Maps!
I’ve been working on the Kickstarter for our second product, The Festering Earth. We have a stretch goal for a full-on maps glow up, but I don’t want to count on that. I’m therefore working on a light refresh of the maps using more modern map assets. Let’s look at some examples.
Back in 2006, Campaign Cartographer was just coming out with its first bitmap symbol sets, just as I was producing these projects. In fact, I was ahead of their releases. For instance, the full version of City Designer 3 wasn’t out when I made our sourcebook on the city of Felric’s Redoubt. Because of this, the big city map was made with vector graphic symbols, whereas the maps I did for our fourth and fifth products had bitmap symbols.
My first example today is a border fort in Heaven called Stands in Faith. Back in 2006, I had two main symbol types besides the base symbols in the core Campaign Cartographer product. I used more photo-realistic symbols for present-day maps, but for the teasers, which depict heaven 10,000 years ago, I used a less-realistic, more abstract style.
In these versions for 2025, I’ve been primarily using the more modern Mike Schley art style. Mike Schley and Profantasy produced two versions of his style for us to use: a colored set for maps like you’d see in many of the 5e products and an “Inks” style for more black and white maps. I didn’t want to forgo color maps for the majority of our battles and locations, so I chose the “Inks” style for heaven maps and the colored style for the current-day maps. This leads to a sort of reverse Wizard of Oz effect, where everything in Heaven is black and white, and the current-day maps have a more modern RPG look.
As an example, here is the map of Stands in Faith from 2006:
2025 Version:
Later in the adventure, we have the more traditional color maps. This map is very technically a spoiler, but without a name or context, you can’t derive any real story information from it (I’ve scraped the title from the map to sand off the serial numbers.
Here’s the 2006 version:
Here’s the new version for 2025:
We’re about halfway through the Kickstarter campaign for The Festering Earth. You can back it now!
