New Map: Loemendor

[Kaljamaha]

Hello everyone. I recently got back to playing Dom2 and decided to pick up on a project I started some 10 months ago, namely this map. It started as an exercise to learn GIMP, and developed into a "fully grown" map.

The map is of my own homebrew roleplaying world. There are a number of special provinces with special defenders and perhaps sites, but a no-specials version of the map is also included. Also, due to the map design being thematic rather than utilitarian, I make no promises as to the MP balance of the map.

Now, the important details: The map has 157 provinces (142/15), and the land mass is rather fragmented, generally with two or three provinces acting as "bridges" between fragments.

Hope you enjoy. While it was a lot of work, I had fun making the map.


K.

[ioticus]

Wow, what a nice map! I like how you made the land bridges and how clean and clearly marked they are. Thanks so much! I can see how players may try to race to grab the northern waste areas for magic sites.

[PashaDawg]

Beautiful map! Looks fun to play on.

What software did you use to pain the map?

Pasha

[Edi]

He used GIMP. Put all the different stuff in different layers so editing any particular detail never affected anything else, and then merged them. 55 different layers and a file size over 100 MB before turning it into a targa, as I recall...

Now that's a map that has been crafted with love, and having seen quite a few of the beta versions, I can honestly say that the end result is polished and polished again. Pretty fun to play on as well, there are some really strategid chokepoints, but generally you won't be immediately boxed in.

The northern waste region also has a couple of startable provinces, so getting one of them can be a good thing or a bad thing depending on what nation you play and so forth.

Edi

[PashaDawg]

Thanks, Edi.

It's a great map. I am trying it out in a practice game right now!

[Kaljamaha]

Thanks for the compliments. I'm really glad you like it.

As Edi said, I made it with GIMP, and also as he said, the final picture had a bazillion layers, 56 to be exact. Five of those are not seen, being used for sketching stuff and storing icons and whatnot. Now, I went wild with the layers, having one for basically each forest, mountain, swamp, desert, ect., which made the picture a huge memory hog. I recommend using restraint with adding new layers.

There is one thing I'm a bit iffy about. All of the possible starting provinces have four land neighbors (two for seas), which means there are only a couple in the north-western corner. In the tests I ran, 5-8 players could start a comfortable distance from each other, but occasionally the above mentioned corner would be empty. So... I don't know how this affects the balance of the map. If it is deemed necessary, I can change some of the three-neighbor provinces in the north-western corner to be allowed as starting provinces.

K.

[Kaljamaha]

Hello everyone. I've made a few corrections and I'm posting new map files for the Loemendor map.

First, I ran a couple of more tests and decided to add a few more startable provinces in the northwestern part of the map. Most of the time even with eight players the starting positions would be okay, but once in a while (like about 1/7 games) the whole map west of the Landbridge (#127) and north of Sirenir Mouth (#66) would be without starting positions. Now both Moorway (#79) and Silent Hills (#107) are startable provinces. Both have only three land neighbors, but if you start there, chances are good that you'll have plenty of time a space to expand.

But, that wasn't really why I decided to do the update. The real problem I noticed was the Doom Horror guardian of Heavenfire Crater. Now, a single Doom Horror would have been fine and thematic, that's why I put it there to start with. The problem was that after a while the province guardians would number in the hundreds, with barbarians, militias, knights and scorpion beast commanders (what event is that?) all happily fighting along the supposedly lone Doom Horror. So, I changed the special guardians.


K.

[Arralen]

.

[Wish]

yeah, and to be honest, after akashic recording the crater (took quite a fight to take that army down) there really wasn't anything there but stuff to incease unrest. I'd expect to find something really neat under there. very dissapointing

[Endoperez]

If a Crater needs something neat, it should have the crater-site from which one can recruit illithids. But that would unbalance it, unless the defenders were *very* tough.