Mapping BotLG

It’s October now, so that means NaMuBuMo is upon us! This seems like a perfect excuse to take some time to plot out the world of BONES of the LOST GOD; luckily, I have some geography already, from it’s first incarnation as a play by mail game. I’ve started a Twine project to help with the mapping, more for the editor’s layout and connection tools:

There’s a lot more stuff in Rooksfoot that needs adding — the forge-shrine to Phaestus, Myxile’s Menagerie, the various Guild Houses, the offices of the Statistique, the Temple of Anama, the Halls of the Stone-Blood Fists, Froome’s the chemists, Wilson & Co., (a cheese shop of some good standing), and I’m sure a bunch of other places that got mentioned once in passing.

That’s great and all — Rooksfoot is the main hub location after all — but it’s also a little daunting given that BotLG is now a lot more graphical, with each location having a couple of sentences of description, but more significantly, a tiled map to explore (complete with fog of war and line of sight). I’ve made a start on a graphical map editor, and, while not strictly in the spirit of NaMuBuMo, I’ll be using some time this month to also work on that.

I can lean on some procedural generation to create some of the maps — the forests, for example, and some of the more dungeon-like content (like the Rat’s Nest, and the eventual procedural dungeon beneath The Skull), but I think much of the city will end up being hand-made. I’m thinking I can use a traditional dungeon generator to dig out room shapes, and then re-connect them with wider passageways and hand-decorate them to produce some sections of the city; but to really do justice to some of the more “iconic” locations, like the ribcage arena, I’ll be making those from scratch.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.