One of the most annoying and time-consuming parts of creating a campaign is drawing up the maps. Not only do they take a whole lot of time to forumulate and put together, but they end up looking astoundingly amateur and messy.

I was wondering what you guys use when you need a map? Is there anywhere in particular online you go looking for when you need a satellite image and google image doesn't have anything useful? Any particular architectural sites or even shadowrun resources that you use? And if you do put together maps and floorplans for your campaigns, would you be interested in sharing them with other gamemasters?

Cheers.

Not tried it myself, but a friend of mine once recommended using architecture software. Then again, this is the same guy who in his own game had a laptop running the sims with him, because he'd made a nice building in the game.

Most of the software is horribly expensive, I'd guess, but free versions do exist. such as http://www.artifice.com/free/dw_lite.html

Personally I've always had loads of fun just designing my own amateurish maps, or at times I'd just take a digital camera and make a snapshot of a floorplan at for instance my university or a mate's workplace to have something ready just in case.

Edit: had a quick look and got a google software program as well http://sketchup.google.com/product_suf.html

Thanks! I fiddled around with sketchup for a while, making silly shapes and playing around. It's very easy to turn something that looks promising into distorted goo, though, so i'll need practice. One good feature is you can download buildings that other people have put together based on real buildings, and maybe use them as targets for shadowruns. You can even create the runner as a basic geometric shape somewhere on the buildings to show where he may be (especially if he's a roof rat type).

Blackjack had some great floorplans, especially of large corporate research facilities and city blocks, but his site went down with a lot of DS sites.

Paradigm, If you've got any amateurish maps you've drawn up, or uni floorplans that you can upload to tinypic or photobucket or something similar, I'd be happy to have a look and probably use them.

Here's an example of one of my amateur attempts at a lower class apartment complex.

First Floor
Second Floor

As you might see, it's shabby and asymmetrical, yet still took me far too long to create.

I'll have a look around, I've moved since then and had a computer harddrive fail, so I'm not 100% sure where everything is or if I still have it. At least the uni pics are easy to get, just have to take a cam when I go to class.

Not to be snarky, but I'm not really seeing what the difficulty is with finding images of floor plans on google image search.

Google Image Search

Pages of Different Apartment Floor Plans

Pages of Different Corporate Floor Plans


There are tons and tons of floor plans on the web - and with free image manipulation programs such as GIMP you can resize, mix and match, overlay grids, and generally distort the image however you want.

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For Satellite Images - I use Google Maps, Google Earth, or Yahoo Maps with or without the hybrid feature turned on.

For closeup images of a sprawl neighborhood - I usually use Dundjinni with the optional Modern Streets Art Pack.

I use stuff I have on hand from here and there, inlcuding.
Sprawl Sites
The maps from my old Top Secret S.I. box set and scenario books.
More recently I picked up Critical Locations the mapbook for D20 Modern

...downloaded Google Sketchup. Stopped with Artifice when it asked me about the company I work for.

Artifice isn't worth bothering with. I just lied on all of the questions, anyway, but it's clunky and nowhere near as easy and intuitive as Sketchup seems to be.

And yes, I've downloaded a fair few "lab floor plans" from Google Images, and I own Sprawl Sites as well.

The main problem is large, detailed maps for corporate research installations, arcology levels and such. That's why I liked Blackjack's site, but I can't get there anymore, which saddens me greatly.

Actually, I saved all of Blackjack's maps. Send me a message and I can email them.

That would be great, but I can't seem to send a private message, so my email is shiny_coin@hotmail.com.

Cheers.

You can access the PM system by clicking the 'x new messages' link at the top of the page.

I use google earth for lay outs of docks, complexes and streets.

For floor plans I use places I've been, offices I've worked, where friends have worked, government buildings hotels, shopping malls and restaurants, like police, bill collectors see lots of places.

Also travel TV and reality shows give good ideas when they show off cribs and luxury hotels, also look at movies.

I just downloaded that attachment Sahandrian, thankee kindly.

Another source I just thought of, is the novelist Mathew Reilly. Despite my opinion of him, he does provide some visual cues in his novels, such as the layout of an aircraft carrier, an underground bunker etc. and even the new york state library. So you could easily just photocopy the maps out of those novels if you have them or like his work enough to buy a few.

Also, if anyone remembers the scene in the First Run scenario SuperNova of the "meet" with Elizabeth to exchange suitcases. I was trying to get the hang of Google Sketchup and I made a diagram of what I thought that streetscene might look like, to facilitate the characters spatial understanding of the combat.

Supernova Street-scene (It'll be up for seven days, but I can re-load it if anyone misses it)

Just open it in Google Sketchup and tell me what you think. Of course, feel free to use it if you're running Supernova, and it's just an intersection with a few blocks of buildings, so you can really use it on any game.

Also, if you've got any diagrams, sketchup files, floorplans or sattelite images that you think are good or you worked hard on, feel free to share them in this thread. If it catches on we can move it to community projects.

Had a rather busy week, so not had time to post, unfortunately. Anyway, uni staff and campus security seem to frown on taking pictures of floorplans, so I've been calmly persuaded not to take those pics. Bit paranoid, perhaps, but I'm not going to press the issue.

As for alternate maps. Found some rather nice plans for houses in my old favorites: http://www.thehousedesigners.com/ Quite a lot of variety to be found there.
Also another planner-type thing that I got from a google add: http://www.floorplanner.com/en/ . Likely not as good as other things listed, but it might appeal to people.

It shouldn't be too hard to visit a local college, even a community college- a few buildings to give you ideas and then expand them.

Currently having to spend it all on academic knowledge skills and raising the mental attributes, I'm afraid. Haven't figured out how to burn edge on my exams yet so far, so I'm having to do it the normal way. Also, all the school shooting news everywhere provides some nasty DP modifiers.

I have a large collection of floorplans from gaming sources.
From GW's "Citi-blok" and "Slaughter margin" for Judge Dredd RPG, to the Seeker Gaming Systems (SGS) "Corporate building", all of the Shadowrun DMZ and "Sprawl sites (?)" map sheets. All of them have been 'backed up' courtesy of my wife's office's colour laser network printer/scanner/fax thingy, since they are all out of print and hard to replace. Also, this way, I can use photoshop (or Gimp) and cut paste elements from each into a new plan.

Plus, I have access to my wife's collection. She used to be in architecture - mainly because she loves to do up floorplans - and has several hundred apartment, house and office plans.
(Many, if not most of them, are not covered by copyright. They have all been superceded, replaced by newer drawings that meet the standards better.)

"Honey, I need a plan for a 6BR, 3 Bath, 4 car garage and a guest wing."

"3rd draw, on the left"

(not an actual quote from us, but you get the idea.)

The plans come in very useful in my gaming endeavours.