The Old Observatory

I completed my map of the Old Observatory (aka Filges lair) and I'm really quite happy with it. Gimp is definitely a hard program to master and, even after years of using it, I feel as if I've barely scratched the surface of what it can do. On the other hand I learn a trick or two every time I make a map with it and, in general, I think each map I make is a little better then the last.

The Old Observatory is particularly good for the style of 3D perspective mapping I like to do and I'm quite happy with the way things turned out. The statues and the bodies are 'cartoony' mainly because I really don't have the talent to make something realistic looking but it should be clear whats being represented. You should have no trouble downloading the map and its, obvously, more reasonably sized once downloaded.

Old Observatory Overview

Whispering Cairn Overview

I tend to redo all the maps and all the written material when I do a conversion. I find that this not only allows me to insert material in order to adapt the adventure to my home brew and also to simply adjust for my tastes it also means that I am very familiar with the material when I actually run it. As part of this process I generally redo all the maps and, partly for fun partly because it gives me another view of the layout I redo all the maps from a 45 degree perspective. Perspective maps have some aspects to them that are really beneficial in terms of running them but there are definitely some downsides. The most common problem is the perspective hiding things from the viewer. I'm used to this sort of thing by now so I don't usually have to much trouble with this but I also make modifications to the map to reduce or eliminate this so far as possible.

Its also worth noting that I'm no great cartographer and the truth is I never will be. My work improves as the years go by but its not up to a professional level. To get to a professional level one needs some kind of innate talent as well as practice etc. and I simply have no innate artistic talent.

In any case here is a view of the Whispering Cairn which will hopefully be interesting to those running this adventure. It gives an overview of the tomb with all the separate pieces attached. A few liberties have been taken - in one case a Hallway turns instead of running straight to the end because I had gotten to the edge of my workspace and it was not worth spending 40 minutes adding squares to the edge for such a minor part of the map. I've also increased the length of the elevator tubes. This is actually to give me more space to work with in order to avoid having parts of the map too often appear 'behind' other parts of the map. Actually I'm going to do that a little less in the future as I learned a new trick while working on Filge's Observatory that will hopefully allow me to keep things further apart for mapping purposes while conveying the actual height more accurately.

Whispering Cairn Overview

The Feral Dog Encounter

As I mention above I'm converting the Age of Worms adventure Whispering Cairn by Eric Mona to 4E. During the course of this conversion I went out of my way to make the scene in The Feral Dog particularly elaborate and I'm keen to share this.

There are two files for this work:
The PDF of the encounter itself - The Feral Dog (Encounter) 1.1
The .Jpg of the Encounter - The Feral Dog Battle Map

This work utilized material from a number of people. For the full list see the credits at the end of the PDF.

The Obligatory Initial Post

I've started this blog in order to have a space to place any gaming related material that I want to bring others attention too. Currently I'm working on converting Age of Worms to 4E and some of that material will end up located here.