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.