Tuesday, May 31, 2011

Looking at City Geomorph Production

So I haven't forgotten about making geomorphs for urban structures but I have taken a bit of time to collect materials and put a production plan together.


The idea here is to be able to make some interesting maps on the fly for players who have their characters enter cities and towns. The way I do this normally is to simply do without maps for the most part and be almost completely descriptive. I have an idea for what these places might look like but for the most part I'm suggesting "shop", "town hall" and "tavern" and letting the players fill in the details with their imaginations. This works well for the most part but its highly abstract and its easy for me to lose track of what's gong on in the location, who might be there and what opportunities might be there for the players. Most of these locations are not pre-planned and I like that aspect but it would sure be nice to put a map down for the players and have their thief notice that the shop keeper doesn't have a line of site to him and try to nab some free gear.


So for my first step I've created some floor tiles in Illustrator and Photoshop to represent stone and wood as these are going to be the most likely surface I'm going to need. 




Next I gathered a number of maps from various RPG books and am going to replicate these. So far there are taverns, shops, public buildings and temples among others. Once these are complete I would like to modify them to a standard for geomorph use and divide them into components. Once done I hope to be able to simply throw a couple or more tiles together and get an original structure of the type desired.