We’re going to take a minute today to figure out reasonable sizes for the buildings in your city. I’m sharing some of my ‘rules of thumb’ for getting buildings that will work well. While you can finish a map without doing this, if you take a minute to make reasonable sized houses, your blocks will look better and it will be easier to just automatically convert a building from the city map into a tactical encounter map.
Our first order of business is to estimate the size of a pub. Why? Because it is a good reference size for all other business buildings.
Start by figuring out how many patrons the tavern should be able to handle comfortably. Let’s say for a given merchant-class ward, a typical pub should be able to handle 30 patrons easily. I assume that a nice tavern needs about 5’x5’ for each patron. If you want to ensure there is plenty of room for tactical roleplaying (in other words, a bar fight with lots of running around), you might double this. High end taverns might have 2-4 times as much space, and a cramped seedy bar might have half as much space.
So for our nice unassuming tavern that can serve 30 people, we will use 30 5’x5’ squares, which makes it roughly 30’x25’ in size.
An alternate way to get a rough size of typical buildings in our ward is to reference the symbol set that we’re going to use. Below I have two symbols from the symbol set I’m using.
Standard CC3 City Symbols are landmark buildings
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ProFantasy Software will be on stand 1715 at GenCon, and we’ll have a brand new release – Fractal Terrains 3! It’s powerful, robust and fully compatible with CC3’s effects.
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:
In this, the fourth part of our series on mapping cities, we will spend time setting up a district using Campaign Cartographer 3 (CC3). We will be using the City Designer 3 (CD3) add-on because it makes the job of mapping cities much easier. But pretty much everything we do in this tutorial can be accomplished with the based program – it’s just more work, and your style and building options are fewer.
When we get to the step of mapping individual buildings, you’ll definitely want to have a copy of CD3 because the end result is so much better.
We are going to rough out the entertainment district of our map (the red district just above center):
My original city map was created in an old version of CC3, so we’re going to copy the district and put it in a new map. Continue reading »
This month’s Annual issue on paper modeling is not the first time I’ve messed with Dioramas Pro, paper, glue and a trusty hobby knife.
Whitewash City and Cardstock Cowboys
t all started with our Deadlands: Reloaded campaign. Savage Worlds was our first game system that put a really heavy emphasis on miniatures, and I started painting a few Western miniatures for our characters, as well as investing in some fitting paper minis. Then Eric Hotz’s beautiful series of Wild West buildings (Whitewash City) caught my eye and soon enough I was busy building paper models for our game.
Mexican Fort in Perspectives Pro
This was all well and good until our posse ventured south and into Mexico, and the American-style buildings suddenly didn’t fit the mood anymore. When it became clear that our characters would have to free a rebel leader from a fort, I started out by drawing a Mexican fort in Perspectives Pro. This came out very nicely, but it wouldn’t really help out on our gaming table.
Dioramas Pro then came to my mind and I asked myself, why I shouldn’t be able to design and build a few mexican-style buildings myself. They’d not come out as marvelous as the Whitewash City models, but probably good enough for ourselves. So I fired up CC3, loaded a Dioramas Pro template for the first time in quite some time and set about designing my own models.
Construction Sheet for Gatehouse
There was a lot of trial and error at first, the project grew and grew, the paper bin overflowed, but I finally managed to create the complete set of buildings as shown in the Perspectives Pro map. I even added some extra goodies like cannons, the village fountain and a graveyard.
We had a blast in the two game sessions our posse stormed that fort and successfully freed the captive. The time I spent on building the model is of course way beyond what you’d normally spend on preparing one or two game sessions, but I had a blast and learned lots about paper-modeling (and Dioramas Pro) in the process. The fort even served as a display piece at Spiel’10 in Essen. And here it is on all its glory:
Forum member Nicholas Hopkins created an atmospheric floorplan for a Call of Cthulhu game. Download the PDF.
He says:
I saw a couple of floorplans in some older mission sourcebooks for Call of Cthulhu and wanted to emulate it as much as possible. I am doing a 1920’s campaign so I wanted it to look a little old fashioned, hence the black and white. It is based on the lighted dungeon template so that the shadows fall the right direction and it gives the rooms a little more texture as there are small, subtle shadows towards the corners of the rooms.
I used the Sepia setting under the RGB Matrix effect and it worked very nicely. Because I didn’t want a background of solid black (never seems to print well) I put in a couple of light sources outside the walls to light things slightly and cast some shadows off the corners of the building. There was some odd effects with the light sources associated with doors and windows so I just made a new sheet called Window Block, made sure that things on it blocked the light sources and was below the Wall sheet so it would disappear, and drew a simple line across the openings. Took care of things nicely. The symbols are a mixture of DD3 symbols and SS3 Modern symbols. They all came out nice looking with the effects turned on.
Dioramas Pro is one of the more rarely used add-ons of CC3 – rather undeservedly though in my opinion. With a little care and patience it can create some spectacular setups for your gaming table.
This month’s Annual provides an example of what can be done with Dioramas, plus the tools and templates to create more paper models. So, break out those hobby knifes and glue bottles and start modeling… Continue reading »
In the previous two installments of this series, we determined where a city is likely to arise, and did some basic planning for a city (read Mapping Cities Part One here and Part Two here). In this installment we will plan out a district in more detail.
There are four things to keep in mind when thinking about the structure of the district:
Roads and Traffic: Are people mostly passing through (e.g., a gate ward) or heading to this district (e.g., a merchant area)? This will determine road size and pattern, with wider roads for main thoroughfares and places where livestock must travel.
Planned or not? Cities rarely arise all at once, and different areas get different amounts of planning. Unplanned sections typically grow up along a road, or near a point of interest such as a well, then fill in between the spaces. Planned areas are more likely to have uniform plot sizes and more organized roads.
Style of the buildings: Do the buildings face inward, typically toward and inner courtyard? Or do they face outward toward the street, typically with stores or other commercial endeavors facing the street. Buildings with courtyards will require more space.
Density: Near the center of a city there is little open space – houses are more tightly packed. Further away from the center there is often room for livestock or family gardens.
Affecting all four of these mapping factors is the question of age: As districts age, they change and deviate from plans, space is filled in, walls are torn down, roads and squares infill. A fundamental right for city dwellers was the right to own land, and new cities are laid out in standard-sized burgage plots. The size of these plots vary from city to city, but are uniform within the city: Typically 10-20 meters wide facing the street, and 50-100 meters deep when first laid out.
The plots are large enough for outbuildings, keeping animals and small gardens. But as space pressure increases, the plots are subdivided and filled in. Usually the divisions stay within single plots, but the example below shows two plots that were split up together.
Over time city plots are filled and subdivided
As you lay out plots, you need to make sure that every building has access of some sort to the road, even if it is through an alley. In the example I give above, the grey areas are alleys. As you have ideas for points of interest, add them now or make notes for later.
I occasionally cheat and put in plot divisions that are not road-accessible. I just know that they will need a passageway through another building (maybe an arched gateway) or they need to be abandoned buildings that I can use later in my campaign.
Next time, I will show you how to apply these rules in Campaign Cartographer, using an entertainment district of my city.
CC3 can be put to many uses apart from mapping, especially if you take some of the more specialized add-ons into the mix.
Several years ago (lots actually), when I was into naval miniature games but lacked the funds to collect pewter miniatures on a larger scale, I resorted to scratch-building ships from sturdy paper, toothpicks and paper-clips. The design process was laborious and I had to keep the little paper parts around for future rebuilds of the models. Continue reading »
