Upcoming Maps & Expeditions

Hi everyone! In July I needed to take a sudden short break for personal reasons and after that, I've been working on several things on the background related to my tabletop RPG games and this also affects my cartography (more about this below).

RPGs by Ironspine Press

Besides maps, I've been publishing RPGs in Finnish since 2006 and I have two (or three) major settings + one more coming up.

Here's a quick summary of the settings:

• Astraterra: A science fantasy RPG setting set in a broken ring world. The heroes explore the scattered fargate teleport network built by the Ancients before the ring shattered. 
• Heimot (Hyperstorm): A science-fiction RPG set in the distant future of the humankind. Inspired by Dune, The Foundation, Hyperion Cantos, and Star Wars, for example. Closed playtesting of the 2nd edition rules will start within the next 2-3 months. 
• Sotakarjut (Warhogs): A military science-fiction RPG set in the same universe as Heimot, but thousands of years earlier. The player characters are Trojans, secret agents, spies, and saboteurs infiltrated into the memory transplants of warhogs (and other morphs using transplanted memories). Warhogs are human-pig hybrids used as shock troops in the frontlines of the 3rd Exo-war.  
• Atherune: A new 5th Edition compatible high-fantasy setting in development. The world is all about dragons, magic, and long lost ancient realms and kingdoms plotting for the high king’s throne, but it comes with a small pinch of gun powder, clockwork devices, steampunk (dwarven and goblin inventions) and science-fantasy elements (titan artefacts) as an extra. D&D using Atherune as the setting is my main RPG campaign currently. 

Bringing it all together

 As some of you might know, I'm doing maps in my free time in the evenings and on weekends, and to be honest, I've been having problems fitting these all in my schedule and I've had to leave my RPG projects to less attention for almost a year. Now, that Astraterra is coming out in English and I've begun to work on the 2nd edition of Heimot/Hyperstorm, I started to think about how to make this all work. 

Here is the plan...

From now on I'm going to base most of my maps to these aforementioned worlds. While all the background fluff might be related to these settings, I will keep the maps mostly generic and system agnostic enough to fit other major RPG settings. 

So, no major changes to map formats or their subject matter. Mostly this affects the backstories. They will be more uniform from now on and might even introduce some sort of meta-plots or story arcs within them.  

Also, with this plan, I can start working together more closely with Hans Zenjuga, who has done illustrations for my RPGs. When working with my own settings, I can also order character or scene illustrations from Hans to add content to the maps, and possibly use them later in future RPG releases. 

Upcoming Maps

Before I get to switch fully to this new approach of releasing maps and writing background for them I have some maps in the pipeline that are mostly done, but I haven't just had the time or energy to make the releases for. 

Here's the status:

• Phylactery Pyramid (final colors & shadows TBD; collaboration with scene illustration, music, and tokens) 
• Space Station Bazaar (line art is done) 
• Military Check Port (line art done) 
• A Shaky Bridge Encounter (colors are done)
• Cliffside Nest (Line art done)
• Crashlanded Scout Ship (Line art is done)
• Undercity Base (line art is done)
• Fantasy City Map (draft is done)

Next,  I'll concentrate on getting these released before the end of the month. If there's any spare time, I'll release a few old-school style bonus maps too.  

Also, there will be Premium Battlemap module volume 2 coming for Foundry VTT later this month. The first volume will have 20 maps and is around 300 Mbs, but the upcoming volumes will have probably less maps per module to save space and bandwidth per module. 

Edit: The  Trollball Arena map is a custom map for one of my Patrons and I agreed to release it later.  

Take care and stay safe,

Miska