Re: Reference URLs For DMs

"Some Guy" <noemailformethanks@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:Ynafg.4823$AB3.303@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
I thought I'd share a couple of my favorite real-world reference URLs and
ask for others that you as DMs use when designing campaigns or are looking
for props. As I get older I have less free time (it seems) and so places
to get material already sorted and organized makes it easier for me to get
on with the more important parts of the job, e.g. coming up with
interesting plots, cool villains, and interesting battlegrounds.

In that vein, here are some of those I use. If you know of any others,
I'd appreciate knowing about them.

MAPS:

As I recently mentioned in a thread that Ubi brought up, I've gotten good
mileage out of the Library of Congress' Panoramic Maps collection:

http://lcweb2.loc.gov/ammem/pmhtml/panhome.html

and:

http://lcweb2.loc.gov/ammem/pmhtml/panmap.html

These maps can serve not only as campaign time-savers but also as props in
some cases for the players. They are especially good if the party gets
into some unexpected trouble in a little village where I'd expected none,
and I want an emergency map to resolve a pursuit (either by or of the PCs,
as their actions dictate.

They also have the advantage that many of them already have keys to
important buildings on the maps themselves. It's not too hard to simply
examine the existing keys and replace them with game-suitable material
(Miller's Dry Goods may become Chuk's Magick Shoppe, for example). Since
many of the maps have lots of little buildings with some vast church or
mayoral office up on a hill, these make great wizard castles or fighter
strongholds, as needed.

The only real disadvantage is no 5' square reference grid, so a new scale
must be constructed for each map. Well, that and airbrushing out the
railroads and steamboats and such...


Another useful map site is:

http://grid.let.rug.nl/~welling/maps/blaeu.html

These are plan view, not panoramic, but are still useful for the same
reasons.

Fantastic! I've been scouring the 'net for maps like these!

What I've been doing for village maps is just to pore over google earth in
Great Britain and Western Europe for small clusters of farming homes and
printing those. North America has largely proven to be to uniformly
gridlike, and everything ends up looking the same.

--
Presto,
- "There are more calls made on Mother's Day
than any other day of the year. Or as the NSA
calls it, 'our busy season'.
- Bill Maher


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