Wednesday, February 11, 2015

D&D 5e Genghis Con module map

I'm going to be a volunteer DM at this weekend's Genghis Con. The convention isn't large enough for an official package from Wizards so we're running a homebrew module. The fact that its roughly 12-hours of content has been interesting to deal with, but hopefully we'll have a few hours in there to highlight local game-mastering.

Handouts are always popular and I volunteered to create a map that will list out the various number of challenges that the players will have an option to go at. Really wish I could be doing this for a larger audience but each of these mini-projects is a step closer I think.

The map itself was a lot of fun to do, I've been messing around with wax-stamps recently and thought I'd try to integrate them into this project. Rather than a more illustrative map I wanted to try to sell the physicality of a handout. Even though this is a two-dimensional printout I wanted to treat it very sculptural, the wax stamps are painted to pop-off and the foil elements are lit to contrast materials on the map. The gold wax/brushed leaf in the wax stamps was a great accidental discovery I made while trying to get the stamp-drawings to pop. I love that even while working in photoshop I can still find happy accidents that really sell an idea that I have.

It'll be a very very very long weekend but looking forward to it. Its exciting to present material you've written to players and capture their impressions of it. I'll probably make a post afterwards to talk about what I actually designed for the convention and how it was received, it'll be fun to make a design-focused post since its something I'm really wanting to bring to the fore along with my art.


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