Lands of Axeoth

Question: How did you make the Titanrealm maps?

To be totally honest? By cheating. I'm not good at art, and only decent as a graphic designer. So I let someone else do the work for me, and that someone was video game company 3DO.

The Titanrealm maps actually begin at their base with the campaign editor from the old turn-based strategy game Heroes of Might and Magic 4. John and I happily wasted a lot of time on that game when we were in high school and college. It came with a map creator, the better to allow you to build your own maps and challenge your friends to defeat them, and that map creator just so happens to be an awesome tool for creating maps for use in RPGs and personal projects as well. The base maps for the Titanrealms are put together in the HOMM4 campaign editor first, which is why those of you who have played that game might recognize some of the structures here and there.

After that, it's a matter of customizing them in an image editor (in my case, Microsoft PictureIt because that's what our budget can afford, my friends), which requires a variable amount of work. They all need things like the titles added and the colors monkeyed with, but some need a ton of extra stuff - like Tamoanchan, which needed starfields and extra layers that the map editor couldn't do - while others, like Muspelheim, are pretty close to finished after round one and just need a little touchup here and there.

Before the software phase, John and I sit down and physically draw a map so we know about where everything is before we start trying to design it for public consumption. Those maps are not pretty at all and everyone is better off not seeing them.

So yeah, don't go thinking we're some kind of 3D vegetation graphic wizards. We just stand on the shoulders of giants.