I’m in “prep new D&D campaign material” mode because I’ve got a game in two weeks. I’ve been prodding my players about what they plan on doing so I can be ready with material for them. Honestly I just need an encounter or two plus some lore and rumor drops to get them started, I don’t need much.
But I am also prepping maps for locations they might visit. I’m working on a map of the big city in my campaign, Kopno’domas. It’s going to be my Viriconium, my Waterdeep, my Lankhmar. The greatest city in the world. A big sprawling urban setting filled with shining palaces, grungy back allies, and buccolic pastures, decadent and squalid in roughly equal measure, spanning a lively river and nestled up against a small mountain range. This city has lived in my head for almost 15 years and I’m excited to put it on the table for the players to see. It’s not real if it’s just notes; only what happens at the table counts.
If that sounds like I’m overprepping, let me expand on that a bit. Sure, mapping out a location on the possibility of characters going there might take a lot of time. But in this case I am working off of those aforementioned 15 years of dreaming, which means 15 years of sketches, notes, revisions, and additions. A pile of neighborhood names, perusing the google results for “how many people per building in Medieval Europe.” Notes about noble houses, their goals and schemes. Random tables about urban encounters and “what building is that?” Me writing flash fiction set there. It’s largely just me taking those notes, picking the ideas I like, and crafting a cool map in Inkarnate.
(Side note: I’m taking notes on this map while I make it; I plan on turning those notes in to a nice long “How to map a city in Inkarnate” post down the road.)
Just Start, Over and Over
I’ve spent, however, most of today creating new maps in Inkarnate, fiddling around with settings, not liking it, deleting it and starting over. I don’t know why I am having such a mental block about this? I kept quibbling about the various different versions I’ve sketched out of this fictional place and how they don’t all match. Can I make them match? Should I honor the earlier versions, or just wing it and make up something new? Can I reconcile the versions, or can I retcon the earlier ones with some kind of obfuscation?
I suspect it’s my perfectionist nature. If I can’t make the perfect map for this imaginary city no one cares about but me, then why even bother? Don’t answer that, it’s a rhetorical question. I know the answer already.
Having an imperfect thing is better than not having a thing at all. And my players won’t be judging the map on their ideal version of this city they’ve never thought about before; they’re just going to be happy to be in this city, stomping around and getting in to Good Trouble.
Navigating the Territory
Always a lesson for me when I stop to examine what I’m doing. This time the lesson is: give yourself the permission to be imperfect. Relax your standards and just start. Get something down, mess around with it, and put it into play. none of the notes are the game. None of the rules and books are the game. Even the character sheets aren’t the game. The game is what happens when we all sit at the table, talk to each other, bounce off each others’ ideas, and see how the dice are rolling tonight.
Kopno’domas started in my imagination but it won’t be a real place until me and the players have adventures in it. My maps, my notes, are just a guidepost, pointing in the direction of the gameplay. The map is not the territory.
We, the players, are both map and territory.
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