New DM saying Hello!
Hello!
Ever since I read The Hobbit, I've been drawing maps. In fact, I was drawing maps before I even finished reading about Bilbo and his adventures. One of my best friends from school and I would get together on afternoons and sleep-overs and just draw and draw and draw. Sometimes we'd draw spaceships; other times we'd draw monsters; or mazes; and sometimes we'd draw maps of magical worlds. Mine were mostly Middle-Earth rip-offs, but I enjoyed it nonetheless.
Well, time went on. I acquired new interests--music, mainly. My friend and I went from drawing on college-rule paper to creating MIDI-based music and e-mailing the files to each other. Fast forward 10 or so years. We're out of college. He moved to the other side of the country. I stayed home. He's waaayy into creating digital music; I'm more into performing. But a few months ago, we were both in a nostalgic mood--talking about the folders we each have of our old artwork and the many MP3s of music we created--when he showed me this website called The Cartographer's Guild. It was great seeing the professionalism and how MANY people were posting some amazing work! It was almost like a glimpse of an alternate reality: "I wonder if I'd be making stuff like this if I kept drawing maps as a kid..."
Anyway, not too long ago, I convinced some friends of mine to start a Dungeons and Dragons campaign with me. None of us had ever played. But I have always wanted to try it. And, of course, I wanted to be the Dungeon Master. We've been playing for over a month now (just 4-5 sessions), and it's been AWESOME. I think we were all taken by surprise as to how much we're enjoying the game.
The first dungeon we did was one I downloaded from the D&D website. So I created the map based on the map in the PDF, which uses dungeon tiles from a specific set (I guess--I'm not sure). The dungeon was called, "Coppernight's Salvation." Takes place in a mine. It was really fun. Here's the map:
They liked the map, and it was a blast playing through it. At the end of the map, the players decided to descend down the waterfall going into this big pit. Feeling pretty confident after running the first dungeon, I decided to create one. And I didn't want to just make another map, I wanted it to be something really cool. Going down a pit? This calls from some 3-D action! Taking inspiration from some of the stuff the guys at Penny-Arcade do in their games, I went through this process:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/4090415...7624182035519/
(Just go to the right for the next image.)
ANYWAY! We had a blast going down The Pit. Now I'm making a new map, which is part of an underground Minotaur prison. I'm looking forward to it and learning a lot by reading posts in here!
So that's me. Hello!
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