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Old School Maps

I had a lot of time over the summer to stay inside while avoid allergens and heat and air quality ozone action day alerts.  Cruising around the net brought me to a blog talking about an old school map -- I think it was drawn by Gary Gygax.  The image conjured up a lot of memories from when I was a kid and I would spend hours drawing maps on notebook and graph paper.  I'd even make my own graph paper so I could make maps.

So I started drawing, and drawing, and drawing.  It was just a simple dollar store mechanical pencil on a tablet of graph paper, but the layouts just flowed.  Tombs, halls, secret doors, hidden rooms all were fit masterfully together into mazes and puzzles on 8 1/2 by 11 sheets.  Beholder tunnels appeared attached to caves.  Pencil shading filled in the negative space.  A large multi-level temple took form.   Unfortunately, the more a made, the more faded my first drawings became.  Pencil smudges.

So I loaded up the 9 pages of maps into my scanner one by one and converted them into images.  In Gimp, I resized the images to a reasonable  number of pixels and thresholded them so that pencil marks and the grid became black and the rest of the sheet was white.  Preserved in this form forever, I started working on detailing them out for use in an adventure.



Keeping to my drawing, I tried first marking them up in pencil, but pencil doesn't show up well at all on a black and white printout.  So I grabbed a set of colored pens and started marking out room names, trap locations, secret doors, treasures, and all sorts of interesting things onto the maps.  Now they were becoming interesting.  And with the base maps digitally preserved, I can reprint them and reuse them for whatever scenario I need anytime.

The 9 pages of old school maps I put together would take months to adventure through, so I really wonder if I'll ever even get them into play, but it doesn't matter, because it was a lot of fun to practice some old school map making by putting pencil to paper.  It also was one of the most relaxing things I did all summer.


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