Sunday, October 26, 2014

Made on a coffee break: Maps of Remlia

My current Dungeons & Dragons campaign world started out as a single dungeon and some bad ideas.

I needed a quick place to start an adventure. So I repurposed an old map I'd made a year ago, rolled some new random encounters, and got to brainstorming. This was the result:

"You wake up in a dungeon..."
Once the players escaped, they needed places to go. I needed a map. So over espresso at Starbucks, I scribbled the following:
Masterful cartography.
 Now that I had some countries, I had to pick one. I chose Remlia, and got to naming its possible cities. Originally it was supposed to be the size of Washington state.
You can tell its good because it's got an city on an island inside a lake.
Of course, now that I had an idea of what it looked like I needed to do it up all nice and fancy in Photoshop. My home game players wouldn't accept anything less.
Doing my best to ape the style of Mike Schley.
And so I've been using the country of Remlia in my games for over a year now. In that time it has seen a magical winter, an assassination attempt on the Princess Regent, a dragon "attack" on Greenbarrow, an invasion from southern elves of Figaro, Elfheim captured, the eruption of a giant robot from beneath Gran Remiel, and the rise and fall of the Ice Queen (crushed to death by the giant robot, naturally).

Now that my campaign world has expanded to include three groups, I felt the need to redo the map once more, filling in some gaps along the way.

Very Skyrim in its stylings.
I've lived with this campaign world in my head and in several notebooks for over a year now. This blog is devoted to writing it all down and keeping track of its many dungeons, locations, house rules, NPC's, random tables, and other setting tidbits.

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