieftains daughter. You hastily performed the ritual three more times and each time the bones indicated that the god wanted the chieftains daughter in payment for his favours...
MONK
2. World Harmony - Your order shoulders the heavy burden of maintaining a ritual without which the world would eventually stop. Your brothers chant perpetually all day every day, this constant background tone vibrates through everything on the planet and keeps the world in a constant state of movement. People of a good nature will vibrate in harmony those of an evil disposition will vibrate dissonantly. Your job is to journey out into the unknown and detect these dissonants and either train them to resonate harmoniously or to despatch them...
ILLUSIONIST
1. Inquisitor - The king and his descendants have used your kind for hundreds of years to keep the kingdom free of dissent. Your job is to travel from town to village to sniff out signs of rebellion using your powers of persuasion and mind reading. "What happens after you write your report is not your concern" were the words of your old teacher, but you know that the people you report on are never seen or heard from again. When you returned home some months ago, your father's mind was full of rebellious thoughts about the kingdom, you planted a masking which might last a year, but if another inquisitor were to read his mind he'd be able to tell that it was your spell...
2. The Puppeteer - You can't remember when your powers awoke, you've always been able to suggest things to people and they've done what you asked. As you got older the tasks you asked people to perform for you were a means to enrich yourself and ultimately brought you to the attentions of the local sheriff and his mind was not as easy to control as the others especially when he had his mage with him. You read the guards intentions from some distance away, the night they came to arrest you and you've been on the run ever since...
Wednesday 2 March 2011
Citymorphs #013 to #016
Four more citymorphs to keep your appetite's whetted...
#013 - Parkland - 002
A small urban park surrounded by small buildings and some sort of barrack type building possibly a stables. I leave the rest up to you.
#014 - A River Runs Through It
More open spaces to keep the population healthy and happy. A river runs through this one with a sort of tunnel affair. On Sundays you just can't move for Anglers trying to land the big black pike that is rumoured to live in the river...
#015 - Crematorium
Despite all the green spaces when you shuffle of the mortal coil your relatives won't wont you cluttering up the house so they bring your corpse here. If you're rich enough they might bury you in one of the few grave plots that they've still got free, otherwise it's up the chimney like the rest of us.
#016 - Temple District
The Gods like their worshippers to build big ostentatious Temples in their honour and big wide avenues along which to process.
A small urban park surrounded by small buildings and some sort of barrack type building possibly a stables. I leave the rest up to you.
More open spaces to keep the population healthy and happy. A river runs through this one with a sort of tunnel affair. On Sundays you just can't move for Anglers trying to land the big black pike that is rumoured to live in the river...
Despite all the green spaces when you shuffle of the mortal coil your relatives won't wont you cluttering up the house so they bring your corpse here. If you're rich enough they might bury you in one of the few grave plots that they've still got free, otherwise it's up the chimney like the rest of us.
The Gods like their worshippers to build big ostentatious Temples in their honour and big wide avenues along which to process.
Monday 28 February 2011
UPDATE: RPG Google mapping with MAPLib
In an earlier article I wrote about How to make your own Fantasy Googlemap with MapLib without needing to be a code monkey, which has consistently proved to be the most popular article on my blog despite the lack of comments. I always intended to replace the rather uninspiring "test images" I used to centre the maps with a demo map of my own creation. Well, life has a nasty habit of getting in he way and I've been too busy with my current C&C campaign and other projects like Citymorphs.
So here at last is my demo map which I am actively using in my campaign.
Observations after 6 Months Use
1. ZOOM - As you can see the map zoom isn't perfect, the placemarker images don't scale with the zoom which means when you're zoomed out fully (as above) they don't "geolocate" anymore. This is annoying but not a total disaster.
2. PLACE MARKERS - I've used the bog standard icons for everything but the Capital Cities (which is a shared marker) for fear that if an owner left the shared marker would disappear from the library.
3. PLACE NAMES - When you hover over a marker it displays the name associated with it, which is nice. However it would be really useful to be able to set a display variable for each marker which would display the name alongside the marker.
4. REGIONS - Although you can draw regions, turning them into hotspots in a client side image map fashion, there are no options for just adding text to the map.
5. LINKING - I've managed to link some of the pop-up descriptions back to my campaign blog for "Read more" links (Try clicking on the Capital icon for Sankahar City), but this requires a bit of HTML knowledge to ensur that your link target is set correctly. The editing interface is a little clunky for my tastes, for example if you don't submit an edit whilst still in HTML view it interprets and displays your HTML.
6. UPDATING YOUR IMAGE - The most annoying feature is that once you've done all the work and added your place markers, if you ever need to update your map image, you can't. This does seem like a massive oversight on the part of the developers and could ultimately limit its usability as a tool, not just for RPG mapping but any mapping. Maps have a tendency to be revised, in the real world political boundaries are redrawn on a regular basis and with regime change comes country name changing.
7. COLLABORATIVE MAPPING - I've not really explored the collaborative mapping functions but from some of the other collaborative mapping projects which feature in the MapLib gallery it seems that other users are getting on fine with them.
8. SHARING YOUR MAP - The sharing options are standard fare but irritatingly if you choose to grab the link to a static image it doesn't show any of the place markers at all!!. Again this seems like an oversight on the developers side (unless there's some overarching Intellectual Property Rights issue I'm not aware of) and this is where in RPG terms the text display of names next to markers feature would make this a KILLER APP.
Aside from the two big issues I've listed above it's still worth checking it out and I hope that any of you who've read this will drop me a comment and a link to your own maps.
Happy MAPLibing y'all
So here at last is my demo map which I am actively using in my campaign.
Observations after 6 Months Use
1. ZOOM - As you can see the map zoom isn't perfect, the placemarker images don't scale with the zoom which means when you're zoomed out fully (as above) they don't "geolocate" anymore. This is annoying but not a total disaster.
2. PLACE MARKERS - I've used the bog standard icons for everything but the Capital Cities (which is a shared marker) for fear that if an owner left the shared marker would disappear from the library.
3. PLACE NAMES - When you hover over a marker it displays the name associated with it, which is nice. However it would be really useful to be able to set a display variable for each marker which would display the name alongside the marker.
4. REGIONS - Although you can draw regions, turning them into hotspots in a client side image map fashion, there are no options for just adding text to the map.
5. LINKING - I've managed to link some of the pop-up descriptions back to my campaign blog for "Read more" links (Try clicking on the Capital icon for Sankahar City), but this requires a bit of HTML knowledge to ensur that your link target is set correctly. The editing interface is a little clunky for my tastes, for example if you don't submit an edit whilst still in HTML view it interprets and displays your HTML.
6. UPDATING YOUR IMAGE - The most annoying feature is that once you've done all the work and added your place markers, if you ever need to update your map image, you can't. This does seem like a massive oversight on the part of the developers and could ultimately limit its usability as a tool, not just for RPG mapping but any mapping. Maps have a tendency to be revised, in the real world political boundaries are redrawn on a regular basis and with regime change comes country name changing.
7. COLLABORATIVE MAPPING - I've not really explored the collaborative mapping functions but from some of the other collaborative mapping projects which feature in the MapLib gallery it seems that other users are getting on fine with them.
8. SHARING YOUR MAP - The sharing options are standard fare but irritatingly if you choose to grab the link to a static image it doesn't show any of the place markers at all!!. Again this seems like an oversight on the developers side (unless there's some overarching Intellectual Property Rights issue I'm not aware of) and this is where in RPG terms the text display of names next to markers feature would make this a KILLER APP.
Aside from the two big issues I've listed above it's still worth checking it out and I hope that any of you who've read this will drop me a comment and a link to your own maps.
Happy MAPLibing y'all
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