Mapping Journal - July (Patreon)

July is almost over, but it has been a really busy and productive time for us. We had our 5th Birthday sale in the middle of the month, and you all saw the new maps we made especially for the sale (Old Pilgrim Road etc). 

We decided after that to finish a city gate map we had planned for a while (Marshgate), and then a multi-level jungle catacomb (Chapel of the Unquiet Dead)

The Heroquest Project

As some of you may know, we cut our teeth on making maps for Heroquest, and this then developed into our current work. We decided that it would be fun to pay homage to the classic, but in a rather different way than just copying the original board.

If you're not familiar with Heroquest, the core mechanic is that the board consists of rooms with walls, but no doors. A diagram in the quest book tells the 'Evil' player where doors/monsters/treasures etc are, and they get placed on the board during the game. 

We wanted to make a set of maps that would be visually exciting, themed around the quest, but also compatible with the quests in the Heroquest book, so you could directly use these maps to play the quests.

By mapping out the particular connections between rooms, and where traps/treasures etc are, we were then able to make maps that have the same gameplay, but are rpg battlemaps in their own right. 

For an example, have a look below. The first quest in the UK & Europe version of the Questbook was called 'The Trial'.

Hopefully you can see from that how our map allows you to play the original quests from the books, but on unique maps.

We've made maps for the first five quests

• The Trial (1st Quest in UK/Europe book)
• The Maze (1st Quest in US book)
• The Rescue of Sir Ragnar
• Lair of the Orc Warlord
• Prince Magnus' Gold

You can see preview pics of those maps below. 

We plan to release these maps as a bundle (and separately) in the first week of August, and then over the next few months work on the others. It's actually really fun to make maps that are compatible with these dungeons, and also then have a flavour of what they're supposed to be.

Bridge at Dragon Chasm

Finally, we wanted to share this progress gif of some of the stages in making Bridge at Dragon Chasm, your Third Map for August. Hopefully you can get an idea of some of the process, but feel free to ask any questions about the workflow 

That's all for now :)