All over the place

Been a while since my last update, and I've been working on a lot of random stuff.

Abulafia is on a new webhost (the name is growing on me, once I memorized it), and the speed has improved nicely. Unfortunately, the move kind of derailed me and I haven't worked on my project there since.

I wrote up a high level history for the area, but I found it kind of trite and boring. Eladrin get kicked out by tieflings who take over the humans in the area. They eventually fall, and a good human empire springs up in its place. I'm going to go back over that and make things a little more gray. I also had the 4e origins (as much as we know) of the eladrin/elves and tieflings worked in to the history, but that probably isn't necessary. I want to make the tieflings less evil and the humans more ambiguous. I want the tiefling empire ("dominion" sounded good) to be the founding force of "modern" civilization in the area.

I'm also trying to figure out the scale and map I want to work in. I don't want to make it too large to deal with, or too small to be quickly outgrown. I'm also seeing the need to fill in other surrounding countries, but I can alleviate some of that feeling by working on the nobilities lands within the Empire. I need to start looking at example maps. Fortunately, I've been collecting digital maps for quite some time, so I'll either just steal one or use it as inspiration.

The last two days I've been playing with Inkscape, a free vector-based drawing program, similar to Adobe Illustrator. It's a really neat program and is very powerful, but there's a learning curve. I'm also not much of an artist and I don't have a pen tablet, and that makes working in it a little harder. Anyway, Inkscape has a couple of nice features that work great for map creation. You can draw a shape or a line, then "fractalize" it, which means it becomes randomly jittered, which is perfect for terrain. The clone/duplicate object feature is pretty good too. If I make a terrain symbol, I can clone it and put them all over the place. If you clone something and change the original, all the clones change as well, so you can update everything simultaneously. You can also find features like that in some of the "real" mapping programs, but I also want to learn Inkscape for fun.

Hopefully with this nice down time for Christmas, I can get some more work done on the game.