Following up on my previous post about the geographic distribution of creek and brook place names in the US, here are a few other maps I made, looking for interesting regional patterns.

First a few more stream-related maps.

This map shows streams whose names end with “branch” and “run”. Branch is a common term throughout the South. Run coincides with the North Midland dialect area, as George R. Stewart puts it. It is a common term in the Appalachian Mountains of Pennsylvania and northern West Virginia. In southern West Virginia the term “branch” is generally used instead of “run”. There are some small areas where “run” place names are particularly dense, especially in north-west and north-central Pennsylvania and northern West Virginia. My map doesn’t show these smaller patterns very well because my dots are large enough to merge into a mass of red. Stewart explains that in colonial times, when these patterns emerged, “run” became a common term for the smallest of streams, while “creek” was used for larger ones and “river” for the largest.

This map shows streams whose names end with “run” and “slough”. The distribution of “run” streams is clearer than in the previous map. I’m not sure whether there is much of a pattern with “slough” and don’t know much about the term, its origin and history.

This map is like the others, but showing streams whose name ends in “branch” or “fork”. There’s a curious concentration of streams named “fork” in the Appalachians of West Virginia and Kentucky. Usage is scattered elsewhere with smaller concentrations in the West, especially in Utah.

One more map about streams. This one showing those whose names end with “coulee” and “bayou”. Unlike the others, this map isn’t restricted to just streams, because “coulee” is a term used for dry canyons as well as streams. Most of the bayous shown are probably streams or inlets of the sea. As expected, the term occurs almost exclusively in the lower Mississippi River region and along the Gulf coast. The usage of “coulee” has an interesting regional pattern. There are four distinct areas where the word is used, and it means slightly different things in each case. The first area is in Lousiana, and is hard to see on this map because it overlaps with “bayou” so much. It is used there for small streams. A friend of mine who lives in southwest Louisiana says a coulee is a stream narrow enough to step or jump across. A second area of usage is found along the upper Mississippi River in Wisconsin and Minnesota. Here the word is used for small, short, steep streams. A third area is found in the northern Great Plains of Montana and North Dakota (extending into Canada as well). Here the word is “the equivalent of creek”, according to Stewart. Finally, in Washington “coulee” is used to refer to region’s unusual dry canyons carved from basalt, such as Grand Coulee and Moses Coulee.

I have a few more maps to write about, but will save that for next time.

I have now compiled a selection of photographs into a 26-page hardcover edition! If you are interested in purchasing a copy they are $60 shipped directly to your door! Please contact me through the reply section of this post.

Title: Constructing the Night Sky: Experiments in Astrophotography

Some years ago I made a series of maps showing patterns in place names in the United States. The most striking one shows the strong regional pattern of naming streams “creek” or “brook”. I used the USGS’s GNIS database of place names, and ArcGIS to make queries and map the results. This brook-creek map shows a point at the mouth of every stream whose name ends with either brook or creek. In the GNIS database “stream” is a class that includes all “linear bodies of water flowing on the Earth’s surface”. So, creeks, brooks, rivers, bayous, forks, sloughs, and so on. This map shows only those named brook and creek. That is why there is a large empty area along the lower Mississippi River, where streams tend to have names like bayou. I’ll post some of the other GNIS maps later. The map is also online at Flickr, where I wrote a bit more about it.

The creek-brook geographic pattern is explained in the classic book about place naming in the United States, “Names on the Land”, by George R. Stewart. It goes back to the earliest colonial times in New England and Virginia. People from England coming to America explored and settled coastal areas first, and began to establish place names for natural features like streams. Large streams were naturally called rivers, as they are in England. In Virginia there are many streams that broaden into tidal estuaries as they near Chesapeake Bay. The larger ones were called rivers. The smaller ones, which from the sea looked like small inlets washed by tidal currents, were called creeks. In England the word creek was mainly used for just that: not a stream per se, but a small inlet of the sea were tides flow in and out (see Wikipedia’s page Creek (tidal)). As they explored inland they came to the tidal limit and found the rivers and creeks flowing always one way, no longer effected by tides. And, as Stewart puts it, “since it seemed the same, they kept the same name for it. Thus a creek came to mean a flowing stream, although in England it meant, and still means, a tidal channel.” This way of naming large streams “river” and small ones “creek” spread from Virginia across most of the country.

New England was colonized nearly as early as Virginia, and it developed different patterns of place naming. A key difference was the land itself. Virginians were a “river people”, living in a land dominated by rivers and estuaries, while New Englanders were a “salt-water people”. In New England the coast rises more sharply from the sea and there are few long tidal channels that English people might call creeks. As in Virginia, large streams were called rivers, but small ones were most often called brooks, as in eastern England. The use of brook instead of creek spread throughout New England and west into New York, New Jersey, and parts of Pennsylvania—all areas that were settled by New Englanders in colonial times. But beyond this region the Virginian style of using the word creek came to dominate. There are only a few scattered areas where the word brook is used, most notably in Minnesota.

There are other regional patterns for stream names such as run, branch, stream, bayou, and coulee. I’ll post maps of those later.

Changed the blog default header image (although I quite liked the previous one) and put a map I currently work on, which hopefully will be ready soon.
The map was created in ArcGIS (desktop edition) with a coloured DTM, a hillshaded transparent layer and a topo base map of the Amvrakikos bay near Preveza, which is in western Greece (the part shown on the map is north to the bay and is mostly mountainous and closer to the city of Arta). Using the right tools to build a proper DTM not only produces hydrologically correct surfaces but also makes hillshades look prettier…The image was rotated, so the north direction is to the right.

In his article Citizens as sensors: the world of volunteered geography (2007) Goodchild details the recent establishment of citizen or public volunteered information which he calls “volunteered geographic information (VGI)” (212).

This movement has been typified by web-based applications such as Google Maps, Google Earth, and Open Street Map.  All of these sites/sights are examples of what is now called web 2.0, which is characterized by the participatory creation of databases of information by web users.  Where the first incarnation of the web was strictly a one way affair where users moved from page to page and could not interact with the information that was presented other than read it, now with web 2.0 users are active creators and authors of information.

In the realm of Google Maps/Earth, Open Street Map and Wikimapia, among others, this information is geographic in nature, while places and events, and many other forms of information, are now georeferenced.

In this new world of participatory mapping enabled by web 2.0 users are the sensors themselves, and the information is locally sensed rather than remote sensed.  It must be stated though, like with any mapping activity, user created mapping is not objective, but subjective to the user’s position within the physical world and material society.

Examples of “Participant Populations” (218) given by Goodchild interestingly enough includes soldiers, and farmers.  He states that these individuals are potential sources of firsthand information and “data that is in many cases much more detailed and current than that available from central…agencies” (218).

He also claims, however, that these “developments contribute to a growing reversal of the traditional top-down approach to the creation and dissemination of geographic information” (218).  This is a problematic assumption though on the part of Goodchild that information coming from soldiers and farmers represent a shift to a bottom up kind of information gathering.

Soldiers represent the violent, repressive, and coercive authority of the state, and therefore, any information they would gather and disseminate will be in the state’s own interest.  Furthermore, the geospatial tools, utilized in precision farming, are owned by the capitalist class.  These tools are used on large farms owned by agribusinesses who farm on land that was gained through the structural, or in many cases the actual, violence of colonialism.  Is that what bottom up means?

Nonetheless, the growing trend of VGI, in many instances has removed map making from the hands of the ‘experts’ and placed it into the hands of regular citizens.  This is an empowering and democratic act, however, only for those that are able to participate by owning the proper equipment, and being connected (literally).

Goodchild, M. F. (2007). Citizens as sensors: the world of volunteered geography. Geojournal, (69), 211-221.

I like old postcards and cartography. These are really pretty.

This guy is right, I should be vegan. The last line in this article is haunting. I have so much work to do!

I’ve had a personal blog intermittently for a few years. I use it to keep track of websites I like, movies I saw, books I read, etc.

I decided to create one just for cartography and GIS. Hopefully, it’ll be useful to some people as much as it will be to me. The main goal is to have it as a place where one can find links pertaining to GIS, cartography, and geography in general.

Enjoy Your Weekend: we’re helping you spend your money wisely this weekend.

Crafty Supermarket: tomorrow afternoon, crafty people are taking over the Northside Tavern, us included. Be there or be square.

Midwest Seed Bombs: Amy of Amy’s Stocking Stuffers likes our Midwest Seed Bombs and Ohio River coasters, which are available in our online shop. Thanks!

City Hall: suddenly added to my Cincinnati to-do list is a free tour of the Cincinnati City Hall. Who knew?

Motion Supports Making Urban Gardening Program Permanent: good news for this fledgling pilot program in Cincinnati.

Bio-Diversity: Christoph Niemann’s Abstract City column in the NYT looks at leaves. The results are stunning.

Mystery of Argleton, the ‘Google’ Town That Only Exists Online: just that.

218332     การผลิตแผนที่และการฉายแผนที่     Cartography and Map Projection

แนวคิดของการผลิตแผนที่ ข้อกํ าหนดและความถูกต้อง กระบวนการการผลิตแผนที่หลักการสื่อความหมายและการใช้สัญลักษณ์ การใช้คอมพิวเตอร์ช่วยในการทํ าแผนที่เบื้องต้นระบบพิกัดและสูตรการแปลง ความรู้พื้นฐานเกี่ยวกับการฉายแผนที่ การฉายแผนที่แบบต่าง ๆ การสร้างและการเลือกใช้การฉายแผนที่ การประยุกต์การฉายแผนที่ในงานสํ ารวจ

(Concepts of cartography, specification and accuracy, cartographic production process, semiology and cartographic symbolization, introduction to computerassisted cartography, coordinate systems and transformation formulae, fundamental of map projection, types of map projection, construction and selection of map projection, applications of map projection for surveying.)

(218332 มหาวิทยาลัยเกษตรศาสตร์)

304433     การทําแผนที่การใช้ที่ดิน     Land Use Cartography

หลักการทํ าแผนที่การใช้ที่ดิน ระบบกริต โปรเจชั่นแผนที่การประกอบมาตราส่วนเครื่องหมายแผนที่ การผลิตแผนที่ และการปรับปรุงแก้ไข

(Principles of mapping land uses: grid system, map projection, scaling, legend, map production and revision.)

(304433 มหาวิทยาลัยเกษตรศาสตร์)

There is a growing trend in the online world with the prevalence of ‘Neogeography’ and the creation of ‘digiplace’ (Zook & Graham, 2007).  Digiplace is a hybrid space that combines the physical and material world with the virtual world (Zook & Graham, 2007).  “The creation of digiplace is not simply a technical issue but a socially constructed process that embodies a range of political, economic, and cultural considerations (Zook & Graham, p. 466, 2007).

Zook and Graham in their 2007 article, Mapping Digiplace: geocoded Internet data and the representation of place, discuss how “GoogleMaps shades the perceptions of the places that it maps” (p. 467).  The authors argue, “geography and place remain relevant in the information age, but the way in which they are used and the manner in which they are relevant has changed…” (p. 468).  The relevance has changed because cyberspace has combined with space becoming intricately linked in a constitutive process that is both mutual and dynamic (Zook & Graham, 2007).  It is mutual in the fact that digiplace defines place, while place defines digiplace.  It is dynamic in the fact that information and knowledge are fluid, constantly updated and (re)created.

However, like with traditional forms of geography and place keeping, neogeography and the creation of digiplace is not an objective process.  Digiplace relies on ‘code’, created by humans to give precedence over certain types of information over others.  The places that appear in a GoogleMaps search do not magically appear of their own volition.  They manifest thanks to code, and as Zook and Graham argue, “[a]t issue is the power of code to set rules for behavior” (p. 471).  GoogleMaps is able to create a representation of place based on code and algorithm, in much the same way that geodemographics are able to create profiles of neighbourhoods (Zook & Graham, 2007).

The underlying code of GoogleMaps represent values that are socially constructed and exemplify a host of cultural, political and economic responsibilities (Zook & Graham, 2007).  More than only an web-based mapping platform, it produces virtual and interactive spaces that are subjective, and mediates how people conceive of and associate their ideas of place.

Zook, M. A., & Graham, M. (2007). Mapping Digiplace: geocoded Internet data and the representation of place. Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design, 34, 466-482.

Another thanks for spreading the word about “n Atlas of Calendria for the Year 2010 of the Common Era, as Observed and Faithfully Recorded by Electrofork. See the post here, at Clear Reality. Thanks, Nila!

In my last post I drew attention to the Collapse journal and its role in disseminating the so-called Speculative Realist ‘movement’. The proposed sixth issue promises much to those working on progressive ecocritical and ecophilosophical projects without necessarily cementing the journal’s relationship to Graham Harman et al. Having recently spoken with editor Robin Mackay about the new volume, I can confirm that it is still in preparation, but an announcement will be made soon and advance orders will be possible at that time. Arriving in December, “late contributors and general perfectionism have held up publication…” Perhaps more interestingly, Mackay expressed concern over the journal’s affiliation with the latest philosophical trend, stating that “it’s not really centred on ‘SR/OOO’, indeed I’d be happy to distance Collapse from this apparent new orthodoxy!”

Following Collapse V’s inquiry into the legacy of Copernicus’ deposing of Earth from its central position in the cosmos, Collapse VI: Geo/philosophy will pose the question: Is there nevertheless an enduring bond between philosophical thought and its terrestrial support, or conversely, is philosophy’s task to escape the planetary horizon, to abjure ‘everything that makes us scurry about blindly on the desolate surface of the earth’ (Badiou)?

Following early-modern geophilosophical experiments in utopia, geographies and cartographies real and imaginary have played a double role in philosophy, serving both as governing metaphor and as an ultimate grounding for philosophical thought. In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant draws a direct line of correspondence between the spherical shape of the Earth as a planetary model for the horizon of thinking and the nature of transcendental idealism, so as to establish and determine the boundaries in which human thinking should and may occur – the spherical shape of the Earth as an unequivocal model for ‘the limits of all possible geography’. However, if Kant grants the Earth a direct determinative sovereignty in regard to thought, Nietzsche subverts the gravitational horizon of the Earth so as to bring about the possibility of the Great Politics and ‘Overman as the meaning of earth’. Thus Zarathustra begins his journey by exhorting to the people of the city, ‘Be faithful to the Earth’. Yet as his journey is prolonged, Zarathustra’s faith for the Earth turns into a longing for the ‘fresh air’, his will to remain faithful to the Earth is only nurtured by a ‘weightless affirmation’ of it. Schelling, on the other hand, thinks the earth as depth, inflecting Nietzsche’s weightless affirmation toward a profound, productive earth with a geological history: an earth turned inside-out, whose destiny is determined by its churning depths rather than by its surface inhabitants.

It is this enigmatic passage between the Earth as a geographical determination and the possibility of a weightless identification of the Earth that conditions Deleuze and Guattari’s discovery of a new ground for Geophilosophy – a philosophy that grasps thinking in relation to territory and earth.

Collapse VI: Geo/philosophy begins with the provisional premise that the Earth does not square elements of thought but rather rounds them up into a continuous spatial and geographical horizon. Geophilosophy is thus not necessarily the philosophy of the earth as a round object of thought but rather the philosophy of all that can be rounded as ‘an’ (or ‘the’) earth. But in that case, what is the connection between the empirical earth, the contingent material support of human thinking, and the abstract ‘world’ that is the condition for a ‘whole’ of thought?

Urgent contemporary concerns introduce new dimensions to this problem: The complicity of Capitalism and Science concomitant with the nomadic remobilization of global Capital has caused mutations in the field of the territorial, shifting and scrambling the determinations that subtended modern conceptions of the nation-state and territorial formations. And scientific predictions present us with the possibility of a planet contemplating itself without humans, or of an abyssal cosmos that abides without Earth – these are the vectors of relative and absolute deterritorialization which nourish the twenty-first century apocalyptic imagination. Obviously, no geophilosophy can remain oblivious to the unilateral nature of such un-earthing processes. Furthermore, the rise of so-called rogue states which sabotage their own territorial formation in order to militantly withstand the proliferation of global capitalism calls for an extensive renegotiation of geophilosophical concepts in regard to territorializing forces and the State. Can traditions of geophilosophical thought provide an analysis that escapes the often flawed, sentimental or cryptoreligious fashions in which popular discourse casts these catastrophic developments?

Collapse VI: Geo/philosophy will bring together philosophers, theorists, eco-critics, leading scientific experts in climate change, and artists whose work interrogates the link between philosophical thought, geography and cartography, in order to create a portrait of the present state of ‘planetary thought’.

Here is the last part of the battlemap tutorials for NewbieDM.com, written by professional cartographer Jonathan Roberts.  Click here for part 1, and here for part 2.

At the end of the last tutorial we had a lovely map, though it’s a little bare. In this tutorial I’ll cover the little tweaks that will finish off the map and how to present the finished product.

Final touches to the terrain – lava!

Here I will cover how I went about creating the lava, and discuss some alternative approaches to the one I took.

Now I already have the lava lines drawn in, so as with my walls, I can create a selection by using the Fuzzy Select tool. I then use Select->Grow to expand it by 2 pixels so that it runs along the center of my lines rather than along the edge. Now I hit Select->Save to Channel to save the selection for future use. With this in place I can quickly lay in some colours.

I create a new transparent layer and fill it with a dark red (7f1800 in html notation for anyone that wants to re-use it). I now have a totally red map. Once again I right click the layer and add a layer mask, being careful to pick my lava selection. Now I only have red lava, but it’s still a little extreme. As before I soften this by duplicating the layer, setting one layer to soft light .

Now that looks good, though it looks a little more like rivers of blood than lava. From looking at some useful reference photos of lava from Google it’s clear that the defining feature of lava is the sharp bright line – almost like ripples. So I take a new layer, grab a nice bright yellow and the ink tool and start detailing the lava. It takes a while to place all the ripples, but it’s starting to look more like lava.

Currently it’s a bit harsh – and certainly not subtle. Now lava is bright because it’s giving off heat – so we should expect these bright regions to give off light. So I duplicated the layer and used the Gaussian Blur filter: Filters->Blur->Gaussian Blur… This adds a subtle glow to the lines.

I’ve also dropped the opacity of the hard highlights to 60% to avoid the harsh look that we had at the start.

Now each sharp line gives off light, but the whole pools of lava give off light too. To add to this effect I add a new layer, set it to soft light and use a very light yellow to lay in the light given off by the lava.

Now that’s quite a lot of trouble to get detail into the map, especially drawing in all the lines in for the lava. One workaround is to find a
texture that you can use to add detail. An excellent place to look is www.cgtextures.com. Here you’ll find a lot of good textures.
For this example I’ve taken the image that can be found here.

I placed this on a new layer, making sure that it covers all the lava:

Now obviously the marble doesn’t look convincing at is, but the pattern of light and shade looks like it might work well. I then set this whole layer to soft light and voila! – instant lava.

This works particularly well because the marble texture is almost greyscale. Had it been brightly coloured it would be best to desaturate it first (Colours->Desaturate).  You can use this technique to quickly add some interest to regions and delineate different types of terrain. It’s easy to overdo this, so drop the opacity low to start and then slowly build it up.

Remember that the more subtle layers you pile on top of each the better the final result will look.  We’ll cover more of this when dealing with regional and city maps.

Adding set dressing

Okay, so now we have a map with all our different features and terrain in place. Time to add some set dressing. There are two ways to go about this. Firstly, we can draw our items of set dressing ourselves. The alternative is to find some items drawn by someone else and steal them.  Remarkably, this second approach is perfectly legal as long as the person has made them freely available. There are loads of items that fall into this category in the User Creation Forums over on the Dunjinni website (www.dunjinni.com). I’ve also got a pack of items on my website that you are free to download and place.

For my example map I used torches, braziers and doors from the map pack, as well as some bones to give a properly ominous air to the
sacrificial pillar.  The rope bridge and the pile of dragon gold I created from scratch for this map. The process for these is the same as for other features of the map. Add a new layer and draw in the lines with the ink tool. Create a new layer for the colours. Finally add a soft light layer to add light and shade.

Here’s the progress of the rope bridge through this process. In the last step I added some extra shadows beneath the bridge to emphasise the height from the floor of the cavern.

Now to add some torches to light the caverns (lifted from my map pack):

A side view to help the GM:

and a signature! Don’t forget to leave your mark on your map. It’s good to see it there, and it also means that if you put it up on the web for others to use that people know it’s yours.

Oh, one final edit. I duplicate the grid layer and blurred one of them slightly. This is helpful because if you are looking at a map at different scales (say in a virtual tabletop where you can zoom in or out) then the program that does the scaling can easily lose a 1 pixel wide line. It just averages the pixels out and gets rid of the line. This doesn’t happen to the gently blurred line – so you have a smooth transition as you zoom out rather than getting a jagged effect with bits of grid disappearing in chunks as you zoom out.

With that final tip we are finished:’

Make sure that you keep all these features on their own layer, I’ll explain why when we get to showing off your map using a virtual tabletop.

Showing off your map

Now all of this is a little overkill if all you want to do is keep the map to yourself and draw the combat encounters out on a dry erase battlemat.

So how do you go about getting this map in front of your players? Well there are two ways to do it.

1. Printing it out.

It’s perfectly possible to print out your map and use it at the table. If you’re feeling flush you can take it to your local print shop and have them run it off on a large format printer. There are even dedicated online printers that specialise in RPG battlemaps (http://www.gamerprintshop.com/). However if you want to print it at home you certainly can.
First of all, make sure that your map is scaled to the correct size. Here I’ve got a 100px grid, so I need to set the resolution to 100dpi to make sure it prints out 1 inch squares. This can be set through Image->Scale Image…

Now make sure that you turn off any images that you don’t want your players to see. Hide the secret doors, remove the traps. In this case I’m going to turn off all the elevation text. Now save the map as a jpg. To do this go to File->Save As… and save it out as something like MapFinal.jpg. It will ask you to set a quality. 85% should be fine so just click okay.

Now you need to download a wonderful little program called Posterazor.  It’s free and cross platform and you can get it here.  Load it up. This program slices up an image – without rescaling it – into a multi-page pdf. Once it has done this, you can print out your map page by page. Not only does this allow you to print the map yourself, it also
means that you can keep most of the map a secret from your players before they explore it.

When you start the program you’ll be asked to load an input image.  Load up your MapFinal.jpg and make sure it’s got the right dpi setting.  As long as you scaled your image right this should be fine. On the second page make sure you have the correct type of paper selected.  Letter for the US, A4 for the UK, just check that your printer has the paper that you pick. Next comes the overlap. This sets the amount of overlap between images on each page. You can have as little or as much as you like. It’s worth having a little as it helps line things up at the table. In step 4 you’ll see an image of your map with red lines over it.  This shows you where the program is going to cut your map. You can edit the values on this page to move the cuts around, but it’s usually pretty good. Finally on step 5 you can save out your pdf. You’re done!

Open your pdf, print it out and take it to the gaming table. You’re all set to use your glorious creation for your game.  For those who would like to save ink, you can also do this at the end of stage 1 – when you have black and white map with a simple grid. This gives you all the same play value, without costing you a fortune in colour cartridges.

2. Using a virtual tabletop

The alternative, and one that uses no ink at all, is to use one of the growing number of virtual tabletop programs out there. I personally have used maptool (www.rptools.net) ever since I moved country and wanted to keep my old game going. I now use it both with my friends from the UK, and also for a face to face game in the States.  Preparing the image for use in a virtual tabletop is much the same as
preparing it for use in Posterazor. Remove all GM only information – remember you’re showing the players the map. Now save it out as a jpg.  Before you saved it at a high quality. Now when the Save As JPEG dialogue comes up, click the Show Preview In Image Window checkbox.  This will give you an estimate of the filesize. As you move the quality slider you’ll see how this size changes.

Now this is a fine balance. Too low a quality and you’re map will look rough and have obvious compression defects. Too high a quality and you’ll be trying to upload a 10MB file to all your friends at once. Now your internet connection may have a great download speed, but I’ll bet it will take a while to upload 50MB. So strike a balance. If you’re using it for a face to face game then you don’t need to worry about internet speeds and you can go with a high quality that looks good.

Finally, depending on the virtual tabletop program, you may want to use a version of the map without the set dressing and add those items, such as the torches and braziers, in the program itself. Now you see why I said you might want to keep those on their own layer! Equally, maptool has an inbuilt grid, so I use a version of the map without a grid, and let maptool keep track of the distances.

With a little set-up for the light and shade, and with a top down token from the wonderful tokens of Devin Night of the Four Ugly Monsters the dungeon is ready for use face to face (with a second monitor, a player laptop or a projector) or across the world.

Here I set up the light sources to conform to the light rules and told maptool where the walls were. I also made sure that the elevations were only visible to the GM – so they can quickly see all the relevant information, but it doesn’t break the suspension of disbelief for the
players.

Now doesn’t that look better than a dry erase battlemat with markers?  And all for the price of two free pieces of software and a small investment of time.

If you want to have a look at the full blown maptool campaign file it’s included in the RPGNow download. In fact there are two campaign files in there – one for Pathfinder/OGL lighting rules and another for 4th edition rules.
If you’d like to see this process in real time, then sign up to The Breaking of Forstor Nagar – a patronage project with Rite Publishing. As
a patron you’ll be directly involved in the development of the adventure with input at every stage. This includes map design, storylines, NPCs and encounters. If you’d like to find out more, visit The Breaking of Forstor Nagar and get involved.

I hope you’ve enjoyed the first mapping tutorial. I’ll be interested to see what people create! I’ll be back in due course with similar tutorials for some larger scale maps, dealing with towns, regions and perhaps even whole worlds. Until next time, happy mapping!

Well, there it is guys.  One of my goals for the site has come true.  A kick ass mapping tutorial by a professional.  I can’t thank Jonathan enough for this series.  Based on the number of messages I’ve received about it, I know it’s destined to become a popular feature here (if it isn’t already).  We have other tutorials coming down the pipe, but let’s give Jonathan’s photoshop some cool-down time!  Make sure you visit his website at Fantastic Maps, for more mapping goodness, and if you have made some maps following the tutorials, share them with the rest of us!

HarperCollins atlas of world history
G1030 .G68513

National Geographic atlas of world history
D20 .G76 1997

By Rory Reynolds

A HANDWRITTEN Robert Burns poem worth £30,000 is to be displayed for the first time alongside some of Scotland’s most treasured artifacts.

The Battle of Sherramuir, a poem detailing the Jacobites’ fight against the king’s army at the height of the Jacobite rebellion, will be among the highlights of the Treasures exhibition in Edinburgh.

The Forlani Map – the first ever printed map of Scotland – and Sherlock Holmes tale The Adventure of the Illustrious Client, handwritten by Arthur Conan Doyle, are also expected to tempt the crowds out of the cold and into the renovated National Library of Scotland.

The map, which is the showpiece of the library’s collection of two million maps, dates back to 1546 and is derived from a document charting the British Isles.

Another highlight of the exhibition, which runs from this Thursday to the 8th January, is the signed order of the Massacre of Glencoe, a chilling document sanctioning the murder of senior members of the MacDonald clan by the Campbells.

The 300-year-old document ordered the Campbells to “putt all to the sword under seventy” those of the MacDonald clan.

Other famous documents include the Copperplate Map of Treasure Island, complete with X marking the spot of buried treasure.

The map was part of the 1895 memorial Edinburgh edition of Robert Louis Stevenson novels.

Martyn Wade of the National Library of Scotland, said: “We are very excited to be celebrating the year of Homecoming by offering members of the public the opportunity to see this collection of priceless Scottish treasures.

“The collection has a wide appeal, with pieces from iconic Scottish literary figures in Burns, Conan Doyle, Scott and Stevenson, and from key moments and movements in the history of Scotland, including the Covenanters, the Jacobites, the Union of the Parliaments and, of course, the massacre at Glencoe.

“I would encourage anyone interested in catching a glimpse of Scotland’s history to visit the library this winter.”

See more of our pictures at our Flickr site and videos at our dedicated channel,  Deadline TV.

Here is an excerpt from a posting at BIKE RUMOR.com, featuring one of my maps of Ben’s and my Block Island bike rides. To wit:

“#152, 153 – two most beautiful maps detailing separate bike rides on Upper and Lower Block Island, RI, from Elizabeth Daggar.”

(Numbers pertain to the maps’ inclusion on the Hand Drawn Map Association)

My first completed embroidery map. My finger tips may be swollen and sore from the final stitches but I am so pleased to have this finished. The bulk of the cotton thread makes stitching hard but gives a weight to the fabric; distorting and warping the image out from its grid like origins.

To give an idea of the bulk of the thread here’s an image of the back taken before the edges of the linen were trimmed.

Narrative authority is based on the argument that, [1] “knowledge is personally and socially constructed and reconstructed in situations as people share their ideas and stories with others”(Olson, 1995)

I have been thinking about authority in Narrative.

By authority, I mean thinking about the relationships between the storyteller and the audience.
Some Examples
- Authority in Journalism and the media
- Scriptural (religious) authority and it’s narrative interpretations

What characteristics are required to give narrative authority?
How do we define a reliable source?

[1] Olson, M. R. (1995). Conceptualizing narrative authority: Implications for teacher education. Teaching and Teacher Education, 11(2), 119-135.

Here is the 2nd Part of Jonathan Roberts’ battlemap series for NewbieDM.com readers.  Part 1 can be found here.  In the following weeks, he’ll be providing us with mapping tutorials for regional maps and world maps as well.  You can visit Jonathan’s site, Fantastic Maps, to find other great examples of his work.

Last time we created the line art for our battlemap, and created a very functional map in black and white with a grid. Now if you want to stop at that and print then you certainly can.Equally, if you’re using this as your own reference and drawing out the map on a dry erase mat for your players, you don’t need to go much further. However if you have a little more time to invest then there are some nice tricks that can relatively quickly make your functional line map into a lush full colour map that will really stand out.

That’s what we’ll cover today. In the third part of the tutorial I’ll go through how to print out your maps or use them in a virtual tabletop.

The most important thing when you add colour is subtlety. It’s really easy to slap down bold colours in the different areas that make your map look like it’s been drawn in neon marker. Equally, it’s easy to let the colours and textures obscure the important features of a map.  Remember that maps have to be functional more than they have to pretty. The map you have already has all the function you need, make sure you don’t lose that when you add the colour.I find that it’s best to start off with one unifying texture as a background and build up colours, highlights and shadows on top of that texture, without ever truly obscuring it. This allows the background texture to tie the whole map together giving it a unified look and feel. The texture I use most often is a parchment texture, but If I’m doing a snow and ice map I’ll use something in blues and greys.

The important thing for the rest of this process is that the background around the middle of the scale in tone – neither too dark or too light. If you want to borrow the texture, here it is:

This is a bit dark for snow, so with this layer selected I used Colours->Brightness/Contrast to lighten it up (moving both sliders to the right) and set the layer to soft light once again, with a duplicate of the layer set to normal and reduced to 50% opacity. Voila! Snow and ice!

Part 3 of the tutorial is now available here.

I am taking the process of building my star clusters as an opportunity for a little bit of DiY astronomy without the “aid” of the night sky.  So you could say this is more experimental astrophotography…