[RPG Newswire] The Cartographic Arts

Via MonkeyBlood Design

It seems that maps have been getting a fair amount of press lately. Given that, I thought I'd devote a post to maps, the people who make them, and how you can make your own.

That said, I have missed large swatches of cartographers and useful map sites simply because I don't know about them. If you have experience with other mapping resources, please comment or drop me a line and let me know the best links I missed. If I get enough responses, I'll post a follow-up or a consolidated full update to handle the additions.

If you need a map for a project, don't hesitate to send an inquiry for a rate sheet to anyone linked here, especially when we get down into the list of Patreon campaigns. The worst they'll say is "No", and you may get a great map out of it, or possibly start growing a great business relationship.

Thanks for reading, and enjoy!

Real-World Maps
The Map of Native American Tribes You've Never Seen Before from NPR gives us a map of the indigenous tribes of North America before the European boats showed up. This seems to be a popular subject, since I also saw Another Native American Tribe Map shared on G+ by T to the E to the O.

The Roads Around Late-18th-Century London, Mapped in Close-Up Detail as published on Slate shows us a view of the world particularly interesting to travelers. If you're thinking of a different kind of map, consider a strip map, showing only the relevant details for a particular route. This approach reminds me of script sides in the theater world, where you only have your lines and the cues before and after. If all the merchant caravan knows is roads, then this style of map may be all they work with.

The Shrine of the Rat God

Because +Tim Shorts asked for it, I decided to pull a map from my gaming roots. I think this was my first "I actually took some time and did a decent job with it" map, probably from late 1987. I used a mechanical pencil and drew it on the first page of a graph paper notebook purchased during my freshman year in college. Yes, that's the very same notebook that contains the maps seen in Meanwhile, In The Game Box... from 2 years ago, and the map of the Tomb of Tor-Kantor from Gone Mapping. Don't Wait Up. back in July.

Microadventure: The Necromancer's Lab

I've been working on microadventures lately. It looks like my target word count is right around 200 words, which fits on one side of a 3x5 card. I want something that I can throw in a backpack and pull out for a one-session adventure if the party takes a hard left and charges for the edge of the map.

Here's the question: Will that brief 200 word description give enough detail to run an adventure?

Hopefully you can help answer that question. Here's a sample: