To Map or not To map?

[Cirigan]

okay so the begining of my game will start in a fairly large city and the players will be their for at least a month, so my question for you is what is your opinion on drawing a map for a city, i've got all the necessary parts written out, but i can't decide wether a map is necessary or not
besides i kinda plan on burning the city to the ground on their way out

[Meat Shield]

I never hurts to just have a generic map pulled off the net for use. Especially if they are going to burn it down, you won't care what the map has.

[BRC]

A rough map maybe, but nothing too detailed.

[Bitzeralisis]

Don't map map it, but just map map it. Simply, all you need is a simple, undetailed map with key roads and buildings marked. Draw some dotted lines to split the city up into districts, and label them. Then, invent minor roads and buildings and your players travel among them, using your notes as a guideline.

[Avor]

I love maps, I spend hours on them. I love it. And as a player I like maps, it gives me a sense of the world.

[Calinero]

I guarantee you that if you deliberately choose not to draw a map of the city because you're planning to burn it down, something will happen to make that city vitally important and prevent it from burning. Irony just works that way. I'd make a map, if I were you. No great work of art, just a general sketch.

[Sstoopidtallkid]

Open Excel. Mess with the settings so each row is equal in size to each column. Voila. Mapping program. You'll need to do something like that just to keep everything straight, but don't let people here fool you into actually drawing.

[Fiery Diamond]

Up to you. I wouldn't, but then I don't draw maps for plot-centric cities.

-Fiery Diamond

[Cirigan]

I never hurts to just have a generic map pulled off the net for use. Especially if they are going to burn it down, you won't care what the map has.

any recommended sites?


Avor; I love maps, I spend hours on them. I love it. And as a player I like maps, it gives me a sense of the world.

i love to do so to, but the mundane details of city maps dull me greatly, i prefer drawing a sewer with a thieves guild and a bizarre snake worshiping cult of kobolds in the caves under the sewers(thats the actually interesting part of this city in my opinion)

[bosssmiley]

Basic city design: pick a dozen or so interesting locales (the palace, the agora, the Cathedral of the Ebon Wing, the worst of the slums, the waterfront, the Great West Gate). Draw lines connecting them. Use that as your basic framework of the city. The players will get the idea.

Don't be afraid to have crazy, counter-intuitive, seemingly illogical stuff cheek-by-jowl: that's the very essence of a city after all. Have a shrine to Pelor in the wall of the temple of Hextor. Have roads loop out of the linear in odd ways for reasons long since forgotten (it might be a "Tsar's thumb" situation, it might be for occult reasons). Have the squalid rookeries right under the walls of the royal keep (see Tower Hill, or Docklands and Tower Hamlets in London for RL examples). Look at "Rome" or modern late-industrialising societies (India, SE Asia) for inspiration.

You certainly don't need to sketch out every alley and sewer from the get go. That's certainly not how our ancestors did it. Just do a Pratchett and add what you need as you need it for the purpose of the story... :smallwink:

[GutterRunner]

How about instead of a proper plan map, a kind of picture map.

Do a rough outline of the city and work out where all the important sites are (temples, noble's castles, barracks, the inn the party start at, guilds etc.) and draw a little sketch of the building at that location, and label it. Then sketch on major roads if you want.
The map will want to be quite big in order to fit a decent sized sketch of the buildings on (the sketches should occupy more space on the map than the buildings do in the city).

This is the kind of thing tourist information offices and attractions might have, and might have been the kind of map used in the Baldur's Gate games for the big cities if I'm remembering it right.

[valadil]

Do it if you have the time to spare, but if you're short on time you can cut the map without affecting play too much. As much as I enjoy having a nice map to give my players, it rarely has any outcome on the game. You can always draw up the map as the city is revealed to them rather than ahead of time.

[Storm Bringer]

I'd just have a rough sketch map. veyr rough. just the outline of the city walls, three or four of the major roads, and add bulding as and when they become impotant to the plot, eg the players inn at the start, the governers palace if they go their, the market if they go shopping, etc.

the players might enjoy pouring over detailed maps, but in all honesty all they need is a rougn idea of where they are in relation to everything else. I've been to many flavoursome and memoerable city that was little more than half a dozen squiggles on a sheet of A4.

[Citizen Joe]

If the PC's KNOW the city, then you just need some flavor text to describe it. Give them some initial important locations and some sort of cheap taxi system. Then whenever you need them to be someplace, they just take a taxi there. The result is more of a schematic diagram than a map.