Time Drawn: February 2013

Every so often my parents take advantage of my art skills and ask me to make some art for them.

This one also added in my geography skills.

You see, my mom runs a role-playing game on Tuesday nights, set in an Oriental-themed world (Rokugan, from the Legends of the Five Rings system). Think Chinese geography plus Japanese culture plus magic with an extra large dose of political intrigue and you’ll be pretty close. I’m part of it, playing a warrior of a tribe that guards an obscure border pass.

This is said obscure border pass.

Mom has an invading army coming in through the pass, and she needed a map for a battle between the invaders and the small army group we players are part of. So, since I knew about the area and am good about not exploiting opportunities like this for my own benefit, she asked me to design the layout.

For reference, the orange lines are paths. If it’s dotted, it’s a path on the cliffs surrounding the area. I’m using contour lines to mark height differences. The blue is a river, the black things crossing the valley are barricades, and that’s 50 tents in the center.

If you’re still having trouble visualizing, well, that’s why I made this image too.

Contour maps are great things, but they require a lot of imagination to figure out what everything actually looks like. Now, if you’re the one designing the map, you’ve got a much easier job because you know what those lines actually mean.

Oh, and the second image has its point of view from the bottom left corner looking to the top right. The valley on the top right is the one that the invaders came from, the one on the left heads to the small town where the local people who guard this place live, and our troop came up from the one on the bottom right.

We, of course, won the battle through superior tactics. The magicians (and my character, acting as local guide and guard) went up that small path along the right side to provide a distraction and artillery support while the bulk of the army forced their way through the barricade on the bottom (fairly easy, since it was set up to be a defense against the invaders) and slaughtered the enemy. We did sustain some fairly heavy casualties (the enemies EXPLODED when they died!!), but only amongst the completely nameless non-player characters that made up the bulk of our army.

So over all, I did a good job designing the map for the battle. Our side had some advantages (like a path that let the magicians have a safe spot to do their thing) and some disadvantages (the barricade in the way), and it made for an interesting battle.

And I got to have fun making a map, so all is good.

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