Here comes along overdue update and outlook, and it is the first day of Gen Con 2022, which I will sadly miss this year due to too high travel costs. I hope my friends at Syrinscape have a great convention and I'm missing them and the buzzle of Gen Con a lot.

Flanaess & Hepmonaland 598 CY - 2022 Edition

A preview is out in the wild and people are sending me things to correct and a couple of glaring misses have been caught. Thank you everyone who take a close look at it and report problems with it, you are the best quality assurance team any cartographer can wish for!

A release candidate will come early next week, and that will be  non hexed JPG and EasyZoom only. Then I'll correct the outstanding issues and small things that comes in during the week for a wrap up and final export next weekend. Then a major project is done, which feels great. Might be my last Major Greyhawk map work using Illustrator, and then it can be delegated to things it was intended to do, Illustrative stuff like symbols, heraldry and decorative elements.   GIS work using QGIS and other related tools will gradually fill the void next year and onwards.

Custom Map Patreon Tier

I've talked a bit about my idea to test a much higher patreon tier for a few people who want to have a customized map, and other related stuff for their campaign. My premise will be that I will dedicate a day per month to work on your project,and with a day I mean around 6 hours of work. The pricing of the new tier would be $50/month with a yearly plan as well with a month free.

This tier is not an ongoing full commission, the content created using this will still be released under the same Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0 license I publish my other Greyhawk content under. This means that it is not for publishers looking for content for their products, it is a tier for Greyhawk  DM's, streamers, bloggers and others who want to have access t custom versions of my Greyhawk content to use in their games, streams, blogs etc.

How things will work practically needs to be worked out with each of you who sing up. The way I similar stuff for Jay Scott and his Knights of Ulek Campaign is that we have a zoom conference on a monthly bases for an hour or two to go over things and I made some changes while we are on the call and work on other stuff afterwards. Some of you might want to send a list of things to change sketches etc, and that could work as well.

My original plan was to try it out first with 5 slots and see how that works, and the number will always be limited. My plan is to keep it limited to a week per month with limits the number  of slots to somewhere around 7. I have 4 interested already which means that there might only be 3 more slots for late comers.  If the demand is way higher, which I doubt considering the price, a rethink might be needed. But this is my plan so far please tell me in the comments what you thing would work best.

Heraldry

The new and updated heraldry have been a huge success, I've received a ton of positive comments, emails and more telling they like it. This is fantastic and show that there is a huge interest and need for heraldry, and I have several projects related to heraldry. First is to look at how to best go about with the Heraldry Compendium this fall. Almost all the heraldry for it are done now it is time to start looking into things like layout, formats etc. I want to look into having a print option for this project, a real print option which I will contact Noble Dwarf  about to see if something could be worked out.  There sill be a separate post about the compendium soon to keep topics separate, and there are a lot of things to consider with the Heraldry Compendium project.

Death Knight heraldry is coming fairly soon. I had a set of designs, but then Mindjourney (AI graphics service) made it possible for me to use its power to work on this. So I'm going to give it my ideas and see what comes out, which can be cool I think. Same goes for my series on the heraldry of  the Horned Society, elves and expanding on the Iuz heraldry. Dwarven stuff is beyond my horizon for the moment, I haven't researched the Dwarves of the Flanaess enough yet to dare start with it. There are also some gaps to fill when it comes to provinces and local heraldry of the major nations which will be given some love too, and having a powerful AI engine will probably help a lot with stuff like this.

Converting all the exiting heraldry to SVG files will also start very soon. It is fairly easy but repetitive and tedious which means I will do it for a couple of hours each day until it is done. Not sure if I'll release them in batches or in a single release when they are all done. I want o get things in your hands as soon as possible, but keeping track of all of what have been released when adds administration which should be kept to a minimum.

MeyerHawk Stuff

Slowly but steadily a whole new branch of my creative content is taking shape. Wasn't really sure how much you would like my campaign stuff, but just like the heraldry it have turned out surprisingly popular so I'm making more of it. The really good part with this is that in most aspects it is a win-win, most of the stuff I create and use in my own campaign is of dual use for general Greyhawk release as well. Also running games and being a creator who is also an active DM makes me better understand an anticipate what you need for your games.  The popularity of the heraldry I originally made for my own campaign is a good example of this, and lots of it is now on the public map.

I removed my old campaign map from EasyZoom, both to make room for other stuff and also because it was past it due date. A major overhaul of my MeyerHawk campaign map has just started and it will be presented in regions this fall for my mid tier patreon members and a full release this winter.  Comments and background information on what is going on will be added as well.

My Shield Lands campaign "Against the Old One" is now on its second year and we have played 33 sessions. The characters are now 4th level and close to being 5th. Its only nine days in campaign time though,so these youngsters have been through a lot in a bit over a week!! Originally my intention was to use my campaign material for my DM during D&D in a Castle, but I canceled that this year. Which means I no longer have to keep it secret (more that for my players), so I'm going to start releasing it for my mid tier patreon members very soon. First out is Auldet the little settlement my campaign started in, maps lots of maps, but also indoor map, NPC presentation with stats, and some notes on hos things turned out when we played it.

In my games we use a heavily house ruled version of Level Up - Advanced 5E from EN World: https://www.levelup5e.com. I will present a series on how I run my games, rules, tools and more.

Mapping Live Streams

The Friday Mapping Live streams are popular and we have around 30 or so viewers which is great, and with Alyssa and at times CaveGeek being there as well it is a lot of fun. This Friday I'll work on my Shield Lands detailed area maps. Please join us and  make sure we work hard!

Thank you again everyone for all your support!!! 🙂