Today's edition of #WestMarchesWednesday is about Populating a Map!
Part of what I'm working on at the moment is a semi-sandbox based on the West Marches model, which I've talked about before briefly. It front-loads a lot of effort into building the world beforehand, and detailing down at the next level when you know what vicinity your players are heading to, and what they're interested in investigating. I've also been playing Gloomhaven a bit recently, which has helped with understanding the idea of exploring a pre-written world. This means you need to have an idea of how to populate your world, and the kinds of things to add to it. Some locations might be "solved" in only one adventure, while others might be larger locations with several "sub-adventures" within it. You can add some secrets that need to be discovered before certain areas can be explored, or social-based areas which require particular relationships to be established, allowing access to areas, or cutting off others. The map I've used above from Dungeon Magazine was a surprise including in the final printed issue of Dungeon magazine, uniting more than 30 maps by Christopher West which had been supplied over many years (and 65 issues!). This gave locations for all of the various sub-locations, and populated them into the world. I had used some of the individual maps to base entire campaigns around, and having a whole world map to use gave me an enormous amount of ideas to work with, which I'm still mining for inspiration, years later. So, I started with loose ideas of what I wanted to have in my "world" (a small area, not even a whole continent". My list is below, and I've started to 'fill out' some of these with ideas of what I want to include later.
I'll detail some of these a little more in posts to come, but if you have any other cool ideas, or inspiration you get from some of these short ideas, let me know! Also posted on Game Masters Stash on 8 January 2020. Comments are closed.
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AuthorI'm Luke. He/him pronouns. Archives
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