Tags
City, Dungeon, Dungeons & Dragons, Fantasy, Kudos, Labyrinth Lord, Maps, RPG, Temple
I love maps. I especially adore hand-drawn maps. They make me giddy.
Even more, I love finding new mappers out there who make these. I’ll post up links to a few that have made me especially happy in the past month over the next week. You know, mappers like John Carr over at Age of Ruins who draws awesome old school maps.
Check out some of these recent pieces he’s posted to his blog:
Buried City of Narizidun
Temple of Apoth Run
I’m pretty sure he’s using a fine graphic pen for this (I would actually guess a fine mechanical pencil and a lot of contrast enhancement initially – but the grid lines from the graph paper are so clear so it indicates that he’s scanning these as-is). His high contrast in-fill is fun and original and makes me think of my younger days as a D&D player.
Also, if you are a big fan of hand drawn maps like I am, just a quick note to remind you that Dyson’s Delves is now available through lulu – a 150+ page book of maps, adventures and dungeons for your old school fantasy gaming enjoyment.
Dyson's Dodecahedron 
So I ramble by WordPress to check my stats for the day, and holy crap I’m blowing away my previous most busy day, what the what?? Then I see this, and that explains it all! Thanks so much for the kudos, sir, it’s a high compliment.
In terms of drawing the maps, I sometimes use pencil to do an initial sketch, but my primary implement is a Sharpie pen (http://www.sharpie.com/enUS/Pages/fine-point-pen.aspx). I absolutely love those things; there’s no bleed through, no smudging, draw a strong black line, and they come 2 for $8 at my local pharmacy which isn’t too bad.
I actually do spend some time photoshopping as well. I play with the vibrance and saturation in addition to the brightness and contrast. I also add a smart sharpen filter and then play with those other settings again after applying it. I tend to pay just as much attention to the effect on the paper grid line as to my own lines.
Awesome. My own photoshopping is so simple because I’ve never really experimented with the program or with graphics in general. I’m a writing and mapping type, and only figured out how to use any graphics software when I started scanning these maps in for my first One Page Dungeon offering.
I have been following John’s work onlyrecently and I must say, the blue graph paper lines cause me to harken back to my mapping back in the day. Very nostalgic look!
Agreed, makes me feel like I’m ten all over again, except the maps are way better than I drew when I was ten.
Ha…. I know what you mean, good Sir!