The Grand Duchy of Karameikos [map]
I started playing D&D around 1981 when I was in first or second grade. Unlike most kids, we kept playing beyond the age of 12. My brother and I both liked to play and to DM, so we divided the game worlds between us. This was a fairly common practice for us. He got Cobra, I got GI Joe. He was Spiderman, I was the Hulk. He got Transformers, I got Gobots (I was young, I didn’t know any better … let’s move on).
With D&D, he got Greyhawk, Spelljammer, and Dragonlance while I got Forgotten Realms and Mystara. Part of the reasoning for this was so that the other one wouldn’t know much about the campaign setting that they adventured in, keeping a few secrets and surprises in the DM’s bag of tricks.
While Mystara has largely been cast off and abandoned by the general gamer community since 2E, it still holds a special place in my heart despite the best efforts of TSR/Wizards to dumb it down or even retro-fit to other worlds it in subsequent products (blasphemy!).
One of the campaigns I’m running now is set in Karameikos. For that campaign, I set myself to update the map in Photoshop in modern, RPG map styles.
I want to give a little shout out to Thorfinn Tait over at pandius.com for his digital maps that I used as a template. Here is his map in true Gazeteer style. Enjoy!
3 Comments so far
Leave a reply
Nice map! I’d be interested to hear how you went about making it. It really does look very similar in style to the modern RPG maps I’ve seen.
I’m especially interested in the mountains. Doing mountains like that in Illustrator (for example from the B10 maps) drives me insane because there are so many lines to draw for each individual mountain, but it looks like you’ve got a good technique going there.
Oh and commiserations on the Gobots thing. I had a similar sort of sharing thing going on with my brother, but unfortunately he never got into RPGs as much as I did.
The mountains are drawn using a combination of Bold/Emboss and then some Filter effects using Photoshop. I did not actually have to draw any lines (thankfully).
I’d love to crank out more maps for Mystara and Birthright, but I’m trying to finish up the first book.
Fingers crossed.