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elanastarsMy last campaign went on indefinite hiatus due to a player having a kid (which--fair!), but I hadn't been inspired for what I wanted to do next for some time. My last campaign had a lot of deep worldbuilding and lore, and while I'll definitely revisit it in the future, I haven't been feeling inspired to go back to it yet, and nothing else had quite caught my attention.
So, recently I watched this video:
There's lots of good content in that video, but what really caught my attention was the Swashbuckling style of campaign. I love that genre and it immediately got the juices flowing. I might post more plot related stuff later, but for this post, I'll just include the introduction.
The players are specifically on a mission to recover a family treasure mcguffin that was stolen in a war long ago, and they've been told that it's going to be shipped out soon. Their mission is to recover it from a conveniently cinematic coastal town. Obviously, nothing is ever that simple and shenanigans ensue.
I like the potential for lots of tropes (In Brennan Lee Mulligan voice: "Tropes! Tropes! Tropes!") and the fact that the campaign has a clear goal, which limits the amount of prep vs my "Who knows man, the party could decide to do anything" style of campaign.
Unfortunately, this requires...a LOT of mapmaking, including both regional maps and quite a few action setpiece battle maps, some of which won't get used depending on what the party does. I do, of course, know that you can buy maps or use ones that creators have freely provided, but I tend to get specific visions in my head and make my own maps instead. Sooooo...here we go!
I generally use Inkarnate to make my maps. I did spring for the pro version for the extra assets and some oft the other features.
In addition, I generally have the most trouble with making convincing town layouts, so I snagged one of those from https://www.fantasytowngenerator.com/.
--A Brief Digression--
Fantasy Town Generator uses procedural generation, and NOT generative AI. There are a couple of key differences that are important ethical distinctions:
If you're interested, the creator posted more information about the way their algorithm works on Reddit. Just wanted to address that as a concern out premptively, since I think we're all sick to death of AI slop being pushed into everything.
--End Digression--
So, with that said, here's the town template that I selected from the site:
Now, this is a good starting point, but I want to add texture and detailing to really make my map pop. (Is this overly complicated for a map that isn't even a battle map? Yes!)
So, I traced over the general shape in Inkarnate. Then, I did some initial ocean texturing, used some premade assets to build up cliffs, and added some sandy texture to the edges to give it a beach look:
At this point, I realized I should probably have done this in a different order and had to get creative with doing the town overlay, relegating it to the top layer. This may work out or may prove to be a huge pain in the ass. Cursing myself for being a perfectionist, I then cut out the outside of the town bit by bit to leave just the area right around the buildings. This took hours.
It looks okay (realistically I *really* could call it here), but I want the edges to blend better. So I started in on the process of erasing the grass texture that was on the generated map. I've only done a few patches--you can see it best in the section to the center left:
That's my progress so far! After I finish blending in the edges, I'll add some more texture on the land area, which should also help blend out the edges nicely. Overall, I'm happy with how this project is coming along!
So, recently I watched this video:
There's lots of good content in that video, but what really caught my attention was the Swashbuckling style of campaign. I love that genre and it immediately got the juices flowing. I might post more plot related stuff later, but for this post, I'll just include the introduction.
The players are specifically on a mission to recover a family treasure mcguffin that was stolen in a war long ago, and they've been told that it's going to be shipped out soon. Their mission is to recover it from a conveniently cinematic coastal town. Obviously, nothing is ever that simple and shenanigans ensue.
I like the potential for lots of tropes (In Brennan Lee Mulligan voice: "Tropes! Tropes! Tropes!") and the fact that the campaign has a clear goal, which limits the amount of prep vs my "Who knows man, the party could decide to do anything" style of campaign.
Unfortunately, this requires...a LOT of mapmaking, including both regional maps and quite a few action setpiece battle maps, some of which won't get used depending on what the party does. I do, of course, know that you can buy maps or use ones that creators have freely provided, but I tend to get specific visions in my head and make my own maps instead. Sooooo...here we go!
I generally use Inkarnate to make my maps. I did spring for the pro version for the extra assets and some oft the other features.
In addition, I generally have the most trouble with making convincing town layouts, so I snagged one of those from https://www.fantasytowngenerator.com/.
--A Brief Digression--
Fantasy Town Generator uses procedural generation, and NOT generative AI. There are a couple of key differences that are important ethical distinctions:
- Procedural generation uses a set of rules designated by the programmer to generate a result, rather than developing its own rules from a set of pre-made examples. (This is the difference between something like "If user is in a swamp area, the swamp grass per tile should be a random number between 1-3" vs. "Analyze these swamp maps and generate a new map based on them.") This means that procedural generation doesn't get trained on pre-existing (usually copyrighted) works.
- Because the programmer creates a set of rules instead of trying to get the computer to figure out rules based on pre-existing materials, the storage and memory demands are much more reasonable.
If you're interested, the creator posted more information about the way their algorithm works on Reddit. Just wanted to address that as a concern out premptively, since I think we're all sick to death of AI slop being pushed into everything.
--End Digression--
So, with that said, here's the town template that I selected from the site:
Now, this is a good starting point, but I want to add texture and detailing to really make my map pop. (Is this overly complicated for a map that isn't even a battle map? Yes!)
So, I traced over the general shape in Inkarnate. Then, I did some initial ocean texturing, used some premade assets to build up cliffs, and added some sandy texture to the edges to give it a beach look:
At this point, I realized I should probably have done this in a different order and had to get creative with doing the town overlay, relegating it to the top layer. This may work out or may prove to be a huge pain in the ass. Cursing myself for being a perfectionist, I then cut out the outside of the town bit by bit to leave just the area right around the buildings. This took hours.
It looks okay (realistically I *really* could call it here), but I want the edges to blend better. So I started in on the process of erasing the grass texture that was on the generated map. I've only done a few patches--you can see it best in the section to the center left:
That's my progress so far! After I finish blending in the edges, I'll add some more texture on the land area, which should also help blend out the edges nicely. Overall, I'm happy with how this project is coming along!
no subject
Date: 2025-06-24 11:24 am (UTC)And I think that map is looking really good! Honestly, I'm kinda obsessed with how nice the blending looks. I think the step you're working on now heightens that further, going by what you've got so far.
Congrats on getting your DM inspiration back in flow!
no subject
Date: 2025-06-24 10:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-06-26 01:23 pm (UTC)