More on mapping tools

I've got this love/hate relationship with Campaign Cartographer 2. I'd love for it to be a great mapping tool, I hate that it's not. :)

Sure CC2 (and CC3, which I haven't upgraded to) have a lot of power, but it's mired in a 1980's CAD mindset. (Because it's basically FastCAD with a mapping theme.) It's painfully difficult to do anything but the most basic things, and it's so non-intuitive that I forget how to use half of it when I take a break from it for a few months.

Now, there are basically two kinds of maps… overland maps and interiors. CC2 is actually pretty fair at the overland maps, which is where it started, because there isn't much to that. But I find that it's the interior maps… the mad scientist's lab or the space station… that I spend the most time on and want the most detail in.

The last time I needed an interior map, of a subway with an alien hive growing in it, I needed it in a hurry… and I started drawing it in CC2, got fed up with it, and switched to CorelDRAW. I've been using CD off and on since CD3, but I'm not sure I know it any better than CC2. And I whipped out my map in CD pretty quickly. It wasn't as pretty as I wanted, but that was a time thing… CD is capable of creating maps as pretty or prettier than CC2. So I decided that I'd give up the pretty symbols of CC2 for the faster mapping of CorelDRAW.

As I said in my last post, I've been trying to move away from pay-for software.* And since I don't use most of CorelDRAW's power, I'm finding Inkscape to be an adequate substitute so far. It doesn't have built-in fractal tools, but there are some interesting-looking plug-in scripts that might do the job.

The real reason I have this love/hate relationship with CC2 is that I love the symbols and hate the software. I like pretty maps, and there's nothing like being able to grab one of several high-tech consoles and plop them down onto your map… I can say from experience that drawing those consoles yourself is more time-consuming that might be expected. If I could only find a way to easily extract the CC2 symbols into a usable format (some kind of vector object I could use in Inkscape), I'd be happy camper.

What we need is a movement toward creating and sharing roleplaying map symbols in an open vector format. Hmm. Looks like the next openclipart.org contest may be Fantasy Mapping Symbols. So I'm not the only one thinking along these lines.

Footnotes:

• - The idea behind moving away from pay-for software is to eventually abandon Windows before it devours my soul. Or declares my installation not Genuine. But before I can go fully-Linux, I need to find adequate subtitutes for the essentials.

- I'm not as interesting in Dunjinni-style bitmaps as I am the scalable vector symbols in CC2. I think Dunjinni maps are very pretty, but I can't do that level of art myself, and I need to be able to create my own symbols/objects that blend in.

Buried in map-making

I love maps. And too often, when I'm working on creating an adventure, I get side-tracked to death by drawing the maps first.

Well, I'm working on a con adventure for… three weeks from now. And it takes place on a space station. So I did the smart thing and went looking for space station deckplans on my favorite PDF retail sites.

That's when I found those nifty-cool deckplans by Ryan Wolfe. But his space station wasn't nearly big enough. And the only other one I found that was big enough looked like an amateur dungeon… paper-thin walls all around, with no room for conduits in the walls, etc.

I looked at some spaceship "tiles" but they were too darned expensive. But between Ryan's work and the less-artistic but cool-to-look-at tiles I decided to draw my own 35mm scale maps.

Now, I don't ever aspire to being as artistic as Ryan Wolfe, but I can do as well as the spaceship tiles. But not in Campaign Cartographer… that thing just drives me crazy, and for interiors, I gave it up in favor of CorelDRAW. But I'm trying to move away from pay-for software and I've switched to Inkscape… not nearly as much power, but it seems to be doing the trick. That's my work so far on the left.

But it's doing another trick… all of my time is wrapped up in constructing chairs, consoles, doors and medical stasis pods that look pretty when you shrink them down to 35mm scale, when I really need to be working on the adventure.

But boy, do I love to draw maps… they help me visualize the whole scene. If only they weren't so time-consuming.

Purty deckplans

I'm working on a space station-based adventure for an upcoming local convention, and I went looking for some deckplans among the various PDF vendors and ran across this…

[[http://home.insightbb.com/~ryan.wolfe/Future_Armada.htm|Future Armada]] by Ryan Wolfe of Ki Ryn Studios. This is the guy that did the Serenity deckplans for the official RPG.

The Future Armada deckplans line currently contains eight ships and one small space station. Each existing set is five bucks and contains multiple computer-rendered views of the ship's exterior, full deckplans in Ryan's beautiful color 3D style, B&W line-drawing versions, descriptions of the areas of the ship and NPC crew, copies of the deckplans in 35mm scale, and often various extras like smaller shuttle or scout craft and variant configurations with deckplans. Much of the rendered art and the 35mm deckplans are also included as JPG files.

Even if you don't do the miniatures thing, these deckplans really make the ship "come to life" for me… they're just darn cool, and you're getting quite a lot for your money. It's obvious that a lot of thought and attention have gone into the development of the ships.

You can see a sample from every set here.

Check 'em out.

Worldbuilding overkill?

I just listened to the Sons of Kryos episode #34, where their "Good Sentence" was "Hey, I've got a good idea for a campaign." Much of the focus was on introducing an idea to the players and letting them have a hand in deciding what the whole thing is about.

And that got me thinking about traditional worldbuilding and the trend in modern indie games to do almost no worldbuilding at all, sometimes creating the entire setting on the fly during play. Compared to traditional roleplaying, as I've seen it at least, in which a GM might spend years, or at least a couple months, preparing a campaign, it's quite a contrast. I remember putting off starting my Miramer campaign because, after two years of development, I still didn't enough detail worked out to be comfortable running it.

This makes me think about some GM advice in [[http://www.crngames.com/the_shadow_of_yesterday/|The Shadow of Yesterday]], which I'll paraphrase… when you've got something really cool, don't save it until later, show it as soon as possible.

And this is based on an idea that I've gleaned from various sources: Anything that doesn't affect play doesn't matter.

It's something I have to focus on more. I don't think quickly on my feet and I like to have a lot of structure under me to fall back on. But I realize I have spent a lot of time not playing a campaign I wanted to run because I "wasn't ready." And then when we did finally get to play, much of my preparation never saw the light of day.

There's something to be said about not spending so much time in prep. I just need to figure out how to run a game without wanting so much background material available.