Friday, August 9, 2013

Irony, MT - Part 2

One of the most important parts of a RPG game (for me anyway) is the map, so when I was putting together a set of western RPG materials for my wife's birthday [see previous post here], I knew that I wanted to make a map to go with it.

Since I had decide to use the Montana Territory for various reasons, I spent some time looking at Google maps, trying to find a town that was in mixed terrain, and was not too changed from its late 1800's plan.  The idea was to then look for a period map of the town, and use that, or a modification there of.  After some work, I finally found the prototype for my town of Irony: Bannack, MT.

Bannack, named for the local Bannock Native Americans, was a gold rush town that boomed quickly, then nearly disappeared before guttering out into the ghost town that it is today. I found a tourist map of the place, which had the look I liked, and drew a simplified version of it in Google Draw.  The pictures are either period pictures of buildings in town, or modern ones of the remaining buildings in the ghost town.

Click to enbiggen
After I drew the map with Google Draw, I then used MS publisher to put together this version, add in the photos, and the border.  I then printed it, and yellowed the paper with coffee and some dirt, folded it about 1000 times and there you have it.  I rather like it.

2 comments:

Lum said...

That looks really great, Well done!
I like the inclusion of the photos. Is there a reason you didn't nte the locations of those places on the map?

Lasgunpacker said...

Thanks Lum!

I did not notate on the map for two reasons, the first being that I wanted it to be more of a period color and less of an assigned position, and the other is that I forgot to compare to the "actual" locations when I was finalizing the map...