Tuesday 29 June 2010

The Campaign Map is ready.





I took some shots of my map from Altstein in the north to Eisenburg-Essling in the south.
The area is dominated by the Teiner Valley which runs from north to south. The whole area is loosely based on the Tyne valley in the north of England where I was born and bred. The orientation is altered from west to east and the topography altered to suit the campaign.
Place names are a mix of made up names and Germanised real names eg. Altstein = Alston (where my wife is from) , Heydn Brucke = Haydon Bridge ( where I went to school) and Hecksheim = Hexham (where I grew up and where I work).
Doing this gives me a feel for the lie of the land and should be useful in setting up the terrain and in visualising the troop movements on the map.
Has anyone else tried this ?.

6 comments:

  1. Nice cartography, Paul, and a good idea using real terrain and place names as the basis.

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  2. Hi there Paul,

    Agreed. Imaginative, attractive, functional, and not overly cluttered. You've given me some good ideas for revamping my own campaign map, which has never quite satisfied on 2-3 of these points. Well done!

    Best Regards,

    Stokes

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  3. I agree with the previous comments. A good plan, well executed . . . and it gives me some ideas too.


    -- Jeff

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  4. Excellent map. Looks handdrawn (including towns and all). Hand-lettered, too? If so, that's excellent lettering work! How big is it overall?

    As for geography, mine usually comes out of my head, not from the real world. But I did use an island off the coast of Antarctica as the basis for an island inhabited by Norse dwarves in one of my fantasy gaming settings. The real island is uninhabited, so I made up habitated places as well as all of the place names. On the other hand, that was not a place I had ever been even remotely close to in real life.

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  5. Thank you kindly,
    the map was made with 6 sheets of A4,I typed the names using a font called French Script MT (because it looks C18ish) in various sizes and colours and placed them roughly where I wanted them on the 6 sheets.
    After printing them I just drew in the features with some felt pens,I was going to paint them but it just looked like felt pen anyway.
    My wife glued them onto some lining wallpaper for me 'cos I'm a bit clumsy with stuff like that.
    I would have loved a fancy map made with computer software but funds are low and the whole project has been done on the cheap so it seemed fitting to do it this way.

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  6. Ah, I hadn't thought of printing out just the text and then drawing the map on/around that. Great idea!

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