How to Draw a System Map

Okay, in my last post on this topic, we generated all of the data needed to draw out a system map for the Fochrik star system. If you haven’t read the previous entry, you might want to but it’s not necessary. The next step is to take that data and turn it into the actual image. This post will cover that process. Let’s dive right in.

The Data

First a quick summary of the data for the system that we generated last time. While we won’t need all of this for the map, but it’s good to have it all summarized in one place. For generating the system map, we’re only going to need the orbital distance and the planet’s radius.

Name	Orbital Distance (AU)	Orbital Period (hrs)	Gravity (g)	Mass (Earth)	Radius (km)
T1	0.19	687.46	0.33	0.0349	2,064.55
T2	0.52	3,112.57	0.67	0.3373	4,468.50
Forge	1.13	9,316.45	0.81	0.6012	5,443.75
Hum	1.23	11,323.3	0.91	0.8139	5,991.92
Larg	1.61	16,957.2	1.12	1.4622	7,215.22
J1	4.66	83,501.4	3.30	525.82	79,714.14
J2	10.59	286,061	1.55	140.14	60,108.51
ID1	16.58	560,391	0.14	0.0189	2,297.74
IG1	18.53	662,106	0.97	19.902	28,62316
ID2	20.53	772,144	0.06	0.0018	1,054.47
IG1	26.01	1,101,096	1.02	18.472	26,919.75

When drawing the map, we want the distances to be all on the same scale. However, we cannot use a simple linear scale in most cases as that would put all the inner planets right on top of each other if we want to see the outer planets on the same image. You can see this in the following diagram that has a linear distance scale.

Fochrik system planetary distances on a linear scale. Click for larger image.

As you can see, those inner planets are bunched up pretty close together while the outer planets have huge gaps. We want to spread out the inner planets while compressing the outer ones but still have the relative scale be correct. To do that we need to shift from a linear scale to a logarithmic one.

To get on a log scale, we are just going to take the base 10 logarithm (the ‘log’ key on your calculator) of each of the orbital distances and use that value to draw the distances. First I’ll present the numbers and then another simple drawing.

Name	Orbital Distance (AU)	Orbital Distance (log(AU))	Scaled Distance
T1	0.19	-0.7212	14
T2	0.52	-0.2840	233
Forge	1.13	0.0531	401
Hum	1.23	0.0899	420
Larg	1.61	0.2087	479
J1	4.66	0.6684	709
J2	10.59	1.0249	887
ID1	16.58	1.2196	985
IG1	18.53	1.2679	1009
ID2	20.53	1.3124	1031
IG2	26.01	1.4151	1083

We can’t quite use the log(AU) values as the smaller numbers generate negative values (I’m not going to do a math lecture here. If you’re interested in why, you can check out this Wikipedia article). So we need to scale those numbers somehow. The scaled distance value in the table above was calculated by taking the log(AU) distances, adding 0.75 and then multiplying by 500. We’ll use these values to create the plot.

As you can see, the range of values is greatly compressed which allows things to be a bit more evenly spaced. The only issue with this scale is that zero (i.e. the position of the star) has a value of negative infinity so we’ll have to pick some arbitrary distance to separate them. However, since we’re just trying to show the relative position of the planets, that’s not too big of a problem. Here’s the simple plot we get:

Orbital distances on a log scale. Click for larger image.

This scale compresses the outer planets a bit but helps us spread out the inner planets which are the ones we’re more interested in anyway.

Drawing the Map

With the numbers above, we have all the information we need to create the map. The last thing to decide is if we are going do make a horizontal map (oriented like the diagrams above or the map in the Clarion Calendar post) or a vertical one (like in the Duergan’s Star post). For this map, I’m going to make a horizontal map simply because all of the “along the way” image will fit better into the post than a vertical one will. However, the process applies just as well to a vertical map, you just have to rotate everything 90 degrees.

I’ll be building the map in Inkscape, my vector drawing program of choice and it will be a simple black and white drawing so it shouldn’t be too complicated.

Here’s a video I made of the map building process if you want to watch it in real time, It’s about 53 and a half minutes long and completely unedited so you can see all my mistakes and fumbling around. If you don’t want to watch the video, I’ve described all the steps below.

Laying the ground work

To start, we want to set up the basic image and some guides for us to work with. I’ve decided to make the image 1200×400 pixels in size so I create a blank document of that size to work with. I also turn on a rectangular grid to help with position items. This grid will get turned on and off as needed during the drawing process.

I’m going to use the logarithmic distance scale for my planet spacing so I then import that image into my document and position it accordingly.

Finally, I draw a guide line down the middle of the image so I know where the center line is. After this initial setup, the image looks like:

I’ve shifted the imported image just slightly so that it’s 10 pixels to the right of where it was in the original. I wanted a little more space between the star and the first planet. Since I’ll be measuring the scaled distances from the left edge of the image, this means I’ll have to add 30 pixels to the values in the table above for the final radii of the orbits.

All of the above was done on the initial default layer. I then create three more layers: one for the orbits, one for the objects (star and planets), and a third for the labels. I like to work in lots of layers as it makes it easy to turn bits and pieces on and off and add in effects if needed.

The star and the orbits

The next step is to draw in the star itself and then start adding arcs for the orbits. The symbol for Fochrik is created using the star and polygon tool in the star setting with corners set to 30 and spoke ratio set to 0.8. This is drawn on the object layer.

Next I hide the objects layer and move to the orbits layer. Here I use the circle tool to draw in the first orbit. Clicking on the point where the center guide meets the edge of the image I then drag out the circle holding down the shift and the control keys until it reaches out to the position of the guide line for the planet T1.

Holding the control key down makes the circle drawn have integer ratios between the x and y directions allowing you get a proportional circle. Holding down the shift key makes your initial click point the center of the circle instead of the upper left corner of the box enclosing the circle. Once I have the circle drawn to approximately the correct size, I use the spinner boxes for Rx and Ry (the x and y radii) to set the exact radii (44 px in this case). The fill of the circle is set to transparent, the stoke is set to black with a thickness of 2 pixels.

Inkscape allows you to draw off the edge of the image so we drew a whole circle for this first orbit. Since we will be copying and scaling this up, we don’t want our circles going way off to the left. We can turn the full circle into an arc by grabbing the small circular mark on the drawn circle (it’s at the 3 o’clock position) and moving it clockwise to break the circle. I move it down to just past the 6 o’clock position. Then I go back and grab the other small circle node at 3 o’clock and move it up to just before the 12 o’clock position. This gives us a half circle which is all we need.

Now it’s just a matter of duplicating that arc and setting the correct radii for each one. As we move out we’ll want to adjust the size of the arc so it’s not sticking up well above or below the edge of the image just to make things a little cleaner on our drawing canvas.

We can duplicate a selected object by pressing Control-D. Then we just go up and set the Rx and Ry values based on the scaled distance values in the table above (remembering to add 30 to each one). You have to remember to have the circle tool selected while you do this or you can’t set the radii.

Once that is done, we have an image that looks something like this:

Notice how the arcs are going high. They will be cut off when we export the final image. They were originally also going low as well but they have been adjusted (at a later step) and I didn’t export an image while I was drawing them.

You might also notice that the arc for the planet T2 is not lined up with it’s guide line. That is because as I was drawing it, I noticed a discrepancy between where the guide line was and where the arc was drawn based on the scaled distance values. I originally though there was an error in the scaled distance but it turns out I just drew my guide sketch wrong. It’s always good to double check your work.

Drawing the planets

We’ve got our orbits, now we need to draw the planets. This will be done on the planet layer so we switch to that layer now.

Like the orbits, we want the planets to all be on the same scale. This obviously can’t be the same scale as the orbits or we wouldn’t be able to see them since they’d just be dots on the page. To pick the initial scale, I just let the radius of the circle we’re going to draw be equal to the radius of of the planet (in km) listed in the table divided by 2000. I computed each of these values and wrote them down on a piece of scratch paper to have them handy.

Depending on how you have Inkscape set up, when you draw in the first circle, you’ll notice that you just get an arc instead of a full circle. That was my case as I have Inkscape set to remember the last setting for the tool and use that instead of resetting to the default. I find that more useful. But we need to reset the tool to draw circles. This is done by finding the Start and End boxes (up by the Rx and Ry boxes) and setting them to 0 and 360 respectively. Now we’re drawing circles again. Also you’ll want to set the fill to white instead of transparent.

I then just move to an arbitrary point on each planet’s orbit, draw a small circle and then set Rx and Ry to be the values determined for that planet. It doesn’t matter exactly where you draw them as we’ll go back and properly position them once they are all drawn.

When you start doing this, you’ll quickly notice that the scale we’ve picked is simply too small for the small terrestrial planets. In the case of a few of them, you can’t even see the disk as it is smaller than thickness of the line we drew for the orbit. To solve this we simply double the radii of these planets. However, that would make the giant and Jovian planets too big if we doubled them as well. So we’re just going to have to have different scales. The terrestrial and ice dwarf planets will be to scale with each other as will the giant and Jovian planets but the smaller planets will be twice as big as they would be if they were to scale with the larger planets.

The last step of drawing the planets is to place them at an appropriate position on their orbit circle. There are two requirements here. One is that the disk of the planet should be centered on the orbit line. The other is that for planets with close orbits, they are spread out across the image so that when we add labels there won’t be any overlap. To make this easier you should turn off the grid that we set up at the beginning so the software isn’t trying to snap your circles to positions you don’t want.

Once that is done, we have an image that looks something like this:

You’ll notice that even doubling the scale, some of those planets are pretty tiny. In fact, you might not even be able to see ice dwarf 2 unless you click on the image above to get the full sized one. But that’s okay.

Adding labels

The next step is to label everything. There are a few things we want to put in our labels. The most obvious is the name of the planet. I still haven’t come up with official names for the planets but that doesn’t matter for the purposes of demonstrating the mapping technique. The other thing we need to do is add the scale for the system map. Finally we’ll add a label for the system. I’ll be using the Copperplate Gothic Bold font for my lettering.

Let’s start with the scale. If you watched the video, you’ll know that I actually did this way back at the beginning of the process. Since it was already there in the imported image, all I had to do was trace it. Once it was drawn in and had the numbers, I put the “Distance (AU)” label on and then moved everything down as close to the bottom of the image as I wanted it.

The labels on the the scale are drawn with a height of 16px for the numbers and 20px for the label. What you choose is arbitrary and it should be picked to match the size of the drawing. You don’t want it too small but you don’t want it too large either.

However, at this point, I didn’t like the orbit lines crossing over the scale and I went back and adjusted them so that they stopped just before touching it. If you look closely in the previous image, you’ll see another guide line that sits just above the scale that all the orbit lines touch. I drew this line in and then, using the circle tool, adjusted the end of the arc of each orbit line to just touch that line, which is why they don’t extend below the image.

Turning off the layer with the guides and the scale image gives us the following at this point. I’ve also now only exported the actual drawing so everything is trimmed appropriately.

Next we label the planets. For each planet I’m going to put the name in using a 20px high font and then centered under the name, put its orbital distance in a 10px high font. Again still using Copperplate Gothic Bold. I had originally intended to just type both and then change the font size of the distance but found that I couldn’t adjust the vertical spacing like I wanted to. So instead I created two text objects, one for each line, used the alignment tools to get them lined up, and then grouped the label for each planet into a single object so I can move it around easier later.

It doesn’t really matter exactly where you put the labels to begin with as you’ll be moving them around once they are done and you have their exact sizes. Just go through and add them for each planet. Then, once they are in the drawing, move and position them so that you like the placement. This may also involve moving the position of the planet’s disk on the orbit line to get a spacing you want.

Typically for the smaller planets, I like to place label so the center of name is aligned with the center of the disk. For the large planets, I tend to set it to the lower left or right corner depending on the exact positioning. I just do this by eye. You want to avoid having the text run over the orbit lines as much as you can but in some cases it’s unavoidable. Just place the names where it looks good to you. On a vertical map, I’ll often try to center the name of the planet under the planet’s disk.

Now we have to deal with the text that is overlapping the orbit lines. This often makes the text hard to read so we need to mask out the orbit lines under the text. Your text layer should be positioned above the orbit layer. If it isn’t you’ll need to move it up in the layer stack. What we’ll do is draw some white rectangles to hide the orbit line below the text. I like to set their opacity to about 75-80% so the orbit lines slightly peek through but you can make them fully opaque if you prefer. Drawing the rectangles can either be done on a new mask layer that is placed directly under the labels layer or in the labels layer itself.

In this image I drew the rectangles directly into the labels layer. Using the rectangle tool I just drew in a small rectangle over the orbit lines in each location there was overlap between the text and the lines. You’ll want to make the rectangle extend just a bit below and above the text. Exactly how much depends on how much space you want between the lines and the text and is a matter of taste. As you draw the rectangles, they are placed above the text so you need to send them to the bottom of the z-order for the layer so they are behind the text instead.

If you draw on a new mask layer, then you don’t have to worry about moving the z-order of the boxes as they will all be between the orbit lines and the text. You also don’t have to worry about the opacity on the individual boxes but can adjust the opacity of the entire layer all at once. This is typically how I do the masks but for some reason didn’t on this particular drawing. Probably due to the fact that I was recording and it slipped my mind.

We are almost done. At this point our image looks like this:

Finishing touches

The only thing left to add is the label for the system, a border, and a white background.

We’ll put the label in the upper left. We want this to be large so we’ll use a 32px high font. We’ll also need to add a mask as it will be overlapping the orbit lines. I considered simply adjusting the orbit lines to end below the label but decided to leave them in and mask them off.

The border and background I did with a single object. You may not have noticed, but all of the images so far have had a transparent background with just the objects drawn on it. This can cause some issues depending on how the image is rendered so we want to add a solid white background.

To do this I make a new background layer that sits at the very bottom of the layer stack. On this layer I draw a single large rectangle that stretches corner to corner across the entire image. I set the fill to white and the stroke to black with a 6px thickness. Due to the way Inkscape draws the stroke, half of that will be off the final image giving a 3px border. If you want it thicker or thinner, simply adjust the stroke width.

And now we’re done. Here’s the final image:

The final system map. Click for larger version

If you’d like to look at or play with the original SVG file of this map, they you can grab it here:

FochrikSystemMap Download

Other touch-ups

Giving the planets some character

For this demo, I didn’t do anything special with the planets themselves. If you wanted to, you could add in cloud bands or rings on the giant planets to give them a little bit of character. Especially if they have features called out in their descriptions. I didn’t have any special descriptors so I left them as simple circles but that could be added in later.

The FTL Horizon

If I was doing this map for FrontierSpace, the other thing I would add in is a dashed arc at the position of the FTL Horizon, which in that game is the distance you need to be from the star in order to engage your Nova Drive to travel between the star systems. That would be an important bit of information for the map to include.

Asteroid belts

I also didn’t add in an asteroid belt in this system. If I did then I would determine the distances for the inner and outer boundaries of the belt and draw orbit circles on the guide layer at those distances. Then on the object layer I’d go in by hand and draw in all the asteroids. I work on a 2-in-1 laptop that has a stylus so I can actually flip my laptop into tablet mode and draw the asteroids with my stylus right on the screen. I find this much easier and faster than trying to do it with the mouse but it can be done that way (and I’ve done it that way in the past). There’s a bit more to it than that so I might do a mini article on drawing in asteroid belts.

Final thoughts

And that’s everything. I think the map turned out pretty well. I was actually surprised it only took a little less than an hour to draw it out once I had all the data. All told I probably spent about 2-2.5 hours creating the data and making the drawing. It would have taken a bit longer if I had had an asteroid belt to include or added details to the planets but that gives you an idea of the effort involved. It actually took me longer to do these two blog posts (5-6 hours total) than it took to actually do the work.

I still have one more post on the calendar system to do and that will come in March. I’d like to hear your comments, questions, or any suggestions you have about the process. What wasn’t clear? What would you like more information on? Did you try this yourself? If you did, share your results. Let me know below.

Expanded Frontier Map

Happy Halloween! In my “State of the Frontier” post last week, I mentioned that I was working on updating an old map that I had created many years (i.e. decades) ago for use as my main campaign map of the Frontier region. Today, I’m posting the (near) final version of that map. Along with a bit of history and explanation.

Background

The original map was hand drawn in the late 80’s on six 8.5″x11″ pieces of quad-ruled graph paper and then taped together. I’ve kept it in a cardboard poster tube all these years when I haven’t actually been using it. Right now it’s rolled up inside out to try to get some of the decades of bend rolled out the other direction.

The map was drawn back before I acquired a personal copy of Zebulon’s Guide to Frontier Space, Vol 1. I didn’t get my first copy of that until 1992, many years after Star Frontiers went out of print. My copy was actually a gift from some fellow role-players.

I had, however, looked at a Zeb’s Guide and its beautiful map at some point before I drew mine. There are too many similarities between the area just around the Frontier in my map and the Zeb’s map to chalk up to mere coincidence. The two most noticeable are the star cluster to the upper left of the Frontier and the neutron star just below it. I would have had zero reason to put a cluster like that (I had four stars and the Zeb’s Guide map had 3) anywhere, let alone there, if I had not seen the published map at some point. And I had exactly the same use for the neutron star system at the location of Lynchpin as the published timeline had. I had a different route to it but the idea was there from a perusal of Zeb’s Guide in a bookstore.

I have now updated my map to better match the map in Zebulon’s Guide as well as included some additional fan created maps of the areas of space the Saurians and S’sessu come from. These changes mainly affect the area below the Frontier and to the right of Liberty system (from the Beyond the Frontier modules).

There are a few differences. Most importantly is the location of the new systems described in the published modules. I place the Rhianna (Mission to Alcazzar) and Starmist (Sundown on Starmist) systems in the locations specified in the modules, not where the Zeb’s Guide map places them. I always thought it was strange that they would move them from the published locations. In truth, only Rhianna was given a general location (inside the loop formed by Cassidine, Timeon, and White Light) but given the way Starmist was discovered (by emergency landing which I took to mean from a mis-jump), I don’t think the Zeb’s Guide location (outside the main Frontier) makes sense for that system and I like mine better (and the system I chose was left off the Zeb’s map completely!). My location for the Belnafaer system (Bugs in the System) only differs by one star from the Zeb’s map and both correspond to the module description. For now I’ve left it where I originally placed it but might move it for consistency. Finally, the location of the Tristkar system (Dark Side of the Moon) is exactly where Zeb’s Guide places it. From the description in the module, the location of the Solar Major system would make a little more sense but since I didn’t actually have this system on my map originally, using the Zeb’s Guide location works just fine.

Second, I don’t have the plague worlds from Zeb’s Guide (the system I choose for Rhianna is actually Zeb’s Delta plague world). On my map they are just unexplored systems.

Finally, while I don’t normally use the MegaCorp systems in my campaign I’ve included them for completeness. I’ve also redrawn the nebulae in the Frontier region to more match the ones drawn in the Zeb’s Guide map and added in the Rim planets.

On the side of fan produced materials, I’ve added in the locations of the Saurian and S’sessu worlds from maps published in issues 4 and 16 of the Frontier Explorer and adjusted my map accordingly.

The New Map

So with that introduction, here’s the updated map.

Expanded map of the Frontier Sector with the systems from Zeb's Guide, the modules and some fan creations added in. — Updated map of the Frontier. Click for the full-sized image.

The smaller blue box is the area covered by the original Frontier map and the large blue box is the area covered by the Zeb’s Guide map.

This is very much a “player-facing” map. It doesn’t contain secret jump routes (with the exception of the one between Truane’s Star to Cassidine that I forgot to remove 🙂 ) that are known to the UPF, MegaCorps, pirates, or the sathar. If I was using it for my game, there are even parts of this map that I would not use (i.e. the MegaCorp planets, and S’sessu and Saurian space) at least not to begin with as those are discovered in game. I’ve set the map up with all these bits and pieces on separate layers so that I can turn them on and off as needed.

The map extends more upward from the Frontier than down because the Vast Expanse, an area that I consider to be fairly devoid of stars, is “down” and exploration is easier (due to shorter jump distances) in the “up” direction. You can see the much lower density of stars in that direction. It gets even worse going further off the map.

While I still have some small tweaking to do on this map, mainly with labeling, it is completely usable.

Future Work

While this is a completely functional map, it’s not super pretty. One of the things I’d like to do is give it a color makeover so it looks more like the maps that my star sector generator program produces. Those maps look like this:

However, that might have to wait for a while. Although when I get to it, it will make a pretty awesome poster.

The actual next step is to work out the logistics of the Second Sathar War and the sathar assault on the Frontier. The sathar are out there on that Extended Frontier map although I didn’t show their systems and jump routes. Given that I know know all the jump routes, I can start figuring out how long it would take for them to maneuver and launch offensives and resupply their ships from their starship construction centers. Some exploration by the UPF and well placed raids could significantly influence the outcome of the conflict.

If you have any thoughts or comments on the map, let me know.

Update: Just saw today that the RPG Blog Carnival topic for November (hosted by Nuketown) is “All These Worlds …”. My post was a day early (and I didn’t know the topic or I might have waited) but it’s close enough that I think it applies. So this post is part of this month’s blog carnival and I might have some more related posts in the coming weeks.

State of the Frontier – Mid Oct 2018

Things have been pretty quiet lately here on the blog as non-game related things have been keeping me away. I won’t bore you with the details but it includes fixing a garage door, repairing a furnace, and replacing a dead smartphone among other things.

On the plus side I also got my internet service upgrade and to my surprise, instead of going from 10 Mbs out to 100 Mbs out, I’m regularly measuring 600 Mbs in bandwidth. What that means is that once the site starts loading, it should be very quick and the large image files should not take much time to download. I was going to be happy with the 10x increase but getting 60x is amazing. I suspect that as more people in my neighborhood upgrade to fiber that might go down but we’ll have to wait and see.

What I’m working on

Despite the quiet, I have been working a bit. Here’s what’s happening and what you can expect to hear about in the future.

Ghost Ship Osiris

I’m currently working on writing up the details of the adventure that take place on Outpost Osiris now that I have the map in place. This was going to be my focus over the past couple of weeks but all my free time got chewed up by home repairs. I have made some progress and it should go quicker now that most of the issues are (hopefully) behind me. Unfortunately, there isn’t much to share here on that project until I get to the next section and start designing the Pursale ship. Although I will be sharing the write-up with my Patreon supporters once it’s finished.

Death at Rosegard

I have a few more maps to create and post for this adventure (the Streel mine complex, a different old mine system, and Trey Mulden‘s compound). I also need to provide a write-up on the NPCs at the Streel mine. And then there is lots of writing to make it into a coherent adventure.

Other stuff

I’m currently running a Star Frontiers game on-line that is set at the beginning of the Second Sathar War (Death at Rosegard was the opening adventure). There has also been a lot on interest expressed in having an on-line play-by-post game that I would set in the same time period. Which got me to thinking about the actual events of the Second Sathar War. I don’t use the timeline in the Zebulon’s Guide to Frontier Space (at least not completely) but have my own ideas about how that would work.

I’ve dabbled a bit with that over the years but never actually sat down and come up with a comprehensive outline of what the sathar would do. And so that has started taking over my brain as I look at logistics and such from the sathar point of view.

I have a map of the expanded Frontier that I created before I ever owned a copy of Zeb’s Guide. I’ve posted that on-line in the past but not here so I’m including it for your enjoyment. This is the “player” version so that everything beyond the Frontier is unexplored. It does include most of the systems from the modules (and apparently a supposedly secret jump from Cassidine to Truane’s Star that is part of my universe, not sure how that got on to this version 🙂 ).

star map of the expanded frontier region — Digital version of my original hand-drawn map of the “Expanded Frontier”. Shown with where I placed (almost) all the module systems (the one from *Dark Side of the Moon* isn’t there). Click for full size image.

I’m currently working on tweaking this map slightly so that the location of the star systems match the slightly larger Frontier map from Zeb’s Guide. I’ll be keeping the module systems where I put them (Zeb’s moves Sundown and Rianna and has a slightly different location for Belenafar) and adding in the Rim systems. I’ll probably also add in the Saurian systems from the Frontier Explorer and possibly the Se’sseu systems too. I had obviously seen Zeb’s Guide before I made my map because I placed a few systems (most notably that cluster to the upper left of the original Frontier) in nearly the exact same place as the Zeb’s map. Luckily none of those changes affect where I had put the Sathar systems.

With the star map in hand, I’ll begin working on the logistics and timeline for the Second Sathar War. I have a number of adventures in the back of my mind that would allow the PCs to directly intervene and affect the outcome and there will be write ups for those in the coming months (years at my current rate of production 🙁 ). But first, the map, then an outline of the Sathar attacks on the Frontier that will serve as a background for the campaigns. I should probably do a project overview post for this stuff.

Suggestions?

Is there anything you’d like to see more (or less) of in the coming months? With winter coming, all the sports activities are winding down and I’m doing less chasing and should have more time for these projects. Let me know what you’d like to see.

Outpost Osiris

I had intended to have this post up on the first but I’ve been a been sick and under the weather. I’m mostly recovered and back to work. This is the follow on post to my Osiris Base – Rough Sketches post where I present the final maps.

In working on the Ghost Ship Osiris module, the next portion of the adventure deals with the PCs rescuing the mining and administrative crew at the outpost from several Pursale robots that the scavenger crew set loose. In order to write that part of the adventure, I needed a map of the base.

I presented the rough sketches I did in the previous post. This one presents the final versions based on those sketches, along with some short descriptions of changes made. Details of the individual rooms will be in the final module. So let’s take a look:

Asteroid Cross-section

First up we’ll start with the cross-section map showing where everything is placed relative to one another.

Click for full sized image

The asteroid is a fairly small one for the outer belt, measuring only 1.4 km long and 1 km wide. Nova Vista was interested in it because of the anomalous readings generated by the presence of the Pursale ship at its core, although they didn’t know the cause at the time.

The main docking and mining level is on the asteroid’s rotation axis to facilitate ships docking with the base. “Below” that are the crew’s living level and the power level.

The mines mostly run through the upper part of the asteroid (as displayed on the map) although a shaft has been started into the “lower” section.

Finally there is a shaft that runs straight into the heart of the asteroid to intersect with the cavity containing the Pursale ship.

Docking/Mining Level

This level contains the base’s docking bay as well as the mining facilities, storage, and technical facilities.

Docking bay on the — Click for full size image

This level ended up almost exactly as I sketched it out. The only real tweaks were to the exact sizes of some of the room.

I just realized that I need to tweak this map just a bit as it looks like the docking bay is inside the asteroid. In reality it sticks out a bit and the silhouette is part of the asteroid that sticks out below it.

Crew Level

This level holds the living and recreation areas for the crew as well as the base’s main computer, offices, and communications and sensor arrays.

This level ended up being a little “shorter” that I had sketched it out. When I started drawing in the rooms, I realized that the individual apartments in the housing area were a little large. As is, the smaller ones are about 1000 square feet and the four larger ones about 1,200 square feet. Plenty big enough for a single person.

I had also drawn the offices a little big as well, but even drawn smaller in this map they are very spacious.

The sensor and communications room is off by itself since it needs to be on the surface of the asteroid.

Power Level

This level is quite simple and just holds the base’s nuclear reactor.

The reactor is fairly self contained but does have a maintenance access airlock as well as a fuel loading/waste removal port.

Other Features

The mine shafts don’t have a map as they are twisty, turny, and loop back on themselves in three dimensions as the mining followed the ore veins through the rock.

The Pursale ship will be mapped separately in a future post once I figure out what the inside of it looks like. I’ll leave it for you to speculate which end is the front and which is the back.

What’s Next?

Next on the docket for the Ghost Ship Osiris adventure is to detail what is happening in the base when the PCs arrive and what they have to do to secure the base. I’ll be generating the base staff, along with their locations and conditions.

While I’m working on that, I have some more notes from the Death at Rosegard adventure to write up and post as well.

If you have any questions, comments, or suggestions on the maps, feel free to let me know below.

Mapping Rosegard – Part 4

In this segment we finish up the map by adding in some small details such as driveways, a fence around the school yard, a scale, and then add in the labels on the public buildings. The earlier videos can be found here: part 1, part 2, part 3.

With the map finished we export the final finished version.

I will be doing one more video related to this map and then will post the final map for everyone to use if they wish.

Mapping Rosegard – Part 3

In this segment, I show how I add in the textures for the lawns, asphalt for the road, farm fields and some gravel paths and borders around the grass to keep the lawns and the farm fields separate. I also add in a couple trees (more will get added later.

You can check out part 1 and part 2 if you haven’t watched them yet.

I’ll finish up the landscaping before recording part 4 where I’ll add in the labels and any finishing touches to the map.

The Expanding Frontier

Creating Sci-fi RPG Resources

Tag Archives: cartography