Another night without much to say, but I did make good progress on a map for my D&D game. I was correct in that sketching the map by hand is a necessary part of my world and story discovery process.
There is a downside. I need big paper. I’m working on 22×17 in. graph paper right now. This, in and of itself, is not a problem, but it does make getting a proper scan of the final product difficult if not impossible without spending a chunk of change. As far as I can tell, even my local UPS doesn’t have the facility to scan large documents like that, and I have checked both my local library and the nearest university library to no avail.
A scanned copy isn’t essential. A few careful pictures will do the trick, but it would be nice to just scan it in and have a manipulable digital copy that I can play with. As it stands, I’m considering tracing it, but I have been working on a mountainous region, which means lots of mountains, which means lots of lines.
I could have used smaller sheets, but I’ve tried that in the past. That way lies another, different time sink. I like to work at a scale that results in decent sized blank spaces. In this 22×17 in. format with one inch containing a 4×4 grid, I’ve made each square 12 sq. mi. I’ll fill in some spaces, but there’s an expanse of sea on this map as well as a swathe of open, arid, high mountain plains.
If I tried to replicate that with 8.5×11 in. panels, I’d have some with basically nothing on them, and I hate that. My brain wants to fill it because those pages feel wasted. Then there’s the trouble of making sure each page aligns with the next, the annoyance of cutoff grid squares, and trying to make several very small maps feel like a cohesive whole. Big pages work better for me.
The mapping is going well. I’m about halfway, maybe a little further, through the first map I wanted to work on. I may buy a letter stencil for drafting to make my labels a little cleaner.
I’m not aiming for a publishing-quality map. That’s outside my skill set and a perfectionism that kills my momentum. Instead, I’ve been looking at the original map of the Forgotten Realms and using that as my guidepost. Good enough to get the message across and full of interesting things to explore, those are my goals.
Until next time!
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