As part of
this month's RPG Blog Carnival and inspired by the excellent and
numerous geomorph pages and
Bat In The Attic's clueful tutorials on
mapping with Inkscape, I had a bash at some geomorph floor plans. Getting to grips with
Inkscape was relatively painless and in short order I had some blank geomorph templates that scale with most miniatures. Trying to recall old TSR map keys was nostalgic fun until I found
ideapod's Omnigraffle stencil and some old modules. Then I had a minor epiphany when I stopped for a cup of tea.
Why not create the symbols once on stencils, then cut and paste them into new geomorphs?
Assembling the stencils took a little while and a lot of leafing through old modules. A quick explanation - the SVGs have four layers (floor, walls, fixtures and grid). If you place walls at the wall layer and things like doors and windows at the fixture layer, you don't need to worry about a wall showing in your door when you open it in true Looney Tunes fashion.
Now I can throw out some quick and dirty geomorphs when I have a minute and if I want to prep player floorplans, I can move some of the map information onto a new layer and hide that. Who said this mapping stuff had to be difficult? A zip of all the stencils and a couple of blank templates can be downloaded
here. Some fully-built geomorphs will be appearing in due course. Have fun with these!
