 Hello, and welcome to MAPCRO, the RPG art show. My name is Kyle, and today we're going to be talking about the best mapping guide I have ever seen. The first this video is brought to you by the old road scene. The PDF should be out by the middle of the month, so check the description below for details on how to get your hands on the maps that I've been making on this channel. Also in the description below is a link to where you can buy the book that I'm using today and also where you can download the scans of the pencil map that I made in today's video. It's really busy down there, you better check it out. I've kept you in suspense long enough. The best guide that you can get for your money that will help you make amazing maps for your RPG is the book Electric Bastionland. In this book, Chris McDowell puts together some of the best tools I have ever seen for how to go from having zero ideas on how to draw a map to having a map full of brilliant ideas, locations, and encounters. By following the instructions, you can create city maps, you can create country location maps, and you can create dungeon maps just by starting with simple shapes and then at the intersection of these shapes and lines where they cross over make little nodes and then roll on random tables. These tables are called spark tables because they don't give you a specific encounter like D4 goblins or something like that. They're just words that when you mash them together, it will evoke an idea. Fungal Exhaustport is something that I rolled up and immediately I began to think about how this giant city of Bastion is the underground of this city is sprawling out and kind of spewing this fungal filth from these ill-cleaned vents into the countryside, stuff like that. The other thing that I did to add just a little bit of juice to this process was create a ring around these areas and kind of plan out just like one kind of monster encounter that you could have in that area. I didn't always stick with it but it was something that kept my mind going. Now the tools that are in Electric Bastionland are very clearly meant to be accessible tools for GMs to maximize their time prepping for a game and I'm using it for something different. I have kind of followed all of the steps and then used that as a basis to kind of make a more complete map a nicer map. So there aren't going to be any labels or encounter details or anything on this final version but hopefully the visuals that I'm providing on this map will be enough to kind of get your get your head churning and kind of be that same kind of spark that the spark tables are in in the book. What I love about these spark tables is that it teaches game designers and mappers and players not to be so precious and tidy about their lore it just to stock these random tables with evocative details that tell us about the world and its values and its dangers without necessarily needing to write a whole Wikipedia article about how these things intersect. It is designing for that initial impact more so than it is to kind of create this thing that you actually need to study. And because there's no established lore or background or backstory in this whole book you can just kind of let your experience be the canon experience. What unfolds in the prep and unfolds at the table is the truth. You don't have to worry about people getting things wrong or getting details wrong or being inconsistent with the author intent or anything like that. It's really wonderful and freeing to to kind of plan a map like this and just let the world in its all of its color and weirdness unfold one step at a time. As I was following the instructions in the book on how to map out a piece of deep country my associations with deep country are vastly different than chris is probably because I'm an American midwesterner so when I think of deep country I think of fields I think of you know the back 40 I think of kind of wetlands that only exist because we chop down all the trees for farmlands that are now neglected or run by you know giant corporations or something like that and as a result this kind of ends up being more like an American bastion land than it does an electric bastion land and that was really cool just to explain some of the insanity that you're seeing on the screen right now there are these kind of living puppets of felt called mockeries in the in the setting details which are basically just muppets and so I kind of had this storm drain from the big city kind of washing all of these like dead muppets into into the swamp lands and rivers and stuff like that and that was that it looks weird but I love it electric bastion land is kind of a giant book most of it is devoted to kind of random character generation tools so don't be intimidated by it's it's page size just get yourself a pdf copy or if you can get a hardcover get that and just have some fun reading all of those random tables and just kind of you know let your mind go slack and see what kinds of weird associations your imagination can piece together just by taking this loose focus and kind of drawing from your own experience and kind of whatever the first thing that pops up in your head is you can get these kind of really vibrant ideas a lot of this kind of ended up being more like something out of Kentucky root zero one of my favorite video games that is all about kind of these rotting reclaimed spaces in just south of where I live another game that came to mind is this first person survival game called sir you are being hunted and I love the idea that the city of bastion to control like the the the wolf population or something like that made these robot hunters that have since been forgotten and have gone mad and are now setting up bear traps and hunting anybody who's walking the countryside I have a wrecked riverboat I have a snake handler church I have a quaint city populated only by crash dummies it's just the stuff that comes out of these random tables was just so vibrant and evocative I don't think that I'm going to be able to do a territory map without first making some random tables just this has spoiled me for kind of creating a bunch of bespoke locations just this method of making is so wonderful I forget about drawing just follow the steps write some notes draw some lines and you can do this to plan out your next game go ahead I'm not sponsored by this like I get not a dime from saying you should buy this book but that's how much fun I had with it just treat yourself get the book draw some maps have some fun and just get enraptured by all of the evocative fantasy nonfiction that is in the covers of electric bastion land that's all the time we have for this episode if you pick up a copy of electric bastion land let me know in the comments below how much you love it if you enjoyed this video or download the map go ahead and leave me a like if you want to see more videos like this subscribe to the channel and maybe I'll see you on the old roads very well