Monday, February 7, 2011

Islets in the Sea of OS'R

Yeehaw, the giant of OSR creative energy is awaking once again.  Look here for the rundown and get involved with an islet of your own.  Thanks to Paul for gettin' it rolling.

In celebration, have a pic of Ceylon:
Now stripped to some evocative place names:
And now stripped clean, ready for a scale change if you like:
Update: As per Spawn of Endra's good suggestion I flipped it to make it look less like Sri Lanka. I cleaned it up a little more too:
And another:
This is pretty trivial to do in a photo editor but maybe it will save someone some time.

8 comments:

  1. That's a nice example of how removing ink (whether lines or text) can help one to focus on what's important in the graphic. It's awesome that a whole part of the country is called The Buried Cities, but it's also cool to not be constrained by those cities. I might take a further step and rotate the island in some arbitrary way so that it doesn't evoke Sri Lanka (and whatever vague impressions I have of it) in anyway at all. (And cut out that tiny little indication of the proximity of India in the NW corner.) Sweet stuff, and public domain. Righteous.

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  2. Great idea. I have a map that I did for a funerary isle about a year ago that I never did anything with. This is a perfect excuse to do something with it now.

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  3. God, I would love to do this.

    This book here is one of the best RPG supplements I ever saw: Don Johnson's Phantom Islands of the Atlantic.

    If I were contributing I'd do Ko Phi Phi or Sulawesi (hardly an islet), but there's Just No Way I can justify the time right now. Alas!

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  4. @Spawn: yeah, and the Gem Lands, like something out of Burroughs.

    @Jonathan: I like your idea of a ritual island a lot. All I need is a little more detail and I may use it. Like, what exactly is the bird shape?

    @richardthinks: I'll poke around tonight, see if I can find any public domain maps of those two.

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  5. Really cool! The other thing I like about these is the feel of a hand-rendered map, which even though they are informed by the best Naval Reconnaissance of the British Navy in the Victorian era or whatever, still takes on the feel of a hand-drawn treasure map, especially when you've ripped away the text and other spatial references. I dig the public domain stuff you pull up for just this reason: it has great texture. Thanks!

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  6. Thanks, yeah I've been looking for those with a certain style to them, like the mountains in these. Unfortunately most of my finds are serendipitous-- look for pictures of pygmies, find what would be a good unicorn skull, look for maps of island find cave men fighting a bear, etc.

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  7. Is this project still on going? Is there a wiki or something of that details the places on Os'r?

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  8. It slowed, but I don't see why it would ever need to end. Go here for what got made so far:

    http://carterscartopia.blogspot.com/p/sea-of-osr-adventure-path.html

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