Floor Plans - Igmans Boarding House

 Here's a floor plan from my still being written Call of Cthulhu adventure.  Igman's is a slightly disreputable boarding house that can be used (freely by anyone, but please give me some credit) as an adventure local.  It's based off of Design No. 30 - A Model Suburban Cottage in Woodward's Country Homes.  I added a 3rd floor as a copy of the 2nd floor, and removed the indoor bathroom on those floors to create a servant's stair leading to their rooms in the attic.  The grid scale is 5 feet or 1.5 meters, the actual plan sizes are listed in many of the rooms, and may appear to vary slightly from the grid - the perils of electronic formatting, reformatting and resizing.

Attic and Roof

A number of small servants' quarters and storage areas are reachable by the backstairs.

3rd Floor

Five bedrooms of varying sizes.

2nd Floor
Five bedrooms of varying sizes.  Balconies rest on top of the
roof of the veranda from E and the backstairs F

Main Floor

D = Dining Room, P- Parlor, L = Library

C is the land lady's private room.

Basement

     The basement includes a 10' wide Area covered by the Main Floor Veranda

Wilderlands - So how big IS a Barony?

     In my last post, I had graphically demonstrated that there was no room for nomads in Altanis, based on the patrol area of "Baronies" as listed in the canon.

     In this it follows closely with the OD&D booklet Volume 3 The Underworld and Wilderness Adventures which, in lieu of a number of hexes, gives a patrol radius.

     By time we get to AD&D, the term "Baronies" has been changed in the DMG to "Territory Development by Player Characters".  

DMG page 93

     Honestly, I find the rules opaque, the DM gives the player a map of 6 hexes, the scale isn't stated but I assume it's 30 mile campaign hexes.  Then (start) map(ping) the hexes at a 200 yard scale, so they fit nine into a one mile hex.  Once the player has mapped the central hex and six surrounding it - this is the confusing bit - which scale is he talking about, 200 yard, 1 mile or 30 miles?  It will take a LONG time to randomly roll enough 200 yard hexes to map seven 30 mile hexes.  In any case, to get back to how far the character will patrol, I interpret the final paragraph to mean once the character has cleared a thirty mile campaign hex, wandering monster checks are reduced.

     I'm going to add in one more system at this point, Adventurer, Conqueror, King includes domain level play in it's core rules and defines the territories, not only of Baron, but of a number of greater nobles also.

Time for some math!

    The Wilderlands definition of patrolling out four hexes from the center hex creates and area of no less than 61 five mile hexes.  Each file mile hex is an area of 21.65 square miles, so the area of a "Barony" in the Wilderlands is 1320 square miles or 845,216 acres or 342,047 hectares.

     OD&D defines a Barony as patrolling a twenty mile radius,   1256 square miles, or 803,840 acres or 325,303 hectares.

   AD&D is opaque, but I'm going to assume he meant a barony equaled a 30 mile campaign hex or 779 square miles or 498,831 acres, or 201,870 hectares.

    ACKS comes in a a puny six mile hex.  That give it an area of 31 square miles,  or 19,953 acres or 8,075 hectares.

Lets put it in a table and do some real world size comparisons.

Region	Description	Square Miles	Acres	Hectares
San Marino	Fifth smallest country	20	15.36	6216
ACKS	1 x Six mile hex	31	19,953	8,075
Liechtenstein	Sixth smallest country	62	39,680	1658
Rutland	40th largest Ceremonial County	152	97,500	39,457
Sao Tome and Principe	25th smallest country	386	247,040	99,974
Westmoreland	29th largest Ceremonial County	759	485,990	196,637
AD&D	1 x Thirty mile Campaign hex	779	498,831	201,870
Mauritius	26th smallest country	788	504,320	204,091
Rhode Island	Smallest US state	1033	661,120	267,546
Samoa	29th smallest country	1097	702,080	284,122
Gloucestershire	17th largest Ceremonial County	1235	790,470	319,892
OD&D	Twenty mile radius circle	1256	803,840	325,303
Wilderlands	61 x Five mile hexes	1321	845,216	342,047
Cornwall	16th largest Ceremonial County	1336	854,770	345,913
Cabo Verde	30th smallest country	1557	996,480	403,262
Delaware	Second smallest US state	1938	1,240,320	501,940

     In Real World terms,  the areas given for Wilderlands, OD&D and AD&D are simply too big, they are the size of an English County.  Now, I know that Ceremonial Counties do not represent a contiguous landholding, but while their size and boundaries have wavered over time, they do go back to the Norman Conquest where they are used as census units for the Domesday Book.  And that book shows that several barons will have holdings within the County.
    One illustration of the practical issues with the sizes given is the time it would take to patrol areas this large.  For a Wilderlands barony, it would take a single patrol over two months, at twenty miles a day, to pass through every single square mile.   Keeping monsters out of such a large area would be a frustrating game of Whack-a-Mindflayer, even with multiple patrols.

More Math Ahead!

    As long as we've reached this point, what is a reasonable size for a Barony, or any other feudal demesne?  Does ACKS have it right at a about 30 square miles?

    To answer that question, I'm going to pull out my go to system for world-building for the last 40 years - Chivalry and Sorcery.  The old red book provides a system for Designing the Feudal Nation, allowing you to generate the demesnes of the great lords, down to the landed knight.  Who isn't terribly humble even if his small manor house isn't much more impressive than the local inn.
   In this system Barons are the lowest nobles (knights being of "gentle" birth rather than "noble") however, unlike the Dukes, Earls and Counts above them, they are NEVER 'tenants-in-chief' holding their lands directly from the King.  Instead, they report up to one of the great nobles - and their fief is generated as part of generating the demesne and feudal holdings of their overlord.  In short, if when generating the fief holders of the great noble, you randomly generate a small castle or shell keep, you create a barony to hold it.  The barony itself will have fief holders dependent on it, but these will be mere landed knights.

    In the C&S Sourcebook, under Feudal Economics, are rules for calculating the amount of land to grow food for a given population.  There is a page of text, but it comes down to add up the population figures from the table, multiply by 10 to include families, beggars and bandits in the area.  This gives the total population, which is multiplied by 8 to determine the number of acres of cultivated and pasture land required to support the population.

   There is one more source I'm going to pull in, Leonard Cantor's The English Medieval Landscape.  This tome, published four years after the Sourcebook, reviews land use at the time of the Domesday Survey.  It shows that "35% of England was covered in arable land, 25% put to pasture, with 15% covered by woodlands and the remaining 25% predominantly being moorland, fens and heaths."  

     Note that the percentage of crop land to pasturage is reversed from the Sourcebook, but it's the ratios of those together to the total amount of land that I'm interested in obtaining - and that ratio is 6 acres of farm and pasture to 4 acres of wood and wasteland.  I can now calculate the average size of a "Barony".

     In doing so, I am assuming that each Barony will have the same breakdown of land use as the kingdom as a whole.  That is of course, another spherical cow of uniform density - a working approximation that meets my current level of detail.

     So, throwing the C&S tables into a spreadsheet and letting it do the math for me, based on the possible outcomes of the determining the Baron's tenants, I find that a Barony will hold between 56 and 118 square miles of territory, on our five mile hex map that is between 3 and 6 hexes (rounding up to the nearest whole hex).  Because of the distribution of possible out comes, the average size is 81 square miles or 4 hexes.  Now I can re-do the last map.

Altanis Baronies & Villages
Click to enlarge

Now, I have room for Barbarians!

Wilderlands - Give Me a Home, Where the Barbarians Roam

Barbarian Altanis are nomadic tribesmen who roam the lands of their more advanced ancestors.  Initial Guidelines Booklet I.

     After laying out the CSIO Market Area and boundaries, looking at the number of villages, castles and citadels on Map 2, I developed a strong impression that there isn't sufficient unclaimed areas to support tribes of nomads.   Rob Conley, in his revision of Wilderlands, assures us that there is plenty of room to fit the nomads in.  Let's see for ourselves.

 

Altanis Village Market Areas
Click for full size

     The first step is to layout the Market Areas for all of the villages on Campaign Map 2.  Technically, they are all Market Class VI in ACKS with a twenty five mile maximum.  (That would only come into effect if the village was located on a road, which only one is, so almost all borders have been shortened using the MP costs from the previous post. )  But Antil is less than seventy inhabitants below the cut off for Market Class V, they exist in a strategic position for shipping on the Romilian Sea - and I was bored with the small areas, so I used the larger area for it.

As can be seen in the Altanis Village Market Area map there is very little area outside the Market Area (the multicolored lines and shaded areas) of some village or another. And I haven't even looked at Barony patrol areas yet.

    Thinking over the image, I decided that it is unrealistic to assume that every hex in the Market

Altanis Village Neighborhoods
Click to enlarge

Area is under continuous occupation or observation by the villages; which would preclude or at least discourage nomads from wandering through.  I decided to reduce the footprint of the villages to their immediate neighborhood, where the fields and pastures worked on a daily basis would be found.  The outer areas are analogous to what Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay refers to as 'Zones of Dependency' where isolated farmsteads, mining claims and natural resources, such a salt licks are to be found.  [Note:  Settlement patterns in WFRP's 'Old World' setting are nothing like Wilderlands, but concept of scattered holdings around the village makes sense.]    This produced the Altanis Village Neighborhood map, where the blue lines show the area surrounding each village that is under daily use.  

Plenty of room for nomads now!  OK, I need to add in the areas patrolled around the castles and citadels, as I don't see a feudal knight allowing a bunch of barbarians to chase a herd of mammoths through his serf's wheat fields.

Per the original Wilderlands of High Fantasy

BARONIES

Upon building a stronghold, player-characters must clear every four hexes (five miles each) radiating from the hex in which his stronghold is located.  While clear terrain can be maintained monster free by patrols, mountains, swamps and dense wood hexes cannot be maintained clear of monsters.  For this reason barons do not usually patrol these areas, prefering [sic] the more tillable clear terrain and hilly areas.

Altanis Villages and Patrolled Areas
Click to enlarge

In this case, I did not reduce the patrolled area by terrain costs, but I did end the patrolled areas at the terrain features listed.  For the most part, as there are a couple of citadels smack in the middle of jungle hexes that would be patrolling something.  In counting off the hexes from each citadel, I have come to suspect that there was some effort made in placing them, as the patrol areas for neighboring citadels usually abut or overlap by no more than a hex.  Rather than laying out these overlapping areas, I chose to map the continuous areas patrolled by the citadels with it.  That brings us to the red lines and shading on Altanis Villages and Patrolled Areas.

Other than the Eyestone Jungle on the east coast, there isn't much that isn't patrolled.  The Lagoldurna Jungle to the east has a string of villages cutting it in half restricting the range of any nomad tribes.

    So, there's no room for nomads in Altanis.  Well, not if you assume a feudal society around the strongholds.  In my next post, I'll cover putting the barbarians back in Barbarian Altanis along with some notes on the barbarian nations to be encountered at the players peril.

Wilderlands - City State Market Area

I realized after my last post that what ACKS considers the distances involved in trade routes, really don't reflect real world trade distances.  While the Spanish treasure armadas and Dutch spice trade are post-medieval examples, albeit still limited to wind and muscle technologies, the Silk Road shows the the flow of long distance trade as does the Roman Indian Ocean trade even earlier.  In fact, very long distance trade evidence goes back into the Bronze Age.

With those observations in mind, the ACKS trade rules do, I think, provide a useful scale for Market Area.  That is, the locations from which a city draws immigrants, as well as natural and agricultural resources and to which it regularly exports both it's own manufactures and items  obtained from trade outside the Market Area. 

Spherical Cows of Uniform Density
     One of the comments I received about the previous post was that the circles denoting trade routes were unrealistic.  Which is quite true, I just wasn't prepared to tackle it in the first post.  The circles defined the outer limits of trade in a perfect world where we assume roads run on flat plains in every direction, which the maps show to be a false assumption.   So lets start refining those assumptions.

ACKS lists Range of Trade (Roads) for Class I Markets as having a maximum distance of 168 miles or 28 six mile hexes.  The comes to 33.6, round it up to 34, five mile hexes from the Wilderlands maps.

Assumption:  This Range of Trade is for travel on a road.  That is a patrolled and maintained pathway which has features, such as bridges, cuttings, ferries, etc to facilitate travel across natural obstacles.  Off road travel distances are shorter.

ACKS Movement Multipliers

Terrain	Multiplier	Trade Range	Hexes (Wilderlands)
Road or Clear Wide Trail	*3/2	168 miles	34
Plains	*1	112 miles	22
Desert, Hills, Woods	*2/3	75 miles	15
Jungles, Swamps, Mountains	*1/2	56 miles	11

All well and good, except that I need to handle trade routes crossing all of the terrain types.  So I'm going back to my roots in counter and hex war gaming and converting things to Movement Points.  Land based trade routes are 34 Movement Points in length, they spend MPs according to the following table.

Trade Route Terrain Movement Point Costs per hex

Terrain	With Road	Without Road
Plains	1	3MP every 2 hexes
Desert, Hills, Woods	3MP every 2 hexes	2
Jungles, Swamps, Mountains	2	3

     After installing Crouton and GIMP on my Chromebook, and converting the maps from PDF, plus a few hours of counting hexes - probably not completely consistently - here's the boundaries (black lines) and Market Area (red overlay) for the City State of the Invincible Overlord.

Click to Embiggen

100,000 Page Views - Achievement Unlocked

Over seven years and two hundred sixty three published posts.  Thank you everyone who has read my posts and a big shout out to the Russian and Ukrainian bots that trawl the web everyday!

When I started blogging in October of 2012, I wanted a place to publish my gaming based musings and had visions of building a following.  Life and work sometimes get in the way.  I still use it for my gaming musings, but realized that I don't have the creative energy - or self-discipline - to write everyday.

My high point was 2014 when I posted 117 time - forty of them in February, because I did a post a day Blog Carnival.  My low point was 2018 when I only posted three times - deaths in the family take a lot out of you.

Here's a some of my older posts that don't get looked at much, but which I think contribute to different aspects of our hobby.

Teddy Roosevelt and the Orcs - where I look at Orc society through TR's history of settler and Indian relations in the Old West (South of the Ohio, West of the Appalachians and East of the Mississippi).

The Dead Orc Scale - classifying difficulty of RPGs by how many orcs you need to kill to advance to 2nd Level. 

Using GIMP to generate campaign maps, especially the older posts where I show how to bring in Google Map screen shots and turn them into hex maps for a Roman era fantasy campaign.

Fishers - a race I created for Adventurer, Conqueror, King to replace hobbits - whom I despise in a fantasy setting.

Rural Dwellings

     The countryside is not all orc-infested wilderness, individual farms are encountered not only near castles and villages, but also tucked away by themselves in fertile areas. However, they are built with an eye towards defense of the family and livestock, and are able to hold off a casual raiding party for hours; although a determined war party will triumph in the end. Generally, the inhabitants will have reached some accommodation with any intelligent monsters in the area, such as trading chickens for pelts with the local goblin tribe. 
     Smart adventurers will look for these isolated dwellings as the sun begins to set; much better to have a roof over your head and walls around you than camp under the stars or rain clouds. See for example Fritz Leiber's The Jewels in the Forest. 

Here I present three variations of combination house barns (using the American term; house byre or byre dwelling for the English) superimposed on the traditional five foot grid.

Dartmoor Longhouse 1.

This rude dwelling is a single structure with the family at one end and the livestock at the other. The walls are usually dry stone and the roof is thatch. Inside it is dark and smokey, as the there is no chimney or flue for the open hearth. Always built on a slope, the livestock are kept on the downhill side of the building where a small culvert drains the foul slurry away through the wall. This plan can be used to represent a variety of primitive house barns like the Scottish blackhouse or French maison longue.

Dartmoor Longhouse 2

Externally the same, the interior has been made more habitable by adding posts to support sleeping, storage and haylofts; accessible by ladders. The hearth has become a ventilated fireplace, making the interior less smokey at the cost of reduced light and heat. A manger has been added for feeding the livestock.

More about Dartmoor longhouses here

Low Saxon Farmhouse

More prosperous than the longhouses, this building contains separate entries and rooms for people to sleep in; as well as stables for cows and horses and a indoor chicken coop. Pigs are kept outside. The hearth is open again, but the thatched roof will usually have an 'Owl hole' for the smoke to rise through.  The walls are timber framed and filled with wattle and daub or brick.

More about Low Saxon Houses here

Floor Plan 1

I found a book of digital floor plans, bought one into GIMP, then played with it adding the Cellar and Attic along with a 5x5 grid.  Based on the fact that no bath is shown, I'd place the plans before 1900.  Perfect for Gaslight adventures or with a quick renovation for 1900-1930 noir/Cthulhu  RPGs.   Really, I'll probably end up using it somewhere I need a random house.

Leave a comment if you have interest in getting the original image or a downloadable format.

Two to four bedrooms on the second floor and two rooms for servants in the attic.  The dashed line in the attic indicates where the ceiling height lowers to a 6' due to the slope of the roof.  The cellar features a modern coal fired boiler and a small secret room.

Building Campaign Maps with Google & GIMP 8 - Adding Symbols with GIMP

 Own of the issues I've struggled with in GIMP is drawing regular shapes, much less complex shapes like concentric circles or stars. After all it's image manipulation, if I wanted to draw shapes I should use Inkscape. But I have worked out a way to import and add any map symbols I want using GIMP. The key is in the Brush tool, Section 9.2 of the GIMP instructions provides the steps required to create your own brush. And in GIMP, a brush can be any shape or pattern.

Section of Tablua Peutingeriana

Start by drawing or finding an image with the symbol you want to use. Because of my opinion of my artistic talents, I am using a section of the Tabula Peutingeriana from a copyright free image  on Wikipedia.  The +British Library also has a section of the map in it's Flicker stream, but didn't contain all of the images I wanted to use.

Here, I've take the section with the image I want and blown it up in GIMP for easier image manipulation.  I've selected the symbol I want to use in  my map and copied it to the Clipboard.


Tip: When using the Selection tool, the size of the selected area is displayed in the bottom bar of the GIMP window, in the message area to the right of the cursor position.  This is important for the next step.

Next I create a new image (File -> New), with the dimensions of the selection and under the Advanced Options, set the Fill to Transparency.

I've pasted the selected area from the Tabula into the new image.  Pretty, isn't it?  But I only want the city, not the land, roads and sea around it.

Again, I've increased the View to 400% actual size to make image manipulation easier.  Now I use the Erase tool to delete all of the drawing I don't need.  Because I set the background to Transparent, the square image can be placed on any background without obscuring the layer underneath.

Here's the important bit, even without Saving the image, I export it to my personal Brushes sub-directory.  On Windows 8.1, it's ../Rod/.gimp-2.8/brushes.  Your installation location will vary. I select to export it as a GIMP brush (.gbr) file. Then click Export.

Click Export on the dialogue box.

Now when I look at the Brushes Dockable Window (Windows -> Dockable Dialogues) in GIMP I see my new Brush (the highlighted square)  Note that GIMP automatically made the Clipboard selection into a temporary brush.  It's built in and can't be cleared, don't worry about it, it disappears the next time you open GIMP, but your new brush remains!

Re-size your brush to produce the size of the symbol you want to appear on your map, place the cursor and click.  You've successfully added it to the map.





I hope that this will be of use to some people, the other campaign cartography posts are collected below.

Building Campaign Maps with Google and GIMP series One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, Seven
Mapping Pavis (Inkscape) series - One, Two

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.

Building Campaign Maps with Google & GIMP 7 - Scodra takes shape, but doesn't gel

I've been playing around with GIMP again, wanting to start mapping the local area, especially the town of Scodra and the location of the Castle of the Mad Archmage (Gentius' Palace in the campaign).  While the techniques I documented in the previous posts (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6) on the subject work, I find myself scraping the bottom in terms of granularity of the image.

The technique I used was to drill Google Maps down to the highest magnification, remove modern features and replace them with features and names for the setting. I made extensive use of the Smudge tool to soften the edges of the areas I masked. So far so good,

The hexes are approximately 1 mile center to center, I've added the walls of the town roads and a latifundium centered on the twenty year old remains of the legionary camp (Castra Appius).  The black dot on the hilltop is the location of the Castle of the Mad Archmage, just outside of town.

I then selected the center of the image, moved it into a new xcf file and scaled it up by a factor of three.  I immediately noticed that the line I had added pixelated badly when they were blown up, but a little editing and running the Smudge tool over them helped with the appearance.

I then started laying out the interior of Scodra, starting with the king's palace and garden at the east end.  So far so good.  Then the street grid, and because the area is not aligned with the screen pixels, I ended up with jagged edges and blobs.  Not great, but reasonable.  Then I tried placing the 'Old Fish' by the gate - and even at the scale of this image it's visibly not parallel to the street grid.

Perhaps if I can increase the pixel density in the image or go back and blow up the image further, I can improve the quality.  Otherwise I'll leave off buildings and just note the contents of the block.

Not everything succeeds at the first try, the trick is not to be afraid to take the second try.

Restoring Lost Art - Pictures from Monster and Treasure Assortment Set Three: Treasure

In the final installment of the pictures included in the loose leaf Monster and Treasure Assortment, here are two unattributed pictures.  The first one reminds me of the art work on pages 172 and 173 of the DMG.  Probably the barefoot guy.

Finding Treasure

Treasure

I'm tempted by the amount of shading on the second to assign it to Trampier, but I really can't say for sure.  Again speculation is welcome in the comments.

Restoring Lost Art - Pictures from Monster and Treasure Assortment Set Three: Ogre Magi

Another Sullivan piece, an incautious fighter negotiating with Ogre Magi.  Note the third one behind the screen, there's a scent of betrayal in the air

Cutting a deal

. This does a nice job of bringing out the oriental background of this monster.  It's a good companion to the illustration DCS did in the Monster Manual.

Monster Manual Ogre Magi

Although the others probably teased this guy about his nose.

Restoring Lost Art - Pictures from Monster and Treasue Assortment Set Three. Umber Hulk

This time I have an action shot by David C Sutherland III, an Umber Hulk snacking on a fighter as his henchman reconsiders his employment.

Umber Hulk in Action

Compare this picture to Sullivan's Umber Hulk in the Monster Manual and it appears rougher and cruder.  Also it has a full head of hair. 

Monster Manual Umber Hulk

Restoring Lost Art - Pictures from Monster and Treasure Assortment Three

A few weeks ago I posted a scan of Trampier's Manticore from the Monsters and Treasure Assortment playing from 1978.  What I've done here is run the manticore and the accompanying dragon pictures through GIMP to delete the blue background from the card stock they were printed on in an attempt to bring out the original pictures as the artists drew them..  Unfortunately, the heavy card stock (and the cheap scanner) ended up with many shades of blue on the scans, so they're still not pristine.  Still here they are, cleaner than they've been seen since 1978.

Trampier's Manticore

 

Full Frontal Dragon

I suspect that Sullivan is the artist for he dragon, but please leave your guess or knowledge in the comments.  I'll post the rest of the illustrations from the Assortment as I get them cleaned.

Building Campaign Maps 6 - Encounter Areas

 Using the techniques I've already shown, adding layers and a grid, I'm going to add Encounter Areas to my map.  This will be a separate layer for my use rather than something for the players edification.  The first step is to add another layer name 'Encounter Areas'.  The key difference is that now I'm going to change the opacity of the layer, so that previous (lower) layers can be seen through what I draw on the new layer. 

The Opacity control is located in the Layers dialogue box. Here I've set it to approximately 25%, or conversely, what ever I draw will be 75% transparent.

The next step is to add a hex grid to this level, using the same settings previously used on the Grid layer.  The only exception is that I changed the line color to blue. With the Opacity reduced, that makes the superimposed hex grids look purple.

Then I just had to choose which natural features comprised and separated the Encounter Areas, and (tediously) filled in each hex in the encounter area with the Area Fill tool.


In the end I have twenty one encounter areas, in a cool looking map.

Building Campaign Maps 5

Having mapped the information known to the players, the next step is to flesh out the map with minor towns, villages and connecting roads.

First I create a new Layer "Minor_Features" to contain the information.  The next decision to make is how many minor towns and villages will there be?  First I'll draw a distinction between small towns and villages; small towns for this exercise are independent communities, while villages are dependent on a larger urban area for a market.  I'll site small towns, such as Claudina and Masio Scampa on the route of the Via Egnatia the same way I sited the large towns and cities. 

For villages, I'll steal an idea from Warhammer FRP, and generate a random number of villages around each of the cities and towns.  Warhammer FRP  used the rule 4d6 villages around a city, but they were looking at population centers over 10,000, whereas Apollonia and Epidamnus are in the 5,000 - 10,000 population range.  So I'll use 2d6 for them and 1d6 for Lissus and Lychnidus.

Siting the villages will be done with some random rolls, one to determine the direction on the hex grid, the next to give an approximate distance.  Then I'll look for a natural feature, such as a river or valley and choose a hex in that area.

Another random number gives me the first letter of the village name, from there I'll choose one from lists of Greek and Illyrian place names available online.

After plotting them on the Minor_Features layer, I'll use the Path tool in GIMP to draw dashed lines for trails between the villages and towns.  The final effort looks like this.

 

If you compare this map to the version in the previous post in this series, you'll notice that the major roads have been redrawn in black. I liked the effect of the Path tool, better than the hand drawn ones I had done earlier. Good thing I had the foresight to put them on a different level than the terrain, it made deleting them a breeze with no terrain to carefully rebuild like I did when I removed the modern infrastructure.

I still have all the villages in the southern part of the map to add and some more trails to this layer, but that's just finishing it off.  If I come up with a new technique I'll post about it.

Building Campaign Maps with Google and GIMP 4

Cities, Rivers and Mountains

   As I showed in the previous post in this series,  I've added a layer which I've added a layer named "Player_Knowledge" to the xcf file.  On this layer, I'll site the large towns and geographic features that the players will know about when they arrive.

     The first question I need to answer is - what do they know about?  For my primary source of information, I'm going to use Strabo's Geographica (See Appendix N) Book 7, Chapters 5 (Illyria and Pannonia) and Chapter 7 (Epirus).  Fortunately, the footnotes embedded in the translation give the modern names for the cities and features, well modern as of 150 years ago.  Anything that I can't google, I'll use Smith's Dictionary of Greek and Roman Geography (Appendix N)  to find an intermediate place name.

Throwing it into a table we end up with.

Strabo	Modern	Notes
River Drilo	Drin
Lissa (Lissus)	Leshe	Also known as Alesso.  Large town.
Acrolissa		Not a town, but a reference to the citadel  at Lissus.  I'll use that piece of information and declare that it's a legionary or at least an auxiliary fort protecting the area against the Illyrian tribes.
Epidamnus	Durres	By Strabo's time the Romans had started calling it 'Dyrrachium' after the promontory, as the Greek name had inauspicious overtone in Latin. Small City.
River Aspus	Seman
River Aous	Vjose	Apollonia is situated about a mile from it.
Apollonia	Destroyed	The only remains of Apollonia are part of the Temple of Apollo on the hill. Small city.
Mons Candavia	Shebenik	Searching Smith's, it's located on the road from Epidamnus to Lychnidus.  The biggest mountain along the way is Shebenik.
Lychnidus	Ohrid	Over the border into Macedonia. Small town.
Pylon	Unknown	As this marks a Roman boundary, I'm ruling that it hasn't been determined at this point.  Determining the boundary may become part of the campaign.
Mons Ceraun	Mal i Kanalit	Derived from the Greek 'Thunder Split Mountain' - sounds like an adventure location to me.
Oricum	Orikum	Small town.
Panormus (harbor)	The Pasha's Harbor	The harbor for Oricum
Onchesmus	Sarande	Had to chase this one through Smith's to 'Forty Saints' to Sarande. Large Town
Cassiopae	Kassiopi	Actually on the coast of the island of Corfu. Looking at the map, it's just off the southern boundary, so I'll skip it.

By using the Modern names, I was able to place the cities and towns on the map.  I had said that the names showed up as mini-layers in GIMP.  I have since found that I can 'Merge Down' the mini-layers  into the lower level, so I now have them all in the Player_Knowledge layer. The gray line represents a known major road.

That pretty well wraps up adding the historical elements onto the basic map.  I still need to generate smaller towns and villages, as well a do overlays for encounter areas, mask the interior so I can save off a view for my players, with out them knowing which valley they need to go up to get across the mountains.  I'm also toying with laying out  the areas for the different tribes, but haven't decided on that step yet.