Maps of Old: Heortland and Kabul Acri

As I mentioned last week, I found some of  old RPG maps I'd drawn for campaigns. Most of these were created by a combination of scanning, hand drawing, and mucking with them in the weak-sauce art program Paint Shop Pro 5. 

I did this map back around 1999 for a new campaign set on the Third Continent of my fantasy world. Over the years I'd cobbled together the campaign- borrowing and stealing from various sources. In the mid 1990's I'd begun to run in a new area of the world. I borrowed elements from Glorantha and Runequest, haphazardly at first. Primarily that consisted of placing Pavis and the Valley of Prax as a cool location for play. Then as I began to look more deeply into it, I feel in love with the weirdness and cosmology of Glorantha. I bought all the available mainline and fan published material I could. This was before Issaries started to publish new things. In any case, my campaign setting became a massive kludge, but the players enjoyed it. The third campaign set there ended with the Giant's Cradle sailing down the Zola Fel, defended by the PCs. 

For the next campaign, I looked further afield. I tried to really figure out what the Orlanthi, Malkioni, and Lunar areas looked like. So I created this thing, which only covers a portion of the sub-continent this takes place on. North is actually to the left-hand side of the page because I like to make things even more difficult. If you know Glorantha, you'll see lots of references. The campaign world works primarily because none of the players (except my wife) really know the Glorantha setting at all. If they did, the cognitive dissonance might do them in.

This is one of my first attempts using the computer to assist me. I did this in the mid-1990's. Many of the signs and symbols come from images I found online or scanned from The Atlas of Fantasy. I think the forests and mountains, drawn by hand, came out decently. This is for a GURPS Fantasy campaign I played in, run by my friend Dave E. I took his sketch map and made this abomination. I was reminded of this recently because my friend Scott's running an arc of his Pathfinder campaign set in here. He actually annoyed me because he riffed and used another campaign from my world for one of his dimension hops- something I'd been working on coming back to for several years. But there's no shortage of ideas and concepts to play with. Looking at this map, the coastline looks weird to me. I don't know if that's a factor of the resolution or what. I love the names Dave had for his world.