Map Commission: The Borellus Connection

After doing the front and back cover maps for the Fall of Delta Green, I was happy to get back to this awesome game for “The Borellus Connection” campaign by Gareth Hanrahan (with Ken Hite). It’s available now from Pelgrane Press as a pre-order for the physical book (you get the finished pdf right away).

Combining the Cthulhu Mythos of Delta Green with “French Connection” style crime thrillers, the campaign takes you in a drug-fueled nightmare from the haunted jungles of Laos and Vietnam via the underworld of Marseille to (un-)familiar streets of Baltimore and beyond. Just reading it makes me want to run a GUMSHOE-style game again!

I’ve created several maps for this book, from the big overview maps showing the flow of the heroin trade around the world, to smaller locations within the individual adventures.

For some I was able to re-use the base world maps I had created for the FoDG rulebook, for others I set up a new style in Campaign Cartographer 3+, reproducing military tactical maps of the era. This style is available as part of the Cartographer’s Annual Vol 16 now.

I highly recommend The Borellus Connection as another excellent role-playing campaign from Pelgrane Press, Gareth Hanrahan and Kenneth Hite.

Battlemap: Temple of the Sea

Here is another battle map from our 13th Age game: The Temple of the Sea.

Sea Temple

Our heroes traced a series of out of control temple guardians back to the new temple of Poseidon at the docks in Drakkenhall. With the sea rolling in and out of the temple, up to their bellies in the surf (or higher in the case of the gnome), they faced the temple’s high priestess, a sahuagin necromancer and his 4 zombie servants, plus the animated statue of Poseidon in an epic showdown.

Click on the map to load the full-size version of the image, ready for A1 printing at 150dpi.

The “Brocken”

Here’s a little tidbit from our current rpg campaign (Gumshoe – Ashen Stars).

After an unfortunate series of events around the Acheron Translight Snarl our crew’s trusty Runner-class ship, the “Jolly Jumper” is no more. While narrowly escaping from the D’Jellar anomaly a pilot error resulted in a fatally flawed exit vector from the snarled translight corridor. The lasers barely managed to escape in the ship’s shuttle and had to watch their beloved home break up into a billion pieces.

But as the saying goes, “true lasers are never long without a ship” and an opportunity presented itself, involving a Bleed-wide warrant, a high-level Combine operative, an anti-piracy operation, a staged prison escape and a conveniently-parked Hauler-class starship.

Brocken - Hauler-class vessel
So the laser crew finds itself in the possession of the “Brocken”. A bit worn, the paint scratched in many places, it is still a translight-worthy laser vessel which holds the promise of a better future.

Haulers are the less-than-glamorous, slow and sturdy workhorses of the Bleed nowadays. Designed to carry a maximum of cargo, they provide the surviving worlds of the Bleed with much-needed resources that are not locally available. The image shows the main deck with its six massive cargo bays, the cut-down engine room and the richly furnished “boardroom” which is used to conduct business meetings. The full deck plans for this ship-class are found in the “Accretion Disc” companion for Ashen Stars and were drawn by yours truly with the Cosmographer 3 add-on to CC3.