Broken Earth: Post-apocalyptic Upper Midwest

[lobster]

Some time ago I stumbled upon a kickstarter for Broken Earth, a promising post-apo rpg in the vein of Fallout-series. The genre is close to my heart and I naturally bought the game as soon as it came out. In general Broken Earth is great but there is a big flaw with the maps included. They are mushy greyscale affair with little emphasis on usability in the gaming table. The game's core lies in hex-based exploration and community building, both of which need good maps. In order to be able to play the game I needed to make my own maps for the campaign area as well as certain key settlements and sites.

Presented here is the master map for the campaign area. I kept it real simple with minimalist color scheme, no more than 10 symbols and legend with both name of the site and it's key as presented in the rule book.

All the work was done on Photoshop.

[madcowchef]

Seems clean and iformation rich.

[arsheesh]

Nicely done!

Cheers,
-Arsheesh

[drow]

very well done.

[Mtaal]

Great work.
I have recently bought the Broken earth game and was searching the internet for more user friendly/printer friendly maps when i came across your post. I was wondering if you have or are aware of a similar map ( preferably with hexes) of the area but without all the info and icons on it for player use. your map is great for use as the reference map, but for the players exploration i think it would be a shame to give them all the information so easily.

any help/pointers would be greatfully recieved.

Mtaal

[lobster]

Great work.
I have recently bought the Broken earth game and was searching the internet for more user friendly/printer friendly maps when i came across your post. I was wondering if you have or are aware of a similar map ( preferably with hexes) of the area but without all the info and icons on it for player use. your map is great for use as the reference map, but for the players exploration i think it would be a shame to give them all the information so easily.

any help/pointers would be greatfully recieved.

Mtaal

I can make you one but consider handing the players an actual map of the area. It's more immersive.

[Mtaal]

I can make you one but consider handing the players an actual map of the area. It's more immersive.

Thankyou, talk about not seeing the obvious I have found a decent enough mp of the area and will be starting my game soon, thanks again.

Mtaal

[Bridgeburners]

Bravo! Well done.

[Vooddoo-fire]

Can you tell me how you mad that map???

[lobster]

Can you tell me how you mad that map???

The original game map does a pretty terrible job at presenting the geography right, so I used Photoshop to lay an actual map of the area and the game map on top of each other. I had to do a lot of tweaking to present the shoreline, rivers, towns and other locations in more realistic way while not altering the intended hex distances and such too much. Having done the main lineart I did the colors (pretty simple stuff as you see) and designed a set of symbols. Then I went back to actual map of the area to see the propable extent of city ruins (in the original map the ruined areas are way too small), actual locations of power stations, dams and other sites. I marked these up with my symbols. I also had to redraw the run of the ruined highways since those presented in the game map have little to do with real world. Finally I did the naming and the map key. And thats about it.

Technically the style is really easy to emulate and I can do a simple tutorial if someone has some use for it. The hardest part was patching up the real world map to fit with the wonky game map.

edit. I also tried to get the extent of reforestation right by doing a bit of research on the flora of the are before it was turned to agriculture.