World Map Prototyping

Taking the concepts of collaborative story-telling and community participation further, we present the journey undertaken, and shots from the creative process involved in generating our first digital map.

There have been several people involved throughout and without their creative inputs a truly shared model like this could not have been achieved.

A generous thank you to the Divinity Original Sin team with their fantastic sequel, Divinity: Original Sin 2, perhaps a full review another time, but their 'GM Mode' concept is truly excellent, we use this for some Discord based D&D Games, but also for applying tags to the map itself. Quite strangely, knowing already the rough shape of the territory, we were able to identify a map that had many similarities, and this image became a basis for our preliminary image.

A printed image from Divinity

With some minor tweaks and additions, this image served as the easiest way to convey the placement of various areas in relation to one another

Pegging down the initial 'outline'

This was quite a 'hands-on' approach, but it helped to solidify thinking and locations

Digital Wizardry Begins!

This is our first digital map, a blank canvas, but not for long...

Defining Territories

Interestingly enough these rough provincial/state borders were developed for the first time during this digitisation process. Players have journeyed to other areas, but have not 'felt out' entire borders, some things are clearly better from a bird's eye view...

Bag and Tag

Once more using Divinity the custom provincial image is uploaded and tagged in greater detail for logging purposes...

With that done the 'base' image is then given some touches and textures, to form a more 'player relate-able' map:

A fog rolls in...

The clouds serve to make the map have a more 'discoverable feel' revealing areas where players are most active...

The Finishing Touches

The marked areas on this map indicate settings and cities developed by around 6 different DM's, finally pulling together several elements of this collaboratively developed world...

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This is quite a monumental occasion for a community that has largely been developing content in the traditional 'pencil and paper' means.

The hope is that in time there will continue to be internal development and playing in this world, but also to in some ways open this collaborative world to other players and Dungeon Masters, artists and writers.

Anyone interested to participate need only contact us via the usual Steemit means, just be aware that because this is a community project, it tends to move at its own speed :)

Hope there are some steemians out there ready to get as excited about this as we are :)

@dungeoneersguild shall endeavor to grow and log this world as it develops!