Lessons Learned:
- Despite entire fandom constantly talking about the Chaos Gods and threat Chaos poses, most of the Imperial Guard aren’t supposed to know anything about it, less alone the specific names.
- Despite their enemeis in Sabbath participating commonly in diablerie and fandom making big deal out of what an unforgivable crime it is, it is not something an average Vampire of Carmarilla knows about in any way.
With the Dragon Age series, a map of Ferelden was created for use in the first game, and became the map of the region for a long time after. The TTRPG used the same map, and even had a printout in the box set for it. Many players, and even some GMs, base their understanding of the setting on this map.
This map includes:
All that stuff appears in Dragon Age Origins, so it’s a good map of what a player might experience playing the video game. As a setting guide, it’s awful.
I love these points. It’s one of the things I run into a lot because I love doing maps for larps. Players all have places mentioned in back stories, or that were visited in past events, and they almost never show up on maps.
Yes, the quaint little village where you killed 200 werewolves was extremely memorable, but if we add every 250-peasant hamlet to the map, it will be solid black.
Yes, it matters a lot to you where your barony is, but just the borders of all the baronies alone will turn the map into a giant blur. And also, I’m not going to name 800 baronies.
So we have a regular worldmap, and a “storyline map” that doesn’t exist in the world, only on the wiki. Many towns are notable because “players were here once”
Consider shrinking your scale. There’s an impulse to draw entire worlds or continents, but then you feel obliged to operate at that scale. The “Known world” of my players for the last 3 campaigns is roughly the size of Florida, and they don’t even see all of it, not by a long shot. In those 4 campaigns, they: