The RPG Blog Carnival is setting up its tents for April here at a Character For Every Game. The Carnival is a monthly event hosted by various RPG blogs and archived over at the fairly new archive site hosted by Nevermet Press.

The carnival works by you making posts to your blogs along the same topic of this month’s carnival during the month. Link to your post in a comment on this page and at the end of the month I will post a follow-up that includes links to every other post in the carnival – my own and yours!

Cartography is a key element in most traditional RPGs and many players and GMs have emotional and intellectual attachments to maps – modern, fantasy, dungeon and others. The first thought is of course the traditional regional fantasy maps as seen in various fantasy novels through the years (particularly the gorgeous maps from the Lord of the Rings and Hobbit novels, for instance). But among the old-school D&D crews dungeon maps come up near top of mind – either the old-school blue-and-white maps of the old modules, or maps like my own hand-drawn maps that we used to see in Chaosium games for instance.

In addition we see city maps, road maps and in more social and political RPGs we map the various groups and power structures in a city or environment (or in a game of vampire, a map of the coterie power structures).

Personally, my addiction is to fantasy dungeon maps, but I love a good map of any kind. During the month of this blog carnival I’ll be posting a few more of my own maps, maybe try my hand at another one-hour-map or two, and posting links to some of my favourite maps available across the internet. I’m also planning to experiment with other forms of maps – power maps, event maps, treasure maps and so on.

In the meantime, you can check out my collection of maps already posted to the blog through the Maps page, as well as a few on the downloads page and of course my pile of trend-setting geomorphs.

How do you get involved? Talk about maps, show off maps, make maps!

• Tell the world about your favourite maps for RPGs (or even for non-games).
• Draw your own maps – try out the one hour map challenge or try your hand at a style of map you haven’t drawn before.
• Create some geomorphic map tiles that mesh with mine and send them to Dave Millar for his awesome mapping program.
• Scour the web for cool maps and link to them.
• Tell us why you love maps, why you hate maps, or how maps have changed your games.

Post your links as comments here and I’ll follow up at the end of the month with a full overview of this carnival.

In addition to the RPG Blog Carnival, April is also the month for everyone working on the A to Z blog challenge. Those of us involved in this challenge will be making a post every day except Sundays as part of the challenge, and the posts will be alphabetically linked. So my post tomorrow will be my “A” Post, and Saturday will be my “B” post and so on.