January 2023 - Plots & Plans

Happy new year! 

Summary:

• Patreon rewards this year continue to be 'not promising anything'...
  but in reality I am aiming for a minimum of 1 map a month. preferably 2.
  Map types will be split 50/5-ish between battlemaps and settlement maps.  
• The Great 2023 Geomorph City-Tile Project begins - aiming for 20 tiles a month and releasing only to Patreon supporters at the moment. 
• 1st 2 maps of the year: will be a Battlemap of a town square on market day & a settlement map - a ghost-thorp in a swampy area

And onward into 2023...

2022 was not what I would call my most productive year & did not quite balance the books. It was, perhaps, more of a year of consolidation of skills and ideas, at least in the mapping department…. personal life is still a work in progress; but I was glad to be able to spend time taking care of my mother as she recovered from some illness over the last year or so. This year, I am hoping to have more time available for mapping :-)

At the beginning of 2022, I decided to focus more on settlement scale maps.
Since then, I found that I miss the other scales and recently, as you have probably noticed, have enjoyed creating a few battlemaps again. 

Going forward into 2023 I am going to mix it up, aiming for about 50/50 settlement and battlemap scale maps, with the occasional other in the mix. 

I am  going to stick to the 'not promising anything' tier reward, but in reality am aiming for at the very least, 1-map-a-month
- Which is what I had in mind when I set the new Defenders of Chaos Tier (monthly-sub) price close to what it had been for the old (per-release) Explorer tier last year.

I am 'secretly' hoping to create 2 a month as often as possible... double the value for your support ...
- And since we are now on per-month, that will be at no extra cost unless you take a fancy to increase your support 

I have also begun an extended project to create as many city-scale geomorph map-tiles as possible
I will initially release these to only Patreon supporters, as an additional bonus.
- see below for more info in that :-)

And then... out of all those maps and tiles, I am planning to start extracting elements that can become assets for others to use to make their own maps.
This is not going to happen straight away.
I plan to test out my production capacity for a few months first and only release them in my shop/roll20/etc.
After that... We shall see. I may add another tier for folk who like to use assets to make their own maps using programs like CC/Incarnate/Arkenforge.
Feel free to persuade me that that is a good idea :-)

Anyways. Those are my thoughts, standing here at the dawn of the new year. If life doesn't toss too many curve balls my way, It should pan out something like that over the year. 

The Great 2023 Geomorph City-Tile Project:

This began as a wild idea several months ago...
It took a while to figure out a style, a working template & a colour pallet, resulting in these first 14 tiles
Tiles are 4x4 inches @300pps and completely rotatable and flippable.
There are no shadows because the ones for buildings at the edge of the tile would be cut off, or overlapped onto things they shouldn't be, which would look very weird - not to mention limiting their full rotation! 

The first set will have connecting roads on all 4 sides, later there will be tiles that have connecting roads on 3/2/1/0 sides. Perhaps there will also be a few larger feature tiles that are sized to be like several tiles permanently joined together (eg. small lakes, crevasses, castle complexes).
Later on, I also have ideas for tiles that have only 1 central road on connecting sides - as well as joiner tiles to go between. Also, wilderness tiles, river tiles, coastal tiles, city wall+moat tiles, ruined versions of tiles, ...  
And that is probably quite enough for 2023 and probably 2024+ as well... 

Currently, the general style is European-Mediteranian / medieval-modern - ish with perhaps a touch of fantasy here and there.
But who knows.. maybe, if I am able to continue in future years, I may be able to add in sets that are for different climate-zones/architectural styles/eras .... but it is a grand experiment & that is pipe-dreaming at this point. 

My plan for 2023 is to create 4-7 new tiles a week in the style I have worked out.
Aiming for a minimum of 20 new tiles each month.

As I draw them, I am posting them to the Patreon-only bonus maps channel on Discord (the 1st 14 are already there). Then, about once a month, I will post new ones as a set here on Patreon.  

For the moment, these tiles will be a Patreon exclusive bonus :-)
There won't be any free public versions.

Later, when I have a larger collection, I will release them on my shop etc.

Upcoming Releases

January:

• A battlemap of a Little Town square on market day (and market night)
  _ should be out in the next few days
• A settlement map of the swampy ghost-thorp of Otsutan (2nd thorp of 6)
  _Should be out later this month
• First set of City Geo-tiles - connecting roads on 4 sides
  _ Day by day on Discord & as a set later this month here on Patreon

February and beyond: 

• A mountain pass gate-fort battlemap
• The third thorp of 6 will most likely be a frontier Fort with a small supporting hamlet on the edge of the wild lands
• Second set of City Geo-tiles 

That will hopefully get us through to the end of February, or maybe a little way into March. We shall see how much time life permits me for mapping :-)