My title isn't that great... but what I'm thinking about is doing some outdoors (forests, cities, etc) style maps but with the same philosophy of the old school dungeon maps. Right now I'm shifting my weekly-gaming style to a parchment background with some ink-looking dungeon walls & features using old school symbols. It's working out well with my prep time and such and I was thinking about doing the same...

Anybody got a style in mind? example map of what I might be thinking about? Other thoughts about how I might do this?

The goal is to get some readily repeatable mapping elements that will minimize the time needed to visually explain the map I have in my mind yet maintain enough clear elements as to eliminate player confusion about the various elements.

Thanks in advance... eager to see what we can come up with!

Edit: In all reality, after doing some searching... the best outdoor style that "fits the bill" are torston's parchment maps. The difference between those and what I'm looking for is an approach that is more modular and quick - I do anticipate recreating torston's fantastic work, but that is definitely a good point of inspiration.

torstan

01-24-2009, 08:43 PM

Do you mean something like this?

Here's a tree trunk in TSR blue:

9578957995809581

Though I guess if you are doing this as parchment maps, you'd rather have it in black?

Hawke

01-24-2009, 08:54 PM

The color conversion wouldn't be difficult to do, but yeah! that's cool... where might I find more?

torstan

01-24-2009, 09:12 PM

I'll do my best to hack apart a few previous outdoor maps that I have and give you the line art for the different elements. Here are the pngs for some more trees:

95839587958895899590

torstan

01-24-2009, 09:15 PM

And here are the jpgs just in case they are useful:

95919592959395949595

Hawke

01-24-2009, 10:41 PM

Very cool! Thanks so much...

torstan

01-25-2009, 08:53 AM

What else are you after and I'll see if I've got them somewhere...

Hawke

01-25-2009, 02:00 PM

I guess some neat bushes and rocks... kind of low terrain or to be used as difficult terrain. Just these trees should help, i couldn't figure out how to do a good hand drawn version (was focusing too much on the treetops/leaves) and didn't think the trunk would be perfect.

How long has the rptools gallery been down? I know you had a bunch of cool stuff in there, is it mirrored anywhere?

torstan

01-25-2009, 02:25 PM

Nuts. No I had most of my stuff there, but the recent website rebuild seems to have screwed that up. I'll get it all back up soon enough. I had meant to put together a website in the near future - this should be a good motivator.