Secret Ways Map

About 3 years ago I ran off a bunch of Dyson-style hand drawn maps.  I was following his website and it inspired me to try out a few myself.

Below is one that never got elaborated upon.  Secret Ways, is a hidden cave with a concealed bandit lair and in turn a secret crypt of undead.  So the bandits are hiding behind a concealed door in some natural caves and unbeknownst to them there is a secret door in their hide-out that leads to an ancient crypt that has undead inhabitants.

Secret Ways Map 2013

The map is usable as a one session encounter in almost any Fantasy game system so it might make an appearance in one of my campaigns at some time.

Safe Harbour Alusia

A couple of maps for the Alusia OpenQuest or Runequest game (rules to be determined).  The players will start on a boat coming to Alusia but the first stop will be at Safe Harbour on North Island. The one pretty safe island in the Alusia island chain. Only the occasional giant lizard to be worried about.  No angry natives or sneaky lizardmen.

North Island, Alusia

I did decide to include a mine.  Which on a small island is a bit of a stretch, but I figure North Island is at 30 miles long and 10 miles wide.  When you think tropical island mines you think phosphate (fertilizer). But I doubt that would be a commodity in the bronze age.  So I will go with an open pit gold mine.  Mining placer deposits of gold in the Pacific is not entirely unlikely. A quick Google search reveals there is an open pit gold mine in the Solomon islands.  The mine is worked by settlers who have become in debt in some way to the Viceroy of the Islands.  The de facto leader of the island appointed by a Sultan in Valarre (one of the seven cities).

The rest of the island is covered in grasslands and coconut trees.  Except for the southern tip of the island where there is a large, rocky area that is home to nesting birds and giant lizards. Blackseal bay provides a calm harbour for ships from the mainland and Safe Harbour itself has sandy beaches where ships can be beached and repaired.  Nearby Hog island is like it sounds. Hogs were let loose on the island by an early shipwreck and now they overrun the island.  It provides a handy place to collect meat but they are quite dangerous.

I tried two different version of the Safe Harbour map one with sepia tones and one using custom shading (thatch for cultivation, waves for the sea and pebbles for the trail).  I think I prefer this version that I have posted.

Safe Harbour Map

The buildings are all single storey huts made from the local palm trees with thatch roofs and woven reed walls. Along the beach are a number of guarded storage sheds that protect goods that are shipping back to Valarre (gold, diamonds, exotic birds, coconuts). Players can purchase use of one of the huts or simply sleep outside on the beach. The weather is generally temperate with occasional overnight rain.

Different Worlds #5

Different Worlds #5 Cover

Over the years I have purchased half-a-dozen issues of the magazine “Different Worlds”.  The magazine was an earlier role-playing magazine put out by Chaosium. It began in 1979 and appeared infrequently but made it all the way to 1987.  I have some later issues of the magazine and I have issue #5 from October/November 1979. Different Worlds would be a great title for a blog about world building but I unfortunately never thought of it.

It is only 40 pages long and not packed with a lot of useful material for today.  I do not see anything I would want to borrow or modify for a game today. But there is some interesting history.  There is a lengthy article for “Developing a Character’s Appearance”. These kind of articles were common in magazines in the early ‘80s. Today the push in many ways is for stripped down rules and simple systems (Lite rules).  But at the time of this magazine there was an interest in all sorts of add-on rules to make the base rules more complex and the characters more unique.

There are a number of ads for Arduin which is interesting.  By the time I got in the game in the early 80’s Arduin was already becoming less well known.  There is also an ad from Fantasy Games Unlimited for a number of sourcebooks for Chivalry & Sorcery.  I believe I have one of the C&S rulebooks somewhere but I have never played it.

An ad for Schubel & Son offers a catalog for $2 (paying for a catalog!) and offers board games, role-playing games and miniature figurines.  I never heard of Schubel & Sons outside of board games so it has me a little intrigued as a collector of obscure role-playing games. Although looking at the ad they might just be selling TSR games.  A search online reveals they did create an original game called “Tribes of Crane” but it was play by mail.

There is an ad for Tunnels & Trolls which is apparently already on its 5th edition but at $8 that is a pretty good deal. I seem to have misplaced the rules to my book set of Tunnels & Trolls. The version is the black box with the small paperback rules inside. Tunnels & Trolls appealed to me for awhile but it is a little to straight forward for me.

On the back cover are a pair of ads for Runequest as could be expected from a Chaosium house magazine. Cults of Prax and Runequest II. This is interesting as I just got my kickstarter reward of Classic Runequest a few months ago. I am not sure if this would have been the same version of Runequest as I now own.

Different Worlds #5 Back cover

Old Maps from the 1980s

Here is a map I recently discovered in a box of old papers from when I was a young teen.  This map of “Terminus” that I drew in 1981 places it shortly before I discovered role playing games. I had read “Lord of the Rings” which is apparent from looking at some of the place names. I drew it for fun because I liked the maps that were common in fantasy novels of the time.

Terminus by author 1981

It looks like it is supposed to be a colony of earth that has fallen back into the middle ages in technology level. The inset maps show how the lands of the country of Falsa expanded into the sea with the use of dykes.

It is a logical outcome of the maps I copied out of fantasy novels.  I found it was easier to read a novel and consult the map if I had a copy that was not in the book.

Lankhmar

Junkyard Planet

The Cosmic Computer

One of the best space opera genre books I have ever read is “The Cosmic Computer” by H. Beam Piper (1963).  Originally titled “Junkyard Planet”.  I was drawn to the book in the late 1970’s after seeing the brilliant cover on a bookshelf at a local library. Later I was able to afford to buy a paperback copy which got read and read again several times.  In recent years I was even able to locate a hardcover version published by AEgypan Press.

The novel revolves around the schemes of young man Conn Maxwell and his entrepreneur father Rodney Maxwell to drag their frontier world of Poictesme out of a slow slide into ruin. The setting is the long night after a Galactic Terran Empire has fought a Civil war that has crippled its economy. Poictesme was on the front lines of the conflict with veterans of the losing side common among its citizens. Caches of war supplies and mothballed military bases are scattered all over the planet. Rodney Maxwell makes a living opening up these bases and selling the equipment.

Through an elaborate plot involving the search for a positronic brain (A.I.) Conn and his father trick and con their friends and business partners into re-establishing space flight and building a new center of trade for this sector of space.  The novel has spaceflight, exploration, pirates, laser battles and a top-notch setting perfect for a Stars without Number setting.

As a postscript. The copyright for The Cosmic Computer has lapsed so it is available from the Gutenberg project as text and audio book for free.

I definitely want to place a scaled down version of Poictesme in my SWN setting Wolf Sector. A planet that used to be a Terran Mandate base that now has a salvage culture selling equipment, weapons and possibly ship parts to traders from off-planet.

TETHRAS

Atmosphere

Breathable

Temp

Temperate

Bio

Miscible

Pop

450000

Tech

4

Tags        Farmland, Mothballed Terran Mandate bases, Large Spaceport.

Enemies    Pirates in Volcano base, Claim-jumper, Hostile robot

Friends        Local salvager, Business Patron, Mayor of Spaceport

Compl.        Map to base is not what it seems, Spacecraft needs rare part.

Things        Abandoned scrapped spaceship, military vehicles

Places        Spaceport, Military base, Mobile medical base.

Tethras is a temperate terraformed world with a light agriculture base and a burgeoning wine industry. Esgari Red is one of the most popular wines in the sector.  But most of the economy on Tethras is based around the salvage that comes from closed military bases. Before the “silence” Tethras was home to a large Military base for the Terran Mandate. The largest base in this entire area of space (4-5 sectors). The agriculture industry sprang up to support the huge population of military personnel. After the scream the majority of the military personnel boarded the few jump capable ships and left for the core worlds. The remaining population was left behind to fend for themselves as best they could. The population was greatly reduced and there were moments in the first 100 years where anarchy took hold but the planet is now fairly stable. There are still areas of the planet that are lawless but the local government (led by a hereditary Port Manager) is well armed from the caches of military supplies and few entities try to harass them.

Khadath Tunnels & Trolls Map

I am looking at some of my earliest digital maps today.  I have a couple of images of a world I developed called Khadath.  I had purchased Tunnels & Trolls (the boxed version with the Corgi books paperback) and I wanted a different kind of setting to play it in.   The maps were created on a long since forgotten DOS image program.

Khadath Setting authour early 1990s

But one thing I do like about this map is the world depicted is an island-continent centered on the north pole of a world.  This is something that always fascinated me. It would have to be a significantly warmer planet. I have jungles and deserts 500 miles or so from the pole. If the planet had a significant axial tilt you could have snow in the winter but I believe the thought was a temperate game world.

The concept was a dying world where the survivors have moved to the far north as the planet gets hotter.  Great civilizations existed in the past and the ruins are still present.  So delving is an important pastime to locate useful material for the dying, resource poor world.

All lot of the place names came from the Commodore 64 computer game Exodus Ultima IV. That game had a lot of enormous dungeons with names like “Moon Gate” or “Fires of Hell”. I had envisioned a world with walled settlements clinging to the coastline, trading by sea as the interior is overrun with goblinoid races and trolls.  At the same time the location of well known lost civilization ruins are marked on the map and are well known to all.

The risks of venturing out into the badlands outside the cities are outweighed by the riches that could be found in the ruins deep in the earth.

The second map is a closer view of the town of Kosht which was the starting citadel - city state for the players in the campaign.

Kosht

The more I look at these maps the more I want to create a new version with more original names for a Classic Runequest setting.

Stars Without Number, The Wolf Sector

Stars without Number comes with a sample Setting, the Hydra sector.  I also have Stellagama Publishings “Lurian Trailing Cluster - Book 1”. But given a few hours of free time I decided to take a shot at developing my own setting.  The nature of Stars without Number is that there is no base setting.  Any number of sector maps can be created, published sectors can be dropped in anywhere.

I decided to have some Viking elements at least in name so I called the sector “Wolf Sector” and added a Fenric Union around the planets Geminus, Valhalla and Fenris.  I used the Stars without Number blank sector map but I decided to show the planets and stars separately on the sector map. Not as detailed as a Traveller sector map but more detailed than the published SWN maps.

I used some online random planet name generators for some of the names of stars and planets and just came up with the rest off the top of my head.

WOLF SECTOR

I also wanted a few alien races so I added a few from an online Alien Race generator.

Chukulak

Home-World: Attis

Description: A race of small but aggressive  reptiles. They are highly intelligent and inquisitive. Their home-world of Attis is hot for humans with an average temperature of 80 degrees celsius. They have also colonized the nearby planet of Xenu which is even hotter than Attis and they only populate the polar regions in large numbers. They had achieved interstellar travel on their own before being discovered before the Silence.

Illarians

Home-World: Mizar

Description: A race of furry, blind marsupials. They have no eyes and see through echolocation. There world is in close orbit of the dim red sun Edolanus. They are an extremely prudish and private race and prefer not to be seen in the flesh by aliens.

I have only developed the campaign start world of Touchdown.

TOUCHDOWN

Atmosphere

Breathable

Temp

Temperate

Bio

Miscible

Pop

12000

Tech

4

Tags Badlands World, Heavy Mining.

Enemies Customs Inspector, Local Crimelord, Claim-jumper

Friends Local Barkeep, Spacer Employment Agency, Miner 49er

Compl. Impounded, Gambling.

Things Abandoned Ore Barge, Map to Gold Mine

Places One spaceport, Remote automated mines

Touchdown is rough chunk of rock in the habitable zone around its star Oedipus. It was a mining colony before the Silence but was abandoned for centuries. Merchant-explorers discovered and renamed the planet Touchdown 50 years ago. They came from Human-centric worlds outside the Wolf Sector. The nearest star outside Wolf sector is Lason but is 3 jumps away. Huge automated strip mines work the rock of Touchdown and giant barges move ore to the Spaceport and onto Merchant ships bound for Mizar, Onai and other sectors. The mines are owned by a collection of interstellar companies with no one company holding sway over the World. The administration of the world is handled by a “Manager” appointed by the an informal council of Merchants. The spaceport is quite large for the small population with many ships coming and going at all times.