Laying Some Groundwork

While I had some free time last week, I put a significant amount of that time into planning the upcoming campaign. One part of that was to review the available source material, and notably the official maps of Lamordia.

Unfortunately, my conclusion was that that official map is, to put not to fine a point on it, pretty lousy. And while there are a few fan-made alternatives out there, none of them really filled me with any great confidence.

This did provide me with an opportunity - about eighteen months ago I invested in a Wacom graphics tablet, and have been looking for a good project on which to use it since then. Crafting a new map of Lamordia was just the opportunity that I needed! I'm reasonably pleased with the result - if we accept that I'm not, and won't ever be, a professional cartographer, and if we accept that my artistic abilities are hugely limited, it does at least reach the standards of "not bad" and "functional". Which is probably enough.

Here it is:

Of course, there's another factor in that: constructing that map took the vast majority of the time I had available, and therefore constitutes the overwhelming majority of the preparation I'll be getting done for the campaign. Which is far from ideal. On the other hand, the absence of a good map was a glaring weakness, so I'm inclined to call this a step in the right direction.