As part of LEGION’s first Warmachine campaign weekend in February, Where Sleeping Gods Lie, I’m building a campaign map for the weekend. Between myself and the other guys running the event, we had a few discussions on exactly how to visualise the campaign.
We knew we wanted a map of some sort. Games Workshop’s Mighty Empires campaign tiles were one option. These look great, however for an event of up to 40 people, we thought a small campaign map would be a bit crowded.
So the next option was to do something on the computer, and project it onto a nice big screen. Great! However, we needed a map first and suffice to say, none of us are expert cartographers or super talented artists.
There are plenty of map generators on the market for role play games, however I was after something a little more slick. This left two options, reuse an existing map (which tended to be low resolution), or generate my own map using something else.
This brought me back to a piece of 3D software software I’ve used before which specialises in terrain generation, called Bryce. This product has bounced around various owners in the industry and is currently developed by Daz 3D. Better still, the basic (fully functioning) version is free!
After an evening relearning this program, rendering a couple of images, and then compositing them in Photoshop, I have a basic map that is quite pretty (see below). The next step will be to add some details and put it in the event pack.
