With the fever behind me I now find myself on the cusp of the weekend, that time when family and real world needs take precedence over the more ephemeral aspects of my life. There was a lot of ground I wanted to cover this week including a review of the Stranger Things D&D boxset, a look at Auras Beyond, and finishing up the Eira patreon … unfortunately wishing for the icy hand of death for three days does not lend well to productivity.
That said I did manage one feat … and truly it was a feat. I finally sat down and used the MapForge software. MapForge (currently in it’s 1.0.9 release) is a 2017-ish kickstarter for a user-friendly (with commercial option) battlemap creator that I jumped on almost immediately because I have the delusion that I can DO ALL THE PRODUCTION on my own. I played with it during it 0.0.# days and found it to be perfectly fine for the state it was in but wanted to hold back until later for anything else … I had three issues when coming back to it for the patreon map.
- Re-registering is a mess and pretty much almost took me out of it as a user, I currently dread the 1.1.0 release as it means having to go through the entire process again and I truly hope that the Mapforge team can get something going that updates the build without me losing my licenses every time.
- Compared to my video the program now is a hell of a lot more sluggish than it previously was and more prone to script related crashes. As this is not commercial yet I can understand that … but I also lost my map 3 times due to crashing so I was a bit miffed at that.
- Finally while I didn’t intend for this map to go commercial there is no labels in the resource selection to tell me what is personal use and what is commercial. I had to go to the MapForge webstore to see what was commercial … not the best option for brainstorming a dungeon’s field when you don’t immediately know what is and isn’t legal to use.
Despite my issues with the software, I still found it to be the most intuitive of the map creators to use. The closest second is Pyromancer and while I enjoy its features and have used it professionally in the past, the browser based nature of it makes it a tad less reliable to me.
The Map
In the coming adventure the players are invited by a Rogen Alpha to join an expedition to the Eastern Fens of Fellarfen where it is believed an Inferna temple may be hidden. The Inferna are a people out of Rogen Legend, a malevolent race twisted by pacts with the Elderkind, who once sought dominion over Era in the island’s earliest days. The Rogen Alpha believes the temple may be the resting place of the Sword of Light Dawning, a blade given to the first Rogen leader by Ei herself.
The temple/dungeon is a two level affair with level one shown here, Secret door type tiles have yet to be added into Mapforge so some trickery was needed to add the secret door to the northwest of the entry stairs. Outside of the that the lighting should indicate to a party of adventures that magics are still active in this location …
