A Fiery Little Something from My Game

A little deviation from the normal update here. Nothing about the 5eMagic site. Instead, I just thought I'd share a little something I've made for the main campaign I'm running. If that's not your cup of tea, feel free to move right along and ignore it. Or, even better, leave comment to let me know that this is very much not what you're looking for.

On the other hand, if you'd enjoy more of this sort of thing (essentially sharing my own creations for you to draw inspiration from, or even reuse), let me know, too.

Today, I just thought I'd share because I had fun making this.

Anyway, I've been prepping for my PCs to sail upon the Sea of Fire in the next couple sessions (they're on a rescue mission on the Plane of Fire).

One of them is a former pirate, so I figured I'd make a map for him to chew on. Of course, he doesn't speak primordial, so he won't get much out of it in terms of the names without the help of another PC who's in the process of learning the language from an NPC tutor.

This image is the untranslated version used by efreet captains and other locals. I have a few other versions, including:

1. a transliterated version that I'll give to the PC who's learning the language
2. a version with hexes for the sailor who might want to measure distances
3. an English version for me (and eventually, maybe, the PC)

This was the first map I've made with Wonderdraft, a new mapping tool I got a few months ago and have been dying to try out. Since my campaign is set in 3rd edition timeline (i.e. 1372 DR) of Forgotten Realms, I haven't had much cause to create maps. There's already a lot around. This, though, was a perfect chance to kick the figurative tires. And I'm quite happy.

As someone who is absolutely not artistically talented at all, I found it very satisfying to create something that looked pretty decent. Plus, using Pixel Sagas' Mara's Eye font (which Keepers might recognize from our Spellbook generator), some name generators (Arabic and Moroccan mostly, with some Jotunn in the top-right corner where the fire giants are), and a bit of horrible misuse of Google Translate made this feel even more authentic.

My only complaint is that it prints terribly. There's not near enough contrast for it to work with my personal printer. I'm probably going to take a shot at Staples or something to see if it's any better. Maybe with a bit of color manipulation first. Still, even if it won't print legibly, I can still share it on my campaign's Slack channel & our Scabard site. So my players will get benefit from it no matter what; I just really like to hand out props like maps and such.

Anyway, I just thought I'd share. Let me know if you'd be interested in the other map versions, too.

-Chris

Update: So I did print it at Staples and it still was too dark. So it got retouched and now looks a lot better (in print, too)! I updated the picture above and I'm also including a version with hexes and a translated version below.