Campaign Creation: Map Making Tutorial Part 4

Okay, so now after all the hard work from the last 3 tutorials (part 1, part 2, part 3), the real fun begins. We're going to add the final touches to your map to really spark your players imaginations. Once again, we'll be using GIMP, the free open source image manipulation application to wrap-up our map project. If you have access to Adobe Photoshop, you can use that app as well. The methods and techniques will be very similar.

In tutorial 3, we went over a number of GIMP's features that helped you enhance your hand drawn map. We'll be using some of them for the final portions of the map. I'll cover some in this lesson but you may want to go over those techniques in lesson 3 if you haven't already.

The first thing that you want to do is open your flattened map file that you created in lesson 3 into GIMP. This flattened file will include all the text and the hand drawn, inked map background all on a single layer.

In your layers pallet, you will want to change the name of the layer from Background to Map. This way, we can add layers beneath the map layer as well as above if need be.

The next thing you want to do is to change the mode of the map file from Grayscale to RGB. To do that, go to Image >> Mode >> then select RGB. Your map is now ready to accept color information.

You are now going to add the paper texture background to your map. Download the image file to the right by clicking on the image so it opens on it's own, then right-clicking select Save Image As... and save the image to your desktop. Open that image in GIMP. Copy the image and paste it into the map file. When you paste it into your map file you won't see it right away but a new layer will be created called "Floating Selection (Pasted Layer)". Double click on that layer name and rename it 'Paper Background'. You should now see the paper texture. You can resize and position the paper using the scale tool, rotate tool and the move tool as needed.

After you have scaled and positioned the paper texture to fill the map area you want to move the Paper Background layer below the map layer. Now select the map layer and under the Mode drop-down menu select Multiply. You will now see your map drawing on top of the texture paper background. Already things are looking pretty good, right?

We're going to add a little color to the map to give it a hand painted appearance. Each color element will be on it's own layer. We'll start with the coastline. I like to add the color of water along the coast and lake shores. Select the Airbrush tool, then choose a fill color from the color pallet. Create a new layer and call it Coast and place it below the Map layer but above the Paper Background layer. With the Coast layer selected, choose Multiply from the Mode Drop-down menu once again. Now adjust the brush scale and begin painting along the coastline. I like to paint just the area of the ripples that I drew along the coast. You're painting doesn't have to be perfect, in fact, the more loose you are with it, the more handmade it looks. Using the Airbursh tool in this way can give a nice watercolor look to the colors you add to the map. You'll also notice that the texture of the background paper shows through the color as well when you have the layer mode set to Multiply.

Keep working your coastline and don't forget your river inlets, islands and lakes, altering the brush scale as needed.

Now, repeat this technique with other color elements such as forest or jungle, mountains and hills, whatever your imagination comes up with. I use the paper texture background as the general color of the land masses and just add color highlights. For example, at this scale, I didn't add any forests or jungles by hand, but instead I will add the colors to represent those areas. Again, I may have to adjust the opacity of a layer to get the right effect.

For the mountains, I use a gray tone and fill the shadowed area on the left side. Remember things don't have to be perfect, in fact the less perfect they are the better. It gives it that hand painted quality. Also note that all the colors are below the black outlines of the map. Those black outlines will cover any odd coloring 'out of the line' marks that you make.

Color in any other details that you've added to your map and with a little work, you can have a great prop to hand to your players. Below is my completed copy of the campaign world map.

Now, at this scale I get a pretty broad view of the lands, but my campaign is beginning in the Region of Eir'ian. So I followed the same techniques in these tutorials and created a detailed map of just that area.
You may notice that in this scale, I added 'trees' for the forested areas and additional towns and labeled areas of interest. This was going to be the map that I hand to my players but after a couple of sessions I realized that these level 1 grunts weren't going to need all this land to explore for quite a while so I 'zoomed' in a bit more and created this map:
This represents a tighter area of exploration that my players may actually get to. I focused more on the details of the smaller scale, again adding more areas of interest, towns and ruins. This is the main focus of my sandbox campaign but if I need to expand it then I have a general idea of what is out there. That is my argument for a top-down approach to map making/world building/campaign construction. All of these later maps were created using the same methods that I explained in these 4 posted tutorials.

I hope you found some of these hints and methods useful and I hope you use them in your creative campaign endeavors!

Dan O'Bannon, Alien and Intruder

This past Saturday, over at Lamentations of a Flame Princess, I learned that screenwriter Dan O'Bannon passed on. I grew up with many of his films including Alien, Heavy Metal and Dark Star, which he made with John Carpenter and Ron Cobb (set designer for Conan the Barbarian). He was one of the first handful of film creators that I began to follow during my formative years.

I begged my parents to take me to see Alien back in '79 and that movie scared the pants off of me! It continues to be, IMHO, the greatest Sci-Fi horror film ever made and sets a bar that has yet to be surpassed.

This brought to mind a little game that I enjoyed playing back then called Intruder put out by Task Force Games. The game was based on the Alien concept of an Intruder on board a space station that goes through metamorphosis and becomes more powerful and harder to kill (possibly even cloning itself) as the game goes on. It is a race against time as the Intruder becomes immune to the weapons that the members of the crew have or can build. And to make matters worse, all the animals from the science lab have escaped making that much harder to track down the real Intruder!

This was a great little game, one of many from Task Force Games that I played back in the day. Simple to play, very fast paced, and filled with enough randomness to make every game a unique experience. If things looked bleak, you can even escape on one of two shuttle crafts, but watch out, the Intruder may have hidden aboard!


It was a thrilling little game inspired by a great film written by a very talented screen writer. Dan O'Bannon will be missed by his films will always inspire.

Campaign Creation: Map Making Tutorial Part 3

Part 1 and Part 2 of the tutorial can be found here.

For part 3 of our tutorial, we're going to deal with adding text labels to your map.

There are two ways to do this, one is by hand and the second is with your trusty computer. I prefer to add the text using the computer as I found that my hand written text, no matter how hard I try, is rough and wild (and in a not so good way). Creating real nice stylized text by hand is an art in an of itself. I'll touch on letting by hand in a future post, but for now, I am going to focus on using the computer to add text to your map. Please note that I am not affiliated with any of the products or websites that I mention in these tutorials. These are the tools that I have found work best for me. You, of course, can use whatever resources that you have access to.

For this portion of the tutorial and the next we will be using the computer to add text to your map. You will need access to a computer (of course), a scanner and a computer application that will allow you to add text to your map. If you have Adobe Photoshop (PS), you can use that as your application, if not, GIMP is a free open source image manipulation application that does much of what Adobe Photoshop can do. It's a very good substitute for Photoshop and did I mention it's free? So if you need to, go get GIMP now. I will be using GIMP in this portion of the tutorial but the methods that I'll be talking about can be applied in both Photoshop and GIMP. You can also use Adobe Illustrator for the text manipulations if you have that.

A note on GIMP: I understand that if you haven't used an image editing application before that there can be a bit of a learning curve. There are many good GIMP Tutorials out there to help you get started (http://www.gimp.org/tutorials/) so I won't be going into details here on some of the basics. This is not a tutorial on how to use GIMP. I will, however, show you the techniques that you can use with your map. I understand that it can be frustrating if you are new to this but just be patient and keep at it. You'll gain a bit more knowledge each time you work with it.

The first thing that you want to do is find some good fonts. Don't use the standard fonts that come with your computer. There's nothing there that is too interesting for a fantasy map. I would suggest that you go here: www.1001freefonts.com . Here you will find free fonts for both Mac and PC. Look around, find some interesting ones and download them. You can install the fonts based on your computer OS instructions.

The next thing that you want to do is scan your map into your computer. Be sure that you have set your scanner to 300 dpi (dots per inch). This is a good resolution for printing out your map. If you are worried about file size you can scan your work at 150 dpi. If you scan at 72 dpi, when you go to print out your map it will look all jagged and bitmapped. Also you will only need to scan this in as a greyscale image. It will keep the file size down and make it easier to work with. We'll be adding color much later in the process in Part 4 of this series. Your scanning software user interface will have most of these options for you to choose from.

You can use GIMP or PS to scan your file directly into those applications.
In PS go to File >> Import >> you should see your scanner in the list.
In GIMP go to File >> Acquire >> Scanner/Camera >> you should see a list with your scanner.
If you have already scanned and saved your image file you will have to open it in your application. To do this, go to File >> Open >> then browse to your image file and select to open.

You should now have your map opened up in GIMP. The image below will illustrate out some of the items that we will be talking about.
Another note about these image applications programs; all the different elements are added on different layers. You will be doing this for each text item or map element that you add. Yes, it will add to the file size, but in the end you will 'flatten' all the layers into just one single layer.

Also, remember to save your work frequently. We're in the 21st century now and I'm sure all of us knows what happens when you don't save your work!

So let's get busy, shall we?

Click on the Text Tool in the tools pallet. If you click on your map a small window will pop up. Type the text that you want to display in the window. You will see it appear on the map. In the Options Pallet, select the font and size that you want. After you have made your selection, click Close. You'll notice in the layers pallet that the text has now created it's own layer above the map background layer. If you don't see your layers, click on the drop-down menu at the top of the layers window.

If you need to move the text to a different place on the map, select the Move Tool. In the Options Pallet, select 'Move the active layer'. Select the layer with the text that you want to move and use the Move Tool to move it to a new position on the map.


Now, use this method over and over again, adding new text to your maps. A good method is to make the first letter of the word a larger sized font. Unfortunately, in GIMP, this has to be done on a separate layer which might get a little unwieldy. There may be an easier way to do this in GIMP but I haven't found it yet. You will not have that problem if using Photoshop.Now, there's one other thing that I will show you here. You can add additional elements, such as a compass, to you map. You can find one online, scan one in or you can download and use this one I created. Remember, if you look for one online, be sure that it is of a high enough resolution for your map to print properly. To download the compass image, click on the image to the right, when it opens in the window, right click and save image.

Open this Compass file in GIMP (or PS). Then go to 'Select" >> All >> then copy (Edit >> Copy) the image and paste (Edit >> Paste) it into your map file. You won't see it right away but a new layer will be created called "Floating Selection (Pasted Layer)". Double click on that layer name and rename it 'Compass'. You can resize and position the compass using the scale tool and the move tool as needed.

You may notice that the white space around the compass image may be covering up some of your map. What you want to do here is be sure that you have selected the compass layer in the layer window, in the Mode drop down menu, select 'Multiply'. You will notice that the white background will disappear leaving only the black of the image exposed. We will be using this technique a bit more in lesson 4.

At this map scale, I add dots or squares for cities and ruins.

Now, you map should be looking pretty good. Be sure you have a version of this file saved. Now you will flatten all the layers into one. Do this by right clicking on one of the layers and selecting 'Flatten Image'. Save this version of the file under a different name so that you have both versions to work from just in case you need to alter your layers once again.
This is a very brief lesson using GIMP to add text to your hand drawn map. I understand that this might be a lot of information but I hope this can get you started with using an image manipulation application to alter your maps. Just be patient and keep working at it.
In the next tutorial, we will be adding color and texture to give your map an old, worn look.

Read Me A Story, Please...

This week has proven to be quite busy for me. In fact, posting might be a little lite the next couple of weeks. I'll get back to my map making tutorial and other Warlock posts soon.

But in the meantime....Why not enjoy a little story.


Crawler of the Mists Audio

Don't forget the pictures too!

Fantasy Friday

No one captures the spirit of classic dungeon exploration better than Peter Mullen. Peter Mullen's stylized fantasy art has been a staple of the Old School Revival and his work has been featured on the covers of Fight On! Magazine, Knockspell Magazine, Swords & Wizardry Core Rules and White Box, as well as various other published material. From his paintings, pastels, and pen and ink work, his odd and eerie visions of heroes and monsters burst forth from the page to draw the viewer into the exciting yet deadly atmosphere of treasure filled tombs and outlandish horrors.

Alas, I blab too much when but a few pictures will do what words cannot.

Explore Peter's work now!

Campaign Creation: Map Making Tutorial Part 2

Hey all you grognards out there, sharpen your pencils 'cause we're starting part two of our map drawing tutorial. You can check out part 1 here if you missed it.

This tutorial will help you Game Masters out there add some style and some finishing touches to your campaign map that you may be handing to your players. Everything at the gaming table could be a prop that helps enhance gameplay and nothing sparks imagination more than an interesting map.

I've seen a lot of campaign maps out there in the interwebz, most of which are very inspiring in many ways. Also many fantasy books come with maps so you can follow the progress of the character's adventures throughout the stories and novels. These are all great inspirations for map features and ideas. Use them!

In this part of the tutorial, we'll be going over 'inking' your penciled map. For this I recommend that you pick up some nice pens to work with. I suggest the Faber Castell pens. You can pick them up at your local art supply store or online. The Faber Castell Black, Fineliner Set of 4 comes with four different widths and goes for about $6.99 per set online. They use a nice black india ink. If you can't find the Faber Castell pens you can go with the black Micron pens. These also come in different widths.

Now, the reason for the different pen widths is that you will use them to create a variety of 'line weights' on your map. It is a very minor detail but adds quite a bit to your finished map. For example, I use a thicker line weight for the coastlines and mountains while most other detail in the map use a thinner pen point.

Let's start with the coastline. I'll use the Faber Castell F (fine) pen and I'll start redrawing over my penciled line. Remember to keep the coastline irregular and jagged. I like to leave little inlets for rivers and bays for coastal towns. Don't forget to outline any islands the same way.
Once you are done with the coastline, I like to add some ripples along the shoreline to give the impression of water. I do that by using the Faber Castell S (super fine) pen. I start by adding a squiggly line along the coast in what would be the ocean or sea. I break the squigglys up so it is a broken line but still follows the contour of the coastline. When I finish with that initial line (remember your islands too) I go back an add a second squiggly line (ripple) following the contour of the first shoreline ripple. I keep this line broken up even more than the first. Again, don't forget your Islands. Note that if islands or land masses are close together, you don't have to squeeze a ripple between them. Just make the ripple go around both pieces of land. The ripples are there just to give the impression of land masses in water.
Now take a look at your work. You should see your well defined coastlines appear to be causing a ripple in water. Your islands should look really nice too. If you have any trouble, just keep working at it. After a few attempts you'll soon start to get the hang of it.

You'll also notice how the line-weights already start to bring some dynamics to your map.Now, on to the mountains. Again, I will be using the Faber Castell F (fine) pen to draw the mountains. The mountains are nothing more than overlapping upside-down 'V's'. Remember to vary the shapes of these upside-down V's a bit too. By the time that you're done inking these you'll wish that you haven't made so many mountain ranges!Once you are done with the mountains, there's one more thing to add to them and for that I will be using the Faber Castell S (super fine) pen once again. What I add now to the mountains is some shading and texture by just adding short strokes, all in the same direction and all on the same side of the mountains. Think of it as if the sun were rising on the right side of the page, the left side of the mountains would be hidden in shadows. I like to use these short strokes but you can add a heavier shadow if you like. You can use the same technique with hills as well.To draw the strokes, I find it easier if I turn the paper so that I 'pull' the lines towards me. It is a bit easier to keep them parallel this way. Vary the lengths of the lines too.Your map should really start to be taking shape at this point. The last thing to add are the rivers. For these I use the Castell S (super fine) pen once again. Remember, there's not may bridges over these rivers that are off the main road becoming an obstacle challenge for your PC's to overcome.

At this scale, I like to add sea-trade routes and major roads. For these I would suggest using The Faber Castell XS (extra super fine) for these elements.

You should have a pretty good looking map at this point!You'll notice that I didn't add any cities or forests yet or lables. I like to add them a bit later and that will be covered in part 3.

Fight On Issue 7 Now Available

Just in time for the holidays is Fight On #7. Another great magazine from the OSR filled with classic goodness. But don't take my word for it, read on!

Deep under the misty mountains, the proudest and toughest keep Fighting On! Join us in those days of blood and plunder by picking up a copy of issue 7, dedicated to M.A.R. Barker and featuring EIGHT adventures, tables, settings, reviews, encounters, monsters, spells, magic items, new classes, non-canonical expansions to Empire of the Petal Throne, and much, much more! With art and articles by Akrasia, Mark Allen, Lee Barber, Baz Blatt, Calithena, Jeff Dee, Krista Donnelly, Allan Grohe, Zach Houghton, Gabor Lux, James Maliszewski, Peter Mullen, Stefan Poag, Alex Schroeder, Anthony Stiller, and more, this is one of the most beautiful issues we've produced. Take your game to the next level and buy it today!

You can get the new issue at http://www.lulu.com/content/8047414 .

Table of Contents
Legend of the Dullahan (Matthew Riedel)……………….3
Creepies & Crawlies (Zach Houghton & Douglas Cox).....7
Temple of the Sea Demon (Gabor Lux)…………………9
Knightly Orders (Robert “Treebore” Miller)…………....14
The Shaman (James Maliszewski)………………………16
Thrazar (Steve Zieser)………………………………….19
The Devil’s in the Details: Pé Chói (Baz Blatt)…………20
Former Gnomish Caves (Alex Schröder)……………….25
A Part of the Tsuru’úm (Baz Blatt)……………………..26
Barony of Northmarch (Coffee)…………………….….27
Rad Expanse of the Broken Moon (Brian Isikoff)……...28
Song of Tranquility (Jerry Stratton)………………….…29
Tables for Fables (Age of Fable)……………………….35
Maze Master’s Miscellany (Beaudry, Random, & Rients).36
Grognard’s Grimoire (Ragnorakk & Mistretta)…………37
Beware the Lord of Eyes (Allan T. “Grodog” Grohe)….38
The Forgotten Entity (Geoffrey McKinney)…………....44
Mooning Ixtandraz (Peter Schmidt Jensen)…………….45
Wandering Harlot Table (Adam Thornton)………….…46
From Tekumel’s Underground (Aaron Somerville)……..48
The Search for Lord Chúrisan (Krista Donnelly)……….52
Taking it with you (Lawson Reilly)……………………..61
The Duchy of Briz (Akrasia)…………………….……...63
Darkness Beneath: The Fane of Salicia (Lee Barber)…....66
The Four M’s (Calithena)………………………………77
Critical Misfortune (Clovis Cithog)……………………..78
One Charge Left (Lee Barber)………………………….79
One Time at D&D Camp… (Harnish & Robbins)……..80
Finding Players (James Edward Raggi IV)………….…...82
Merlyn’s Mystical Mirror (various)……………………...85
Artifacts, Adjuncts, & Oddments (Green & Calithena)....88

Front cover by Peter Mullen. Back cover by Brad Johnson. Fight On! and Erol Otus logos by Jeff Rients. M.A.R. Barker photograph by Giovanna Fregni. Interior art and cartography by Mark Allen (portfolio.marjasall.com: 3,5,29,33,37,38,42,44,48,49,56,57,60,62), Matthew Riedel (4,7), Black Blade Publishing (blackbladepublishing.com: 5,37), Dei Games (deigames.com, 6), Anthony Stiller (7,40,41,42,43), Lee Barber (ghosttower.crithitcomics.com: 8 (logo),66,68,71,72,73,74,75,77,79), Kelvin Green (junkopia.net/kelvinsdirtybits/main.html: 8,88), Otherworld Miniatures (otherworld.me.uk: 9), Gabor Lux (10,11,12,13), Bill Hooks (14,15,36), Tita’s House of Games (tekumel.com: 15), Steve Zieser (19), Kesher (23,51,59), Alex Schröder (25,43,54,58,84), Baz Blatt (26), Coffee (27), Brian Isikoff (28), Jerry Stratton (www.godsmonsters.com; 30,31,32,33), Age of Fable (35), Martin “Istarlömé” Gillette (40), Peter Jensen (45,88), Jeff Dee (50), Talzhemir (51), Mikko Torvinen (64), Akrasia (65), Robert S. Conley (66), Ben Robbins (80), James Forest & Larry Whitsel (81), Stefan Poag (84), M.A.R. Barker (85), Joe Wetzel (86), and Eric Bergeron & Rob Kuntz (87).