Tonnichiwa's Workshop (using cc3+)

[Tonnichiwa]

Today I begin a long journey.

31 years ago the TSR company created the Oriental Adventures book for the Advanced Dungeons and Dragons game. It was 1985, the year of the movie "Back to the Future", Prince, Madonna, and Michael Jackson were being spammed all over the radio, James Clavelle's book Shogun had been made into a TV miniseries, and Ninja's were all the rage. And if I remember correctly the only computers that were available were either the Commodor 64 (or some version of the commodore) or the IBM 286. There was no internet, cell phones, cd players, dvd players or drawing tablets.

I was 17 years old at the time and had been playing the two different versions of Dungeons and Dragons since 1980. In the new Oriental Adventures book, there was a kingdom that was called Kozakura, set in a larger setting of Kara-Tur. It was based on the Warring States period of Japan (Sengoku Jidai in Japanese) and I was immediately hooked.

Since that time, my old gaming group has disbanded and moved on from playing Dungeons and Dragons. They got lives and kids and got married and life happened.

But recently, some newer friends of mine have shown interest in some Dungeons and Dragons gaming. They used to play Legend of the Five Rings RPG from the AEG company way back in the 90's but they haven't really done any Asian style setting in their D&D games. They constantly talk about how much fun it would be to do a game of D&D based on feudal Japan or some fantasy version of it but no one has stepped up to really put that into action...until now.

After playing around with some maps, trying to create an Asian setting, I have finally decided I would just begin with that old setting from the Origional AD&D game.

But after digging out all of my old AD&D stuff I have run into a bit of a problem. Shortly after publication, TSR decided to move the Kara-Tur setting into the Forgotten Realms setting, produce a few maps for it, but then left it alone and really never went back to it after about 1990.

So resource materials and maps for the places I want to GM the players through are very sparse. So what is a GM with a mapping program like Campaign Cartographer 3+ supposed to do? Map it all out of course

So with that in mind I set to work gathering all I could find on my favorite country, Kozakura...sadly there isn't much.

There is a map of the entire country, but it doesn't go into great detail. This is the one TSR created and placed in their boxed set of the Kara-Tur setting.

EDIT: Sorry about the image, I still can't seem to figure out why it turns on it's side when I load it up to this site. It is the proper direction on my computer screen but for whatever reason it doesn't load up the right way