Ron Edwards has put together a cool “Heartbreaker Redemption” project on Kickstarter called Circle of Hands. He’s also hired me to draw maps for it. Which is of course a mistake because I’m slow as fuck at drawing maps. Just ask Venger Satanis and Alexander Macris. This is the last reminder of the kickstarter because it ends in something like 12 hours. So if you are reading this, and think the maps below are pretty ok looking, you should rush off to check out the kickstarter. Like NOW.

That said, this is one of those projects that has totally revitalized my mapping. I’ve been pushed and shoved out of my mapping comfort zone by his requests. He’s managed to get the following work out of me so far – only the first of these has been approved as a final, the rest are works in progress for the book:

This mountain fortress is on the actual kickstarter page. It rocks on toast. I like how I made the south side of the fortress crinkly, utilitarian, and with very small spaces, which accents how open and airy the north side of the fortress is, where a single old rose garden is bigger than any room on the south side.

This ruined church in the swamp forest isn’t done yet, but drawing it actually involved looking up forest density statistics. In the end I decided to draw only trees over 1″ thick, so there would be roughly two to four times as many trees as shown by the trunks in the map.

This shrine on the shore of a rough mountain lake is still a work in progress, needing some work on the water and trees and maybe some more mountain. But I find it very evocative and it actually reminds me of some ponds that I explored as a kid.

This is the fortified ship-building town of Spur, a map that is very much still in progress (as you can tell from the sketched out buildings, city blocks and walls. Expect it to see a major change to the northern wall structure before it gets finalized.

This last map is one that even Ron hasn’t seen yet. It’s a town built up around an inhospitable spur of rock. There’s a small fortress and bailey at the top of one hill, and a collection of buildings scattered about the various levels of the stony shore.

Alright, you’ve seen the maps. Go back the Circle of Hands kickstarter!