Ma-a-aps, Ma-a-aps, Ma-a-aps

I suck at making D&D maps and it makes me sad.

I've tried a couple of programs, and they are easy enough to use, but my maps always look terrible to me. I hem and haw over how much forest, or how many villages, or other stuff that probably doesn't matter all that much in the long run. These elements, however, form a series of mental blocks that cause me to throw my hands in the air in defeat.

An alternate method, and one I used to use back when I ran Stars Without Number, is to generate them randomly. (My generator of choice is Wizardawn) Of late, however, I don't feel a connection to a map I generate randomly, it's not "mine." I don't know why this wasn't a problem back in the day. (Probably because I was gearing up for grad school and I didn't have time to let things like that bother me.)

I'm going to make another attempt tonight with Hex Kit, a program I got in the hugediculous bundle hosted on itch.io earlier this month. The program itself is not complicated or difficult to use... I just hate the maps that I make.

I don't recall this being such a problem when I was a kid, or even in college. Perhaps it's because I didn't have the exposure to map making greats like Dyson Logos and Niklas Wistedt. Maybe I have the map-making equivalent of the mindset that some people have where they think they can't DM because their game isn't like /\/\att /\/\ercer. (That's a whole other can of worms I'm not going to open up.)

I'll give it a last shot, and if I hate them then fuck it, I guess we'll use the Known World or something.

Shifting Gears

I'm putting my Troika game on ice after we finish the present quest tomorrow.

It looked a certain way in my head, but it's just not turning out that way. Sometimes it's cool when a game takes a direction you didn't expect, and sometimes it's just bleh. This is one of those blehs. If I do return to Troika someday, I want to turn up/emphasize the Spelljammer/Saga vibe I was trying to go for. This might require me to write entirely new backgrounds. I was doing that before the plague hit, but I don't even know where the file is.

I will be running some Old School Essentials for a chunk of my old college gaming group. That's pretty dope. I'm just trying to decide how much of the Advanced Genre Rules book I want to use. Going to go bottom up for the setting, that's for sure.

I hope all of you blog-comrades are doing well.