He says of this ship, created with Cosmographer 3:
Like many forum members, I’ve been drawing maps (both fantasy and sci-fi since I was a kid of 9 or 10 years old). I’ve had CC3 since February-ish of last year, but took a really long break from it while I was looking for work. I think that my tenacity and OCD makes up for my lack of initial planning and can’t keep things well enough alone 🙂 I often only have a faint image of how a landscape, ship or city is going to end up and each often goes through several revisions before I’m satisfied with the result. I find it’s a very organic (and sometimes frustrating) process: the land shapes the features shapes the cities and roads shapes the land…
The ship in this thread grew from the idea of an engine and a bridge connected by a spine, different modules could be plugged into the spine depending on the mission requirements (living spaces, labs, hanger bays, cargo, etc.) BUT… when I started drawing the modules I drew the rooms to small and nothing fit in the “slots”, so I took what I liked (the bridge) and then built the captian’s cabin, first starting with the furniture and then building the walls. Once that was done it was time to think about the “why” of the ship, it made sense to me that the captain and first officer would have cabins on different sides of the ship (in case of attack one hit wouldn’t take them both out). So I coppied the bulkheads of the captain’s room and turned it into the XO’s and NCO’s quarters (as they would have less room than the CO)! the rest of the ship just sort of grew from there.
Well, that was a bit a tangent but gives you an idea of how I Cartograph (is that a word?)! To summarize, I’m playing, learning and expermenting all the time to share what I see in my head with others.
Ashen Stars is a wonderful space opera rpg by Pelgrane Press, based on the GUMSHOE system. I had the pleasure to create the game’s published setting map (a part of the Galaxy called “The Bleed”) based on a sketch by Robin D. Laws.
Lately I got to revisit the setting when, after play-testing the upcoming Terra Nova adventure, Simon asked me to create a simple black and white diagram of the adventure’s featured luxury liner. You can see the result below (the color background was added for web display). While the exact layout of the ship isn’t important for the story, the relative position of the important locations is, and the map shows those.
Joe Sweeney, the avid mapper behind the Battle Maps Tiles from the 2010 Annual, is working on a new sci-fi battle map tiles pack. We will be making this available through the Annual later in the year. The set he is building already contains well over 100 new textures and scores of signage overlays for floors: access zones, radiation danger, chemical areas, shuttle landing zones, overhead automated cranes, etc.
Before he completes all the graphics work and begins developing the battle map tiles, Joe would like to know what sort of signage you’d like to see. How about a “no aliens” floor zone sign? Or perhaps “white, red, green zone” signs for those Paranoia games? Get creative. Get practical. Think of all the signs (and textures) you would love to see in your next sci-fi mapping project and email your ideas to jsweeney@storyweaver.com or post them in the comments below.
[NLP138 from the ProFantasy forum produced this excellent floorplan using Cosmographer. This is how he did it:]
Well, I knew I wanted to do a floorplan and so my first thought was to fire up DD3 but I’m really lazy so loading the other textures and symbols sounded like a drag and I knew I wanted to use symbols and textures from Cosmo3. So instead of using Dungeon Designer I started off with a Cosmographer bitmap deckplan. I’d already spoken with my friend who was running the game to get the specifics on the size of the pods and the central hub so picking my dimensions was more or less already done for me.
The first thing I did was I drew out the pod you see in the upper-right. The walls surrounding it are actually two arcs because I was having a hard time trimming the wall to insert the door symbol – at first I drew the walls as a circle (there may be an easier way to do this but I’m still not that savvy). Once the pod was completely built (to include furniture) I copied it once and moved it down. Then I did a mirror copy of the pod to give me the same layout on the other side – originally I was just going to make 3 copies and then rotate them but I didn’t like the way that would end up looking furniture-wise so I was happy to see there was a mirror function (this was a bit of a learning experience for me). The last smaller pod was made in the same fashion but made deliberately more cramped in with a dingier looking floor texture to reflect the lower social and economical status of the inhabitant.
The central node was then drawn – I wanted to use a different deck texture from the pods since according to the gamemaster the pods were modular and could be swapped out and exchanged. I figured the central hub then would be very neutral then regardless of the other occupants wealth level. Adding the symbols was a lot of fun – but slightly tedious at times trying to get them just right and I’m sure I could zoom in to some of the sections and find tiny mistakes.
Once all of the embellishments were in place it was just a matter of tweaking the sheet effects. I used the default ones and then altered them slightly – I think I added a wall shadow to the “bulkheads” sheet and I know I played with the different symbols effects trying to keep them from throwing too many weird shadows. I also created two sheets for the legend plate in the bottom right but I think it looks pretty standard. Just a couple of rectangles with shadow/blur effects and some words on that.
On my website I’ve got the finished image (not as high rez) and a few of the “in production” images that I sent to my play group to show them the process.
Scrying Eye are also in the RPG cartography business, but they provide the end result, not the tools to do the job! Recently, they’ve used our Cosmographer 3 software to create detailed miniature-scale deckplans under license for Mongoose Traveller. James Miller of Scrying Eye talks about Cosmographer 3 and his deckplans at about 5:20 in the video below:
A long wait is finally over. We’ve got the Cosmographer 3 materials from the printer and Steve has been building stock and assembling shipments since Friday. Look for your Cosmographer 3 box in the mail soon.
I’m very happy to report that Joseph Sweeney has taken to Cosmographer 3 like an angry Rancor to Jabba’s fighting pit and produced his first video tutorials for our sci-fi add-on. Continue reading »
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Here is the follow-up to our poll asking which additional Traveller starship deckplans we should do. I was a bit surprised that warships seemed to be the top choices (except for the far trader). I’d have thought that civilian ships would be more important to most Traveller players.
Nevertheless we created deckplans for the three most popular designs:
old). I’ve had CC3 since February-ish of last year, but took a really long break from it while I was looking for work. I think that my tenacity and OCD makes up for my lack of initial planning and can’t keep things well enough alone 🙂 I often only have a faint image of how a landscape, ship or city is going to end up and each often goes through several revisions before I’m satisfied with the result. I find it’s a very organic (and sometimes frustrating) process: the land shapes the features shapes the cities and roads shapes the land…
Here is the follow-up to 
