And so my story continues, with good news! Paizo's announced that the next RPG Superstar is starting early (And also changing to seasons, so that people don't get super confused over years. Which seems fair, for those of us who are perpetually confused.) Thinking of entering? You should! It's a great experience, as my long-winded story will eventually wrap around to, probably. Check it out here!
Without further delay, back to my disasterpiece.
Maps: a thousand ideas flew through my head. Great and wondrous places of adventure. Things all across Pathfinder's Golarion I'd wished a module or AP had ventured to. Places that had nothing to do with Golarion that I thought were totally cool but didn't really fit at all. Places that probably had no right ever being on a map.
But there was one glaring fault with all of them. Words.
Big words, fancy words, descriptive words. Made-up-fantasy words! Words that people have to look up in the dictionary! Words! Spoilers: I frickin' love words.
The problem is, I think in novels, not landscapes. It's always been that way, and is one of the main reasons I ended up majoring in English literature. Hell, my degree pretty much gives me the right to make up and destroy words at will. Pickupable? Totally a word. (Best used for NJ pizza, greasy and thin and folded properly into pickupable form like a civilized human being.) I've always, in my heart, fancied myself a bit of a writer. Not once did I ever imagine being a cartographer.
So I sat down and started fiddling with ideas. Sketching out (really bad) maps of three different locations that I thought were all pretty neat. I finished up, looked down at my work, and cried a little on the inside. They were terrible. A four year old could draw better maps than me.
I passed them around to a few choice friends, asking for opinions. "What the hell is it?" was a common sentiment. "Oh, it's this and that and this other thing," I explained. Great battles between PCs and the foes they might face danced through my head. "Oh," they said, "that sounds cool."
Sounds cool. Looks terrible (and vaguely phallic). I needed a new strategy.
I decided to go with the idea that--in my head--sold itself on its name. The Sodden Lands: it's wet and it sucks and there's a hurricane beating on your head, like, all the time, or something! Sounds like a cool place for an adventure. I've already got a whole adventure forming in my head, with those poor bastards who never managed to evacuate eking out a pitiful existence while being harried by the boggard tribes and the storm and the whatever else...
Which I think, more than my inability to draw or think in maps, was my real downfall. The idea sold itself on the awesome adventures in my head, not the map on the paper. My 'pit crew' (since this is what they're called, for whatever reason) nodded and hmmed at it, mostly because they'd cheated and heard my original pitch. Their opinions had been invalidated by knowing the location by the stories in my head--like myself, the map wasn't just the map anymore.
This problem was compounded by the fact I'd decided to go with the idea that used an overland map instead of a 5 ft. per square dungeon map. Dungeon maps are arguably easier, since you can stick to a grid and add neat little features like doors and traps and holes and whatever. But to me, a dungeon sounded boring without a story to go with it. Okay, so there's hallways and doors and traps and whatever, but why should I care? It just didn't feel alive to me; didn't feel like the sort of place I'd just drop a group of 4 PCs and say go.
Overland maps are way harder to draw when you don't know what you're doing. What do natural landmasses look like? Where would a town be built? How? How do rivers flow? Which way? Where do these things even come from? Is it like how toilets switch direction in the southern hemisphere? Is that even true? What happens when you're in a land of perpetual hurricanes and fantasy and magic and shit, do these rules even apply? Does the rule of cool override common sense?
I tried a dozen different iterations of the idea, and eventually came up with something that I thought looked passable. It wasn't good, mind you. Good was never the goal. The goal was simple: don't come in dead last.
I'm still not sure I actually accomplished that.
(Spoilers: 6.5/10 too much water)
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