Only 10 hours left on the Inkvein campaign. A massive part of Inkvein is the mapping. Today, as my next pound of flesh to tempt people into supporting the book and as a treat for backers, I’ll showcase a number of the different maps you’ll find within its pages.
Mapping caves is hard. You can:
Map in horizontal layers like a traditional dungeon map, which makes encoding verticality hard, and doesn’t feel like caving.
Attempt to map in 3d, which makes it difficult to understand and even harder to describe to players.
Or…
You can map the way we map caves in Inkvein: side profile. This gives you verticality but keeps things readable. And I’ve had folks who do actual caving say I made the optimal choice, so there.
Inkvein also opts to avoid attempting to illustrate individual tunnels: this means maps are more readable and can fit in a reasonable space. The properties of routes are still easily communicated though with solid, dashed, and dotted lines.
But there are some areas of the Inkvein that need different maps…
Like for example, the Colloidburg city map.This page has been trimmed at the bottom to reduce image size.
This is a top-down pointcrawl, which is perfect for a city where the spaces between keyed locations are abstracted. Plus, by keeping the map simple, it still works as a mini-map on spreads like with the caving maps!
But also within Colloidburg is a sub-dungeon: the Archive.
Because of the verticality of this dungeon and the differences between floor plans, an isometric map called to me. This type of map gives you an idea of room sizes which is important for this location. Though quite the challenge, yours truly made sure there were still mini-maps for each spread of keys!
I also needed toa sea with islands, and a tower. The Sea of Words is a subterranean sea of Ink, with a scattering of islands within it. For this, I returned to the top-down pointcrawl:
The top-down pointcrawl map makes adjudicating travel between the islands simple, and keeps it easy for players to make a map. ~I loved making this with my charcoal brushes~
Islands themselves have a simple ‘sub-pointcrawl’: a top-down perspective with some topography lines to give an impression of the lay of the land and a clear graphical pointcrawl on top.
Each island is kept to one page, which makes them easy to run at the table.
Last of all, we have the Pentower: a sub-dungeon on one of the islands, which has a ‘classic style’ dungeon map per floor: Whilst I was tempted to go isometric, I found the regularity of the floorplan meant a top-down perspective would be a bit clearer.
And last of all, I made an isometric pointcrawl for the Inkdrake’s hoard! This captures the elevation changes that are an important aspect of this region.
It was important to me to create functional cartography for all the different spaces in the Inkvein. Above all else, I prize clear communication: that’s why a lot of my cartography style is routed in diagram design rather than illustrations (I save that for the paintings).
We've got a couple more sneak previews before the end of the campaign, so keep an eye out for those too!
