Here’s a quick thing I’m sure all DM’s do in one form or another, whether it’s via email, wiki, pen and paper, or some other form:  the game recap.  In my particular case, we don’t get to game as often as most of us would like, so as game recap is a great way to get the players up to speed on the events that have occurred in-game up to the current moment.

This is something that I’ve only implemented recently, but I’ve found that it helps cut down the 10 minutes or so of last-session questions and answers before we start gaming for the night.  Here’s what I’ve been doing… I’m building a document as a narrative of the previous game’s session, and I add to it at the end of the night.

A sample page from my recap document

Within the documents I’m adding maps, images, NPC quotes and other stuff directly lifted from the adventure I’m running, in order to make it more attractive and engaging to the guys.  The document is simply a word one, converted to PDF.  Very simple, yet effective.  I even noticed that there were some printouts at the table last time we played.   Everyone knew what had happened previously and we got right to playing for the night.  That’s the point.

Now, what kind of recap you give your players works best depending on your group.  Some groups and DM’s may prefer to write their own version of events on a wiki, using Obsidian Portal for example.  Others may use a Google Group to keep track of what’s going on.  Those are all great tools to use to keep track of your party’s progress, but in my case I’m using what I know is the best for us.  Knowing my players, I don’t think they’d have the time to sit there and dig through a wiki looking for campaign info.

So how do you guys recap your game?  Do you have any links to your campaign websites or wikis out there?  I’d love to see them, as I’m sure other Dm’s would as well.

Yes, I know this isn’t technically tabletop RPG content, sorry RPGBN, but I think this game looks too cool for me not to blog about it.  Plus, it is getting a tabletop treatment courtesy of Green Ronin, so there.

Dragon Age was developed by Bioware, and they see it as the spiritual successor to the Baldur’s Gate series, although it is not based on D&D.  I love Bioware games, Knights of the Old Republic and Mass Effect are two games that took up most of my time when they came out, and Dragon Age looks like it’ll be no different, plus, it’s heroic fantasy, one of my favorite gaming genres.

The game releases today, November 3rd and here now are a boatload of screens full of coolness:

But what about videos?  Check these out…

Character Creation:

Dwarves!!!!

The Korcari Wilds:

The game is available for PC, PS3, and Xbox 360 starting today, November 3rd!

I have in my possession a brand-spanking-new, hot off the presses signed copy of R.A. Salvatore’s latest Forgotten Realms novel, “The Ghost King”, part 3 of the “Transitions” series.

You, dear NewbieDM.com reader, can win the book!  The contest is simple, send me an email with the best hand drawn sketch you can come up with of Drizzt and his black panther Guenhwyvar.  You can draw it by hand, or on Microsoft Paint.  If your drawing looks like a 3D render or something similar, I won’t even consider it.

Send me those emails, I’ll select my favorite sketch, and you’ve got the book!  Not an artist?  No problem, I’m not a writer and I have a blog.  Enter anyway!

Contest ends Friday November 6th at 11:59pm eastern time.

*By entering you agree that your drawing may be posted on my site, whether you win or lose.*

I brought up a topic on Twitter recently that spawned a number of replies and let to an interesting discussion.  I asked if DM’s mostly rolled out in the open, or behind the screen.  A good number of DM’s seem to roll their dice in front of their players, which is what I personally do.  In combat, all my attack and damage rolls are out there for all to see, as I believe it adds a sense of excitement to  combat.  I love the groans that accompany a natural 20, and the high fives that accompany a crucial monster attack that ends in a fumble.

Having said all this, the topic of the DM fudging  the dice came up.  How can you fudge if the dice are being rolled out in plain view?   Well, the truth is that I don’t fudge dice.  Dice fudging goes back to the very beginning of D&D.  It is a tried and true tradition of the game.  After all, what DM wants his party to die at the hands of a lucky Kobold rather than the big boss at the end of the dungeon?  Not me.  But I also think that the element of randomness that the dice bring to the game is crucial, and should be respected.  I was asked if I would allow a total party kill due to lucky rolling at the hands of some mediocre enemies.  So I tweeted the following:

I’d rather “guide” the story through narration than by fudging. If I smell a TPK, I’ll narrate them out of it, rather than lie about a roll.

It’s very simple.  If I see it coming, I’ll get them out of it before I let it happen.  I ask you this… what’s the point of rolling if you know that a certain outcome will cause you to fudge the roll?  If you know that your party might die due to the breath weapon on the big red dragon, and you plan to fudge this “to hit” roll, why do it at all?  Narrate them out of a possible TPK.  Reinforcements come in to help them bring down the dragon… a dragon’s old enemy swoops in to attack him while he’s busy with the party, allowing the pc’s some rounds to deal with a distracted dragon… the party has a round to heal a few key members… You can come up with something.

Although it looks tasty, it's not the fudge we're talking about.

All I’m saying is that I’m not in favor of the randomness of the game being played with.  You wouldn’t use loaded dice, and fudging is the verbal equivalent of pulling out your loaded d20.  Instead, use you narrative control of the game to steer things where you want them to go, while making it feel organic and not too obvious to the players.

I know I’m going to be in the minority with this thinking.  I know that fudging is seen by many as a handy DM tool.  I get that.  But I want to get my point across and get your thoughts on the matter.  If a result is so crucial that you are willing to lie to get it, then just skip the step  altogether and use your storytelling to get where you want or need to go.

Alright, my flame retardant suit of armor is on.  Bring it on!

Oh, and check out Mike’s D&D Blog, where he writes his views on the subject, as he was involved in the twitter debate.

Before I get to the review of the magazine, let me point out why I’m choosing to review Dungeon Magazine now. It occurred to me that I wasn’t seeing any reviews of this magazine (or Dragon) on any of the blogs that I typically read. If I’m wrong, please correct me, so I may add another blog to my list of reads. I figured this may be of interest to D&D players who may not be subscribers of the Insider service, and are looking for a little reading material to help them make up their minds as to whether or not to subscribe. Having said all this, here’s my review.

The Raven Queen graces the cover of Dungeon 171 this month.

Dungeon Magazine has recently changed formats, and has become exclusively a  DM’s magazine. It not only includes adventures, but also articles that are useful for DM’s looking for extra materials for their campaigns. This change was recent on the part of Wizard’s, and as far as I’m concerend, it’s a welcome one. I’d much rather have one magazine to pick and choose from, than have to dig out stuff from two. So, what does this issue of Dungeon offer us DM’s for use in our game? Here’s a sample, let’s see.

Adventures

For DM’s looking for adventures, side trecks, or battles we get a varied lot to choose from, with the bulk of them geared towards the heroic tier of play.  The big picture item here this month is the introduction of the “Chaos Scar” campaign, or as the editorial in the magazine calls it, the “Caves of Chaos” campaign (?).   The Chaos Scar is a long narrow valley carved out by a meteor, dotted with caves and areas of adventures.  The campaign is a loose collection of adventures centered around this area, with enough plot holes deliberately left to allow the DM to fill with his own creations.

W e get two Chaos Scar adventures this month, “Stick in the Mud”, dealing with a tribe of Bullywugs who have taken residence in a long dead Wizard’s laboratory; and “Den of the Slave-Takers”, an adventure revolving around Gnoll slavers and an evil Halfling.  Both adventures are 1st level adventures, perfect to begin campaigning in the Chaos Scar.  I like the idea behind this series, and if I weren’t already involved in a campaign, I would have looked into running this one.

Continuing in the heroic tier of play, there’s a side trek called “Treed!” which deals with an Owlbear the party has to deal with.  Meh.  I wasn’t too impressed.  The adventure consists of a role playing encounter (and labeled as such, even given a level but no XP ?), and a combat encounter.  If you have nothing prepared for your 7th level party, throw this at them, otherwise,  I’d skip it.  What’s a role playing encounter anyway?  I don’t recall that being anything.  It’s not a skill challenge, it has no XP value, it’s just an encounter consisting of a series of Perception & Insight checks.  Weird.

Moving on to the paragon tier of play, we have an encounter that if I threw at my players they’d scream “Cheesy!”.  Not because it’s a bad encounter, but because of who’s in it.  My players are a bunch of cynical jerks anyway, so never mind them.  In this encounter, the players get to fight Drizzt, the world’s most famous Dark Elf, and a nasty 21’st level Solo Skirmisher, along with his panther Gwenhwyvar, also 21st level. The encounter provides the stat blocks, the battle map, and a Skill Challenge to attempt to get Drizzt to stand down.  It’s a neat encounter that I’ll never run, unless I re-skin Drizzt.  “Eh… you guys see a dark elf… his name’s, eh… Brizzt.”  “Brizzt?”  “Yeah, yeah, Brizzt.  Roll initiative.”

For the epic tier of play we get yet another adventure in the “Scales of War” campaign, “Grasp of the Mantled Citadel”.  I’d be lying if I said I knew anything about what’s happening in this adventure path.  I have no idea.  I tried collecting all the adventures as a single PDF and hit over 500 pages a few months ago.  I’ll never run it, so I’m not even reading it.  Either way, they are up to level 22, so it’ll soon be over.

Deities and Demigods:  The Raven Queen’s Misbegotten

This article, by Robert J. Schwalb (who is quickly becoming one of my favorite 4th Ed. authors), sheds some light on the Raven Queen and her followers.  There’s plenty of fluff here related to the goddess, and then it includes stats on several samples of her devoted followers, who belong to groups dedicated to serving her, as well as including details on sects that follow her as well.

It’s a cool article, and seeing as how the Raven Queen has become such a popular deity in D&D, I can see this article getting some use.   I know I may pick and choose certain things from it.

The Eye of Justice

This is a Forgotten Realms article detailing a group of corrupt vigilantes in the city of Westgate.  It includes an encounter, which to me seems a little incomplete due to lack of a battle map.  It also mentions some feats that players can learn for joining the group, but doesn’t include them.  It instead mentions they’ll be in an “upcoming” Dragon article. When?  It’s upcoming.  I don’t play in the Realms, although that shouldn’t necessarily matter, and I have no desire  in using this group as presented.  Plus, the lack of the battle map in the article threw me off.  One of many editing issues with the magazine this month.

The magazine also includes a Mike Mearls article where he answers mail related to Skill Challenges, and a “Save My Game” article on organizing tiles an minis.  This article isn’t even highlighted in the contents, it  gets a very generic sounding “… back with more advice and letters from the mailbag…”.  Meh.

Something happened when this magazine was put together.  The table of contents is all wrong.   The pages don’t match the articles, and page 90 shows up 3 times for three different articles.  There’s a missing battle map, and the editorial on the front page calls the new campaign one thing, while the adventures call it something else.  There are also 9 blank pages with a “Dungeoncraft” header, following such article, in the back of the magazine.  I don’t know, maybe the editor is on sick leave and an intern filled in, because this is sloppy work.  I hate to say it guys, but it is.

If you are a non DDI subscriber, and I had lent you this magazine to judge the quality on, you’d pass on it.  And understandably so, as it feels a little amateurish.  Although in their defense, it’s not a normal occurrence.  Something must have happened.  If these issues are fixed at some point please let me know so I can amend this review.

]]> http://newbiedm.com/2009/10/29/newbiedm-review-dungeon-magazine-171/feed/ 7 newbiedm dnd_4new_dutoc_171_pic3_en http://newbiedm.com/2009/10/29/newbiedm-review-dungeon-magazine-171/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/WwwNewbieDmcom/~3/LrDF5RFziAY/ http://newbiedm.com/2009/10/28/pre-campaign-player-questionaire/#comments Wed, 28 Oct 2009 16:14:02 +0000 newbiedm http://newbiedm.com/?p=1223 ]]>

Many times, we as DM’s do not have the luxury of playing with a group of people we’ve know for a long time and are comfortable with.  I happen to have that luxury, playing with a group I’ve known and have been friends with for over 20 years in some cases, and haven’t had to resort to alternate ways to find players.

So as a DM who’s running a game for a bunch of strangers, you’ve got very little to go on besides the small talk that goes on during character creation night and the pre-game pleasantries that are exchanged on game night.  It’s a tough job to manage 6 or 7 different personalities when you aren’t too familiar with them.  Also, player expectations for your game are something you should know and respect, as well as the reverse; players should know what kind of game you plan to run before they jump unto your table.  With this in mind, I’ve created a small player questionnaire for you to hand out to your (potential) players.

Asking questions before the campaign starts is a must.

These questions aren’t meant to include everything you must know about a player, but they do have a very basic and general scope to them, things like how they view alignment in the game, to what food allergies they may have that you may need to be conscious of.

Although I don’t currently have a need to use it, I put it out there in case someone does have a need for it and hasn’t found one online.  I hope it helps somebody out.

EDIT:   I have updated the file to address a typo, and a misunderstood checkbox item that was addressed in comments below.

You can find it here.

I had a chance to read Kobold Quarterly, a D&D magazine believed by many to be the spiritual successor to Dragon Magazine (in its print version pre-4th Ed.) and I can see why that is.  It is a nicely put together mag with tons of D&D content, whether you’re playing 3.x, Pathfinder or my system of choice, 4th Ed.

The current issue out now is issue 11, the Fall 2009 issue, with this nice color cover:

There's some nice artwork right there...

Just from the cover, the two things that stood out the most for me were the articles on 4th Ed. wishes, and the designer round table.  Wishes because I’d like to see how they created that without breaking the game, and the designer round table because of some of the names attached to it.  I had an issue with this article, and I’ll get into that later on in the review.

I won’t spoil all the articles so you have an element of surprise when you pick up the magazine.  You should pick it up if you are running a game and would like to sample other stuff outside of the WOTC published material.  Here now are a few words on some of the articles:

A Broken Mind:  Sanity and Mental Disorders by Scott Gable

Right off the bat we get an article filled with alternate rules for a sanity system in 4e.  The article assigns a new ability score to your character, “Mind”, and based on this score you have a “Sanity” pool of points.  Different factors affect how and when you lose points from you sanity pool, reading forbidden tomes or running into aberrant creatures are two examples that would force you to roll a sanity check to see if you are affected.  There are then effects that take place depending on how many points you’ve lost, etc…  The article is well presented and it’s obvious that some thought went behind the design of the system.  If you are a DM that would find this sort of thing interesting, then by all means go for it.  It doesn’t seem to be too complicated, and the author does a good job of laying it out there in a simple enough manner.

Running Across the Screen, a GM Roundtable

The cover of the magazine calls it a designer roundtable, yet the article refers to it as a GM roundtable.  A minor point, sure, but it stood out for me.  Either way, this is a very nice article that includes 16 DM’s, with such names as Monte Cook, Chris Pramas, Robin Laws, Mike Mearls, Chris Perkins, and James Wyatt.  The article includes the DM’s input on what it means to them to be a DM and other stuff like encounter design and player free will.  It’s good to read what other DM’s think, specially those so close to the game that their names are on the books, so it is an interesting article.  My only gripe, and it’s a minor one, is that for me a roundtable would have everyone in the same room playing off each others’ answers, while this clearly reads as an article combining emailed answers. Doesn’t mean it’s bad, I love the article, but it’s not a real roundtable in how I see the meaning of one.  Either way, as a DM you can get some good insight out of this.

Wishing Well by Garrett Baumgartner

Wishes have been a controversial part of D&D, and I believe their exclusion in 4th Ed. was a deliberate attempt to get away from the more game breaking aspects of the game.  In this article, the author attempts to bring back the Wish as a system revolving around the three tiers of play, and based on the tier the impact and effect of the wish becomes greater.  The wishes are given out as if they were treasure based on the 4th. Ed. treasure parcel system, and they immediately reminded me of the alternate rewards mechanic in the DMG2.  In fact, the Heroic Tier wish is called a boon, which if you’ve read the DMG2, you’ll immediately recognize it as a reward handed out as if it were treasure as well.  Wishes can be used for things as renewing an encounter power, granting instant success on ability checks, and even changing your race at Epic tier.  To be honest, I’m not sure that I’d use the Wish mechanic as written in this article.  Wishes are out of the game for a reason, and this article does nothing for me to justify their existence.

Farragum, the Howling City by Dan Voyce

This is a neat article detailing an underground city populated by the Derro, and even includes a new disease to throw at your player, “Madness of the Wailing Wind”.  The Derro, which I didn’t know and had to look up, are an evil race that’s a combination of man and dwarf, something the article omits but I would have found useful to know.  Sometimes authors should not assume every reader is a knowledgeable about every D&D thing out there, just a thought.  The article highlights important locales and includes a nicely rendered color map of the city.  It seems easy enough to place this in any generic campaign world, although I’m not sure of there are Derro’s in 4e., making their inclusion in this article a little puzzling.  Perhaps a city of Duergars?  In all fairness it was both a 3.5 and 4e article, which leads me to my one negative thing on the magazine…

Maybe I’m getting blinder as I age, but I had a real hard time finding the reference on the article headers that described if it was a 3.x, Pathfinder or 4th Ed. article.  Once I found it I had an embarrassing moment of “how stupid of me“, but I still feel it could be a little bit more prevalent, or perhaps written into the introduction of the article itself.  Also, the table of contents doesn’t detail what edition the article is for, and I think that would be a good thing to include on there for faster flipping to the sections that may interest me.

My other very minor gripe was the inconsistency with the GM/Designer roundtable article, which seems like an editing mistake more than anything else.  I think it could lead someone who’s looking for designer advice to find something else when they read the article.

The magazine is very nice, very well put together, and for its price it is a good value.  At $5.99 for the PDF, or $7.99 for the print version, you really can’t go wrong.  I think the points I touched on regarding the edition references would go a long way towards making it a little more user friendly, at least for me.  Would I recommend it to someone who has never read it?  Sure.  Extra content for your game is never a bad thing, and sometimes it’s good to go beyond the books and writings of the same designers you keep buying and reading from over and over again.   So yes, I recommend it, even with those minor flaws (to me) that I singled out.

This is the third installment of a series titled Warstories, which consists of short post meant to inspire discussion and dialogue amongst DM’s.  Warstories deal with the many different issues that come up in a D&D game from time to time, and tend to affect Dungeon Masters in particular.

I had an unfortunate situation to deal with in my game recently:  inter-party conflict.  It wasn’t the type of verbal cheap shots that are sometimes traded at the table, nor was it a simple argument about whether to kill or not an NPC.  It was an all out “I’m dropping a daily, action point, and dropping another daily, and if he goes down I coup de grace him” type argument.

Now, you could say that as a DM, I shouldn’t have let the problem they were having escalate to the point of PC murder.  I agree to an extent, but I feel that a DM needs to have a certain “hands off”approach in regards to how the party interacts with each other in order to maintain the feeling of free will.  Could I have brought in some town guards in the middle of the fight in a darkened alley?  Maybe.  But that would be too much of a “hand of God” approach to the situation.  I felt I had no choice but to let it play out at the table and let the chips fall where they may.

After the game ended, and both ended up dead, (the PC who killed first was then killed by another party member in retaliation during one of the encounters of the night) I stayed up thinking about it for a bit and realized a few things.  One, it’ll take a strong group to come back from this.  Even though it is a game, tempers were flaring, and insults were traded amongst the real people behind the PC’s.  That can’t be a good thing, as some of the chemistry in my group is already a little flimsy at best.  Second, no matter what, meta-gaming and the issue of trust will play a role with whatever new PC is introduced by the affected players in this mess.  Of that I have no doubt, and I’m not looking forward to that.  Third, I need to be a dicky DM and stop things before they escalate.  The laissez-faire attitude cost some people a good time last night, screwed my plans for the evening, and left people feeling like they wasted 3 hours of their evening when they could have been home with their kids.

A party divided can't be a good thing.

D&D is a game of heroic fantasy, and killing your party members and sneaking around the party doing your own things are not  heroic acts.  That’s not really the type of game I’m interested in running, not when my D&D time is so limited due to real life.  So how did I handle it, after the fact?  Well, my PC’s got an email from me basically calling them out and saying that if that’s the game they’d like to play, they can find another DM, because I’m not running that.  I have zero interest in balancing a party’s dislike for each other, whether fictional or real.  It’s not my thing, and I won’t do it or tolerate it anymore.  When a player heads towards that, he or she is being disrespectful towards the DM and everyone else at the table.

There are, of course, groups that enjoy this stuff.  Good for them, this doesn’t apply to you if you enjoy running games like what I’m describing.  So I ask more experienced DM’s, how have you handled such situations?  How did your group deal with the aftermaths?  Was the table the same afterward?  I look forward to your comments.

I’m a huge fan of Dungeon Tiles, as I feel that they open up creativity that maybe wasn’t there before as you build your maps.  I don’t necessarily feel that every encounter area deserves to be plotted out with multiple tile sets, but certainly you can devote the big fight of the night or a boss encounter some time to come up with a nice encounter area.  And that’s where the strength of the tiles comes into play, because I really think that  they help you visualize an encounter area and go beyond the simple 20×20 room with no dressing or terrain.

A new set was recently released, Sinister Woods, and I went ahead and picked up a couple of packs.  One of the things that irritates me about the way they are packaged is this need for secrecy about the contents inside.  I wish the folks at WOTC were more forthcoming about what’s included in the package in their previews, so I’m going to provide a service here at NewbieDM for those of you curious about this latest pack.

As you can tell and were probably expecting, there are plenty of outdoor tiles in the set, and plenty of trees to go along with them.  The strong point of this set, in my opinion, is the great complement it makes to the previously released (and now out of print) set “Ruins of the Wild”.  There are also some pretty nice transition tiles here, leading into dungeons, ruins or whatever else you may come up with.

The tiles are divided as follows:

• 3 8×8 pieces
• 3 3×8 pieces
• 6 4×4 pieces
• 6 2×4 pieces
• 9 2×2 pieces
• 3 1×2 small pieces (rubble, thorns, ruins)

One thing of note, the included map shows an encounter area built with 2 sets, a trend recently started by WOTC, as with earlier releases the tiles showed maps created with only 1 set.  There are also more tiles marked by the “difficult terrain” symbols, which as a DM, I’d like to determine myself what is difficult terrain, a minor gripe.  Also, and I’m sure this is an exception, my tiles are a little damaged, with the print peeling off the cardboard in a few pieces.  I haven’t opened my second set, so I don’t know if it’s isolated or not.  Normally the tiles are of great quality, so I’m assuming it’s a random, isolated case.

So in closing, the transition tiles and it’s compatibility with the previous outdoor set make this a great buy, although I think more than one set would be necessary to create truly epic encounter areas.  Either way, it’s a great set so go get it today.  At 10 bucks a set, it’s not a bad deal.

Green Dragon Inn © Wizards of the Coast

If you’ve played any of the published adventures in 4th Ed. D&D, then you are familiar with the work of Mike Schley.  In my opinion, Mike’s visual style is very closely tied to the overall palette of 4th Ed. and clearly WOTC feels the same way as his work is a part of many of their published products.  I recently had the opportunity to ask Mike a few questions, so here now are 1d12 Questions with… Mike Schley:

First, I’ll ask you two important questions:  Are you a gamer?  And if you are, do you prefer playing or DM’ing?

Yes, I love gaming. Though I haven’t had the time recently for a regular weekly game I always love a good campaign. I love to DM but playing a character is just as fun, especially if you have the room to really develop your character and the party’s story.

Give us a little bit about your background in the hobby.  How did you get into fantasy cartography and how did you get your first big break into D&D?

I started playing with some friends back in the mid-eighties. We were all in middle school so needless to say the adventures weren’t too complex back then.   I loved drawing the campaign maps and character profiles and spent a huge amount of time mapping everything from new worlds to five-foot grid versions of my own neighborhood.  Like a lot of folks I fell out of the hobby in high school and college but picked it back up later on.

As for my career, I originally started working in the fantasy RPG field as associate art director for Dungeon Magazine while it was being published by Paizo. Working with the art and editorial staff over there was an absolute blast. Before then I had worked as an in-house designer for the gaming company Decipher so I already had a bit of exposure to the gaming industry. After a while at Paizo I noticed that I was constantly looking for high quality cartographers to contribute to the magazine. Unfortunately there just weren’t as many out there as I would have liked.

There were tons of illustrators but very few cartographers in comparison. Later on, as I began thinking about pursuing a career as an artist and leaving the role of managing artists to other folks, I recalled the need for quality cartographers and called Rob Lazzaretti over at the WotC.   He was running WotC’s in-house cartography department at the time.   I showed him some of my previous work and he was kind enough to toss a project my way.

Looking at the work I did back then makes me cringe.   I had a lot to learn but luckily they have stuck with me over the years.

In my opinion, your visual style is now closely tied to 4^th Ed., as many of the introductory products included your cartography.  Was that accidental, or were you tapped to be one of 4^th Ed.’s primary cartographers from the beginning?

Although I can’t speak to what was going on behind the scenes at WotC, simply because I wasn’t in-house, they did let me know that I would be helping establish the flavor of 4^th Ed. Cartography. I think they may have also asked some other cartographers to emulate my style but that’s just a guess.

Tell us a bit about the map making process.  What tools do you use, and how do you approach a map?  Do you have a digital palette where you just draw stuff from, like set dressings (tables, statues) for example, or is a new map completely original from top to bottom?

The process of making a map is actually similar to that of inking and flatting comics. Once I have the basic sketch imported into Photoshop and all the standard design elements in place, like the background texture and grid, I begin by laying down my inks.

Organization is absolutely critical since the inks will serve as templates for selections and masks down the line. After the inks are done I send the image off for approval and if I have the green light I then move on to painting the colors underneath my ink layers. I maintain a large content library of inked objects to pull from.

The key is just using the inks and not the colors to build scenes that would otherwise take forever to draw. This way I can have a dozen barstools inked in a flash while giving them all unique lighting and color treatments.

Walk us through the design of an adventure.  Do the writers work jointly with the cartographers as the adventure is being written, or do you get basic descriptions of the encounter areas once the adventure is written and get to add your creativity to the process?  How much of the map is your own creation vs. the needs of the writers?

Many times I receive sketches from the writer only after they have worked out all the details of the adventure setting. In those cases I generally keep to the script since a map must work with the story it’s illustrating. It all depends on the project though. Some require a more strictly facts approach while others leave more up to my own interpretation. By far the most fun is when I have free rein to create out of whole cloth.

When you work on a battle map, do you take into account the limitations of a DM?  By that I mean the size of the encounter area, the difficulty in transferring the map to the game table, etc.  Does knowing that DM’s need to eventually transfer a map to the table keep you from going overboard in details?

Heh! Not really. I figure that it’s my job to present a map that’s understandable and evocative. The DM can choose to transfer as much or as little of the detail as he likes during the game. I just want to immerse him in the world and give him as much information as possible to pull from.

What do you prefer working on, outdoor larger scale maps, or battle maps?

I love large regional maps. The maps of Sarifal and Cormyr were an absolute joy! Battle maps are great as well. I just love maps. I even dream in top-down perspective.

Can you tell us what D&D related project you’re currently working on?

Well, I just finished the maps and a few illustrations for the 4E Adventure HS1 Reavers of Harkenwold. I am also contributing monthly to WotC’s DDI adventure path Scales of War and Paizo’s Pathfinder Society adventure series.

What advice would you give amateur fantasy cartographers out there who are looking for their first break in the industry?

Keep drawing! A fundamental understanding of rendering, design, and color will help immensely as you create new maps. Each map for me is a work of art in and of itself so a lot of the issues that I address in illustrations also come up in my cartography projects. As for getting a break into the industry; show only your best pieces and don’t get discouraged by criticism, use it rather to improve your work.