Day 5: The Map

I didn't expect today to be an easy endeavor.

From today's exercise plan...

I should warn you that today's exercise may take more than 15 minutes. I'm still working on coloring the large-scale map of a world I used 2 years ago, but the small-scale map only took about an hour.
Today is the day you get out your pencils and paper and start to draw The Map.

Again; I'm working on a star cluster here, not a specific world.  That being said, the star cluster does need to get mapped.  Stars placed, stellar phenomena placed, borders and hazards placed. It's a similar enough exercise that it works as part of this schedule.

Over the years I've picked up a few tools to help me out in the map-making department.  One of them is Campaign Cartographer.  It's a solid program, but does require a 3-credit college course to unlock everything you can do with it. I've made a few world maps with it, as well as the map of the star sector my current Star Wars game takes place in.

 

I think this is what I'm going to do today's lesson with. The lesson plan reads as follows:

So, today's exercise is to draw out the physical contours of your map, and then identify at least three places that your people might live. You don't need names for them yet-- we'll worry about names next week, when we give our people language. Just draw a dot on the map or maybe sketch a little "house" symbol to indicate that people have settled that area.

That could fly for a star map.  Let's see...

...yeah, that could work. It's a start, anyway I don't have smaller nebulae, protostars, pulsars, travel routes, or names for half the star systems. These are just the inhabited systems, too.  There are hundreds of others that aren't inhabited that would just take up space on the map.  Got a couple purple nebula, and a green nebula in there (that reddish stuff is just the backdrop).  The blue nebulae on the borders represents clusters of proto-stellar matter that REALLY messes with Faster-Than-Light travel. 

That should be all for today. Looking forward to tomorrow, as it deals with Races. Got some ideas about what I want to use and where it all goes.