Tuesday, March 15, 2011
Geomorphs - the City
I've been thinking of a set of geomorphs over the last couple of days, and here is why. Even though I like the fly by the seat of your pants way I've been handling urban encounters in my Legends of Early Greyhawk campaign I noticed that my players have been seeking out a lot of different shops and taverns ect. which is to be expected. So a started to think that I could have a little map for each one of these kinds of places ready to go in my binder for when it is needed. The problem is that they really go to town when they go to town, and it would start getting weird if every type of place looked the same. The answer, geomorphs. Although there may be similarities at least each location would be different in size, layout and possibly number of floors. I could get a couple of 5"x 5" and a pair of 3 x 5" tiles on a letter sized sheet of card. At 5ft. per inch I think I have the basis for a really interesting set of urban geomorphs.
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I just found your blog; good post. Some friends and I have begun work on mapping out some of Greyhawk City and are using some of Gygax's methodology from his Yggsburgh book, making templates for various buildings.
ReplyDeleteWe plan to blog it and by interesting coincidence to your latest post, we've also posted the Gygax-Games comment. Although yours predates ours by a few weeks.
I am referencing Yggsburgh as well as the Gygaxian Fantasy Worlds books for a starting point on the building maps. I haven't put much time into getting the final geomorphs done as my campaign seems to be on hold for the time being. I'm all ready to put a sample together so perhaps I should post one soon. I'll keep a look out for the stuff your group is creating.
ReplyDeleteThe GFW Canting Crew does have a nice bridge and gate tower to map out.
ReplyDeleteRight now, I am going through a few of the Yggsburgh supplements for comparison. The supplements weren't actually done by Gygax, but they should follow the building rules he set down in the main Yggsburgh book. I would the supplements done by Jeff Talanian, who worked closely with Gygax on the Castle Zagyg: Upper Works box. There is only one degree of seperation there.
Gygax set up a pattern for having 460' square neighberhood blocks. It is a convenient size, and, coincidentally enough, comes very close to the map grid we are setting up for the city. On a 3 x 3 page map (8½"x11" graph paper with 5 sq/1"), each square actually equals 469.3'.
One of the things I want to do is make a compatible block template for anyone to print out or use on their computer to make their own additions if they'd like.
Drawing geomorphs on my computer is only slightly less tedious than paper & pencil.