Looking for some ideas

[Rufus]

Hi all,

I have very little experience of mapping but I am an enthusiastic writer of RPG scenarios and would like to enhance these with some improved maps. The project that drove me here initially is that I would like to update and re-draw some old (c. 1980) maps I did for Metamorphosis Alpha. For those unfamiliar with the game it is an interesting challenge from a mapping perspective as it is a sort of post-apocalypse setting but is set on-board a giant starship so I need to map the structure of the ship and then fit inside the geographic features both "natural" and functional. Any ideas welcome

Rufus

[arsheesh]

Welcome to the Guild Rufus! Well I'm not sure if there are any star-ship related tutorials here or not. There certainly might be, but I haven't ever needed to create a map of one before so I've never looked. You might check out the Sci-fi section though to see if you can find examples of what you are interested in, and then try contacting the artist to esquire how they did it. Also, have a browse around the tutorials section.

Cheers,
-Arsheesh

[Rufus]

Thanks Arsheesh, I suspect just looking round will take weeks but that's OK, I should have a PC by then. I am currently struggling by on my wife's Netbook since my PC expired a few weeks back. By the time I have a proper PC, I hope to have some ideas of what to do with it

Rufus

[jbgibson]

Welcome, Rufus. You say "big ship"... There are tutorials for the usual Gaia Class ship -- the 24,000 mile circumference one. ;-)

If you mean substantially smaller than a planet but still big enough to have terrestrial-type geography, lots of the regional or local-scale tuts would do for the 'living surface', you'd just have to come up with the mechanicals and shell. Do you have design generalities in mind?

[Rufus]

Hi jbg, thanks for the reply. I'm still without a PC so I'm moving at a fairly slow pace, trying to use GIMP and Inkscape on a netbook with a screen the size of a postage stamp. After a little fiddling around I managed to make an outline of the hull of the ship (each deck is approximately 22 miles wide by 48 miles long) and have then exported this as a PNG which I then imported into GIMP. I don't have much (OK any) GIMP experience so I'm now messing about with ideas. I used RobA's "Not So Random Coastlines in GIMP" tutorial to both create some lake outlines and to create a "mountain range" that runs all around the edge of the "natural" decks. I guess it's back to the tutorial list for more ideas now

Nigel

[jbgibson]

OK, that's a tidy little vessel. Have you got some artificial gravity going, tangent to direction of travel? Any provision for sloshing under accel or decel? Multiple decks... Cool, so some have a literal underworld & heaven!