It’s Monday again and we’re talking gunpowder and primitive firearms in D&D, love them or hate them there’s a few things you need to consider when bringing them into your game:
It’s bank holiday Monday here in the UK, and Hannah has some questions about what do to when players “go off the rails” or spin off into a random tanget.
In this week’s Friend or Foe Friday–and our first episode dealing with this particular creature–we take a look at vampires, the aristocracy of the night, in D&D.
In my current Midderlands game the player started off in the City of Lunden but–seeking a cure for a virulant plague–they were part of an expedition to the Island of Emeraude. In Glynn Seal’s excellent Midderlands setting Emeraude serves as a placeholder for another OSR setting, the mystical forest of Dolmenwood as created by Gavin Norman of Necrotic Gnome.
My PCs have been in Dolmenwood for a while and we’ve been using the following map (drawn by Brian Richmond) as our Roll20 map of the area:
Brian Richmond’s Dolmenwood Players Map
This is great however it does have a number of things listed on it that I’m not too sure I want the players to necessarily know about straight away.
Recently Gavin has released a preview of the upcoming map from the in-progress Dolmenwood Campaign Book, you can see the article on the Necrotic Gnome website by clicking here.
Preview from Necrotic Gnome’s upcoming Dolmenwood Campaign Book
Now this map looks amazing (having be drawn by the expert cartographer Glynn Seal) and I’ll be one of the first in the queue to buy this book when it comes out; however–given the current circumstances–and the schedule of these things it’s not going to be for a while, and I could do with a slightly funked-up player map for my game in the meantime.
So–having some extra time on my hands–I decided to have a go at drawing my own version of the Dolmenwood Map, combining elements of the original and the preview map.
Please note: I am most definitely no Glynn Seal or Gavin Norman (probably more like Ronseal or Barry Norman TBH), but–given it’s the first map I’ve properly hand drawn in over five years I was pretty pleased.
So to start of with I sketched out a rough version of the map in pencil and then I looked at a couple of tutorial videos from WASD20 and QUESTING BEAST on Youtube:
I then broke out my pens and went over the pencil outlines (before erasing them) to create the black and white map below:
My Black and White Map
Next I scanned the map into my computer and used Photoshop CS 3 to colour/shade in the various areas:
My Photoshopped Colour Map
I’m pretty chuffed with the result, it’s not going to win any awards and there’s still a lot of stuff missing from it like roads, towns, etc (although I may put the towns in as tokens in Roll20 i’m not sure yet), but it turned out better than I expected.
P.S. My apologies to Brian Richmond, originally this article said that Gavin Norman drew the player’s map pictured, this is not the case it was Brian’s work. I have now amended the article.
P.P.S. Gavin has been kind enough to provide a Google Drive link containing other player map versions:
In this episode I attempt to put a different spin on the “What is OSR?” and other standard RPG conversations by comparing the glorious roleplaying game to something equally as divine, the BLT.
