Part of the blog bandwagon

Like a lot of people in this hobby, I love a good map. I am a map freak. I had a hard time figuring out what I was going to write about. I was really debating just putting up a bunch of maps I’ve made, but instead, in my rummaging through maps of yore, I rediscovered a set of maps I made for an overworld wargame set in one of my campaigns.

Background

In my pseudo-Classical Greek setting, the heroes had disappeared to a demi-plane and hopped around a bunch of islands (made a map for that too). While they were away on this high seas adventure, their hometown of Argot was about to be invaded by the Mineosi Empire, headed by the many-bodied Deathless One from beyond the Teeth of the Sun.

This was all in preparation for the last part of the campaign. After all of the fun sandboxy island-hopping stuff in the demiplane, they were going to be big dang heroes and save the city from certain destruction. Just how much certain destruction though would be determined by the results of a minigame.

Tracing Paper

Each of the players had a turn at fighting this war game with me to determine what had happened while they were away. And when I wrote the recaps, I wanted a visualization for what had happened.

Enter tracing paper. I placed some tracing paper over the map and drew troop movements and battles on it.

This may have been a really specific case, but I can see tracing paper being used for a lot of things, like as a secret GM layer; map overlays for climate, elevation, international borders, or spheres of influence; to track the PCs’ progress across the overworld; to slowly uncover secrets on a map you want to reuse; or for a disguise for your bear in Honey Heist.

Hope this inspires you to try out tracing paper in your map-making!

Here are some adventures I’ve written with maps I’ve drawn:

• A foray into that classic hatching-style dungeon map for Return to Perinthos, The Sibyl of the Ascent
• A forest with multiple layers in The Devil’s Millhopper
• An isometric map in The Lost Treasure of Granny Snake-Eyes

Here are some other map-related links:

• Chain Stocking the Hex Map by Prismatic Wasteland
• Lie with Fictional Maps by Gem Room Games Blog
• Anti-colonial TTRPG Map by Afraid of Encounters
• The Map Speaks: Communicating Via Maps by Personable Thoughts
• Don’t Prep Hexcrawls, Prep Hexframes by A Shrike for My Dreams
• Against Maps by Among Cats and Books
• My Favorite Map by Mindstorm
• VTTs, Movement, and Maps by Tychological Anomaly
• Freeform Pointcrawls by Wandering Diejack
• Every video by Map Crow
• Every video by JP Coovert