Maps of Hobbinton

As a followup to my post for RPG Carnival - Cartography, I thought I would post these two maps and explain a little bit about how I created them.

Hobbinton Township Environs Map

The first one is the original that I drew on a 8.5 x 11 piece of paper with a felt tip pen. It shows the area around the township of Hobbinton (aka Hobbington, Hobnington, and Hobbnobton, depending on the district of town of the speaker). It shows a little bit of information that the Players don't start out knowing, so if you are one of the players in the current Campaign reading this, then do yourself a favor and don't study the map too hard. It will be more interesting for you if you get to be surprised during the course of play. Anyway, I drew this map, and then used my camera to take a picture of it, which I uploaded to my computer (obviously), and then worked on it in both, Picasa (a great piece of photo-editing software from Google that does all of the basic manipulations very easily and nicely), and then, surprisingly or not, I brought it into Microsoft Paint, a very simple image editor application I still find plenty of use for.

Hobbinton Township Details Map

This second Map is the one that came out of my efforts in Microsoft Paint.  All I did was I take the middle part of the map and cut it out and pasted it into a new image and saved that file. Then I erased the extraneous stuff I don't want to keep it from being cluttered using the Eraser Tool.  I then used the Line Draw Tool to paint in the details I wanted. I used various thickness lines and colors to distinguish elements of the map from one another.  That includes the main road (green), the section walls that divide neighborhoods (brown), the main channels for water (either underground or above ground), and the Main Pipes that go from the Water Tower to the fountains. I included a bridge which I painted in using the Line Tool. I then added text to the image in Georgia font to make it pretty, and used the line tool to show where these places are located.

Pretty simple. But the results, I think, are very helpful to me as a Gamesmaster. I can now look at the map and it reminds me of a ton of stuff that will be helpful to remember during the next Campaign. :)