Home D&D Map: Eberron (Khorvaire)

The impromptu coalition that our group had originally fired up with eventually broke up into its own smaller groups that, so far as I know, could still be meeting regularly like we are.  After 7 months or so of Tallingroth though we opted to swap DMs and settings.  My wife took up the DM mantle and I became one of the players as we dove into our favorite D&D setting: Eberron.  We started out in Graywall and over ~60 weeks we crossed the continent of Khorvaire and eventually faced off with Vol herself.

D&D has a handful of settings that the publishers have devised for DMs to take prebuilt.  The best known is probably Forgotten Realms (home to the infamous Drizzt Do'Urden) if only because it seems to be the default for video games (Baldur's Gate, Neverwinter Nights, etc).  Forgotten Realms is excellent as a "defacto"/pulp fantasy but you'll have to pardon me if I point out that there isn't that much depth to it.  In Eberron though you can't toss an ooze without running into an interesting story hook.  Aside from giving D&D several interesting races (Shifters, Changlings, Warforged, etc) it's just dripping with potential narrative.

Technically my map only shows the continent of Khorvaire (one of about 4 major continents) but since our entire campaign took place there it seemed forgivable.  I love the map of Khorvaire and spending ~12 hours refining a draft of it really just helped to underscore how much detail and work was packed into the setting.  I certainly won't mind if we head back someday.

Homebrew D&D Map: Erd

One of the luckiest things about our move earlier this year has been dedicating a whole room to our tabletop games.  Not only has it allowed the construction of our massive table (which is working out pretty shiny) but it's also providing a place to collect all our gaming paraphernalia.  Along those lines I'd been meaning to carve some maps of the various D&D settings we've played in so far.  Our group's about to conclude its third campaign and we've already got the next two lined up after that so there'll be plenty of maps to mount.  Aside from giving us a way to display/document the worlds we've killed monsters in it'll let me scratch that cartography itch now that I'm not coming up with maps for our current campaign anymore.

This first map was for a setting dubbed "Erd".  Back in 2012 we hoped in on a local, impromptu gaming coalition.  Nobody expected very many people to show up but the first game in Jan 2013 wound up with 11 players.  The fellow organizing the whole thing didn't have a setting to start with but within a couple weeks we'd come up with a world, something of a history, and some reasons why our adventurers were off adventuring.  Our current group spun off of that a month later and we've been meeting every week since.

I've never been all that happy with the Erd map.  Relative to the maps that followed it it's very simplistic; more of a political map than anything that shows any terrain.  That kind of goes for the campaign on the whole, somewhat simplistic and boilerplate.  That said, it was meant to be a collaborative effort and for many of us it was a first real attempt.  Erd was my first experience DMing in a decade and I learned a heckuva lot from it.

Gilgal Country Round

I do enjoy some pyrography from time to time and it's been ages since I last picked up my "burny pen".  Almost a year even, since I made the Derpy Dragon.  In a couple of days my wife and I are flying to Europe for a big vacation.  We'll be visiting some family friends in Britain, Wales, and the Netherlands before swinging through my old stomping grounds in Germany.  It's going to be a whirlwind of a trip and we've been looking forward to it.  One of the places we'll be visiting is a tiny church in Wales where some of her ancestors are buried.  It's in a remote location and there's a whole story about how it'd been lost until her Grandmother found it some decades ago and now it's been renovated and repaired as a family center. 

They hold a tea party there every summer now and it's a big shindig.  I figured the least I could do was contribute a little country round of the place.  My mother-in-law was nice enough to provide a good photo that I was able to transfer onto the linden and bingo-bango.  The tung oil finish should finish curing just as we're packing so we should be good to go!

Theraputic Pyrography

I can't speak for anyone else but personally I find woodburning to be pretty relaxing.  Spending 3-8 hours hunched over a piece of linden, focusing on precisely creating details in the wood grain with a hot stick.  Add a good audio book or some interesting podcasts and it's a pretty dandy way to spend the day. Starting a business, even a small one, involves a certain amount of stress so it was pretty nice to be able to sit down and focus on these for a few days.

These two rounds were burned with patterns I'd purchased long ago from Walnut Hollow.

My wife and I saw How to Train Your Dragon 2 last weekend and while I came out of the theater with a desire to recreate Hiccup's helmet it was my wife who got back home and started doodling dragons.  She doodled a fair few but one in particular caught my eye and I couldn't not use him for some pyrography.  He's just so adorably derpy!

As usual each of the pieces has a strap of latigo lace nailed to the bag so they can be easily hung on the wall and they're all treated with tung oil to bring out the wood grain and preserve them for the ages.