Mapping Pavis II - Building the Neighborhood

Here I will demonstrate building out an area of the Big Rubble using the blank grids I built in Mapping Pavis I.  The area where I want to set the adventure is west of Griffin [sometimes Griffen in the setting] Gate.  On the City map, it's square C9.

I'll start by taking the blank 5x5 square GIMP drawing and exporting as a PDF, which I'll then import into Inkscape and save as an SVG (scalable vector graphics) file.  Opening the Layer menu, I'll add three layers to the SVG, 'Grid', Infrastructure' and 'Subsquares'.  Select the 5x5 grid, and select Layers->Move Selection to Layer, choosing the 'Grid' layer in the dialogue box.

Switching to the Infrastructure layer, I'll add in the city wall, which starts near the bottom right and exits about half way up the left side of C9.  A simple rectangle for the Griffin Gate itself and then a straight road leading out from the gate.   There needs to be other major streets in the town, so I'll add one in branching off of the gate road and going through C9.  It roughly parallels the wall, but I don't want it to be straight, as my conception of Pavis is that, unlike Greek and Roman towns, it was laid out haphazardly.


I'll start with the block four down and three in from the left and map the buildings with in the bock on the 10x10 square drawing I made earlier.  Again export from GIMP as a PNG file, open the PNG in Inkscape and save a an SVG file.  I only need two layers on this drawing, 'Grid' and 'Buildings'.  Again, I move the background grid to the Grid layer and add the wall section so guide my layout.  I'll need to leave a gap for the street cutting across the corner of the square too.

Now to generate the buildings, of course I built a generator, I always do.  It's linked over on the sidebar.  When I built the generator, instead of setting to always build a 100x100 meter block of buildings, I set it so that it randomly selects a 'Nominal block size' and creates contents until it meets or exceeds the nominal block size. I'll just run it until I have enough buildings to fill the area.  In this case twice, I've reformatted the numbers to make a combined list for the block.

No	Type	Floors	Size (meters)	Description
C9.43.1	E		30x40	The area is covered with tall weeds. The cellar is made of field stone and has 3 levels. The cellar can be accessed by a open stair inside the left rear corner of the building site. The access has been hidden by brush and weeds. Any cellar floors in the building have a 10% chance of collapsing the first time they are stepped by any individual character. Any stairs or ladders found in the cellar have a 15% chance of breaking the first time they are used.
C9.43.2	D		10x20	The front right corner foundation of yellow brick remain behind to mark where a building once stood.
C9.43.3	D		10x10	The rear left corner and right wall foundations of brown brick remain behind to mark where a building once stood. The area is covered with brush, a small tree grows within. The cellar is made of packed earth and has 1 level. The cellar can be accessed by a hatch without a stair outside the right rear corner of the building. The access is hidden by debris.
C9.43.4	D		10x10	The front right corner , rear wall and left wall foundations of yellow brick remain behind to mark where a building once stood. The interior is a shallow pit covered with weeds and bushes.
C9.43.5	Empty		10x10	The area is covered with brush, a small tree grows within.
C9.43.6	C	1	20x20	The broken front wall and rear right corner of adobe remain standing to mark the building. The area is covered with thorns. The cellar is made of packed earth and has 1 level. The cellar can be accessed by a trapdoor with no means of descent inside the right front corner of the building. The access has been hidden by brush and weeds.
C9.43.7	D		10x20	The front right corner foundation of yellow brick remains visible to mark where a building once stood.
C9.43.8	D		40x40	The left wall foundation of adobe remains behind to mark where a building once stood. The interior is a shallow pit covered with weeds and bushes. A pool of water has collected at the bottom. Check for wandering monsters.

Building Types paraphrasing from Pavis and the Big Rubble.
    'A' - Intact and inhabited; 'B' - Open to the weather, but inhabitable; 'C' - Shell of the building; 'D' - Foundations poking up through the grass; 'E' - No remains above ground, may still have intact cellars.

Going back to the drawing, it's easy to place the building outlines on it and add labels.

The final step is to turn off the grid (Shift -Control - L) Then click on the eye icon next to the Grid layer in the right sidebar, so that the eye closes.

Click on the drawing, Select All (Control-A), then reducs the scale of the drawing by Object->Transform.  Click on the Scale tab in the Transform dialogue on the right sidebar.  Set the scale to 20% of the original and apply.

Copy the reduced image to the Neighborhood drawing for the C9 block.  Then using the cursor controls, slide it into position in the square 4 down by 3 from the left.  Delete the wall segment that was copied over, tweak the building locations to align at this level, including editing the Path for the main road transiting the square and you achieve this.

Repeat for successive sub-squares.

Now I'm not planning on mapping all of Pavis at this scale, just the pieces where the adventures are.  I'll keep a couple of generic areas for random encounters.

Mapping Pavis I - Setup

I've been fascinated by the Chaosium RuneQuest Pavis and the Big Rubble setting since I first read the saga of Rurik the Restless in the rule-book. A year or so ago, I went out to DriveThruRPG and bought the PDF version. It's a huge setting, 25km² of ruined city, now inhabited by trolls, broo and other two and four footed vermin - like adventurers. Sealed off for hundreds of years, it was forceably re-opened by the dragonnewts, then re-colonized by Sartarites, and now conquered by the Lunar Empire. I'm considering setting my next campaign there and wanted to start mapping out the ruins. The small scale map included in the PDF being evocative, but not terribly useful for game play.

The first step was to import an image into GIMP and overlap it with a grid. I started with a hex grid, but as I started drilling down, I realized that a square grid would be easier to use.  I took a screenshot of the PDF page, then in GIMP, I opened the image as Layers, edited out the scale given on the image, created a new 'Grid' layer on top of image layer and then used Filter->Render->Pattern->Grid to draw the lines. I set the distance between the lines at 65 pixels. That gave me a little over 100 half kilometers squares inside the walls. Since the PDF says that the walls contain "about 25km²" of land, that's good enough for my work.  Labeling the top row and left hand column provides me with an easy reference system.

The next step is to be able to drill down to individual buildings.  Again I used GIMP to create a large square, first divided into a 5x5 matrix of smaller squares.  The large square at this scale represents on of the squares on the Pavis map, which I'll refer to as a neighborhood.  The 25 squares inside are 100x100 meter 'blocks".

The final layer is another large square, subdivided into a 10x10 matrix.  The large square represents the 'block' in the neighborhood map and is subdivided into 10m² 'lots'.  Or about 30x30 feet - not coincidentally the size of the house I owned in the Chicago suburbs fifteen years ago.

Next I'll demonstrate drilling down to the building and block level.

Urban Ruins

I've created another RPG Playing Aid generator, over under Utilities - Urban Ruins. I created it to generate random urban remains based on the Runequest Pavis and the Big Rubble setting.  It will make a group of building remains, providing their footprint, height and a description.  It's not so much a dungeon generator as an idea generator.

I'll have a couple of posts showing how I use it to create large scale maps of the Big Rubble.

Here's an example of the results.  The 'Type' column is explained over on the Urban Ruins page.

Nominal block size: 40m by 40m

No	Type	Floors	Size (meters)	Description
1	B	1	10x10	Walls of orange brick support the remains of a black tile roof. The left wall is stained with mildew. The cellar is made of packed earth and has 1 level. The cellar can be accessed by a trapdoor with no means of descent inside the left front corner of the building. The access is full of debris. If searched or cleared, 25% chance of being attacked by vermin, insects or snakes.
2	D		10x10	The front left corner , right wall and left wall foundations of finished stone remain behind to mark where a building once stood. The interior is a shallow pit covered with tall weeds.
3	Special		10x10	A well with no lip, just a hole in the ground. . Check for wandering monsters.
4	Empty		30x30	The area is covered with tall weeds.
5	E		30x30	The area is covered with brush, a small tree grows within. The cellar is made of finished stone and has 1 level. The cellar can be accessed by a open stair outside the left rear corner of the building site. The access is full of debris. If searched or cleared, 25% chance of being attacked by vermin, insects or snakes. Any stairs or ladders found in the cellar have a 15% chance of breaking the first time they are used.