 Welcome to MapCrow, the RPG art show. My name is Kyle and today's episode is brought to you by the Old Road Zine. It is available in PDF format on my itch page. Check the description below for details. Today we are talking about sci-fi maps, which is a little outside of my wheelhouse, but before we get started on that, I would like to extend a special MapCrow thank you again to Ben of Questing Beast for featuring my channel in his wonderful newsletter. It really helps out the channel and for all my fellow Questing Beast fans out there, it's lovely to see you come over to the channel. So first we have to discuss what really separates a fantasy map from a sci-fi map and it's a matter of attitude and tone in my opinion. In my favorite fantasy stories, there is an overriding theme of destiny, of an achievement of greatness against impossible odds. And in sci-fi, my favorite sci-fi stories are kind of barely squeaking by, a survival in an uncaring universe where you don't matter. And I think that's the big thing. Destiny versus inconsequential existence is the big thing that I think separates fantasy from sci-fi. I think I detect that the difference in theme is reflected well in games like Mothership or the Aliens game or Stars Without Number or even Traveler where you can allegedly die in character creation. Survival is not guaranteed, let alone heroism. Now this difference in theme, I don't think it's truly consistent throughout all cases of these genres, but I think it's a great starting point for art making. It's more important when you're making a piece of art to pick a point of view than it is to convince people that that point of view is the only one they ought to have. That allows you to make consistent decisions that make the whole piece feel like it belongs with itself. I've always kind of been fascinated with the idea of physics in space kind of creating extra problems like a derelict spaceship hurtling towards your colony that you can't move is a big problem. You can't reason with physics. You have to go onto that ship, see if you can start up the engines and veer it away off course to avoid annihilation. A lot of the tension that you immediately get by having an adventure in space is a single puncture in your spacesuit, a failure of your life support system or a crack in your front window. That's life threatening. Once we've decided on our critical path, we need to start creating gates or obstacles in between the docking bay and the engine core. So going with this theme of an uncaring universe where humans are not all that important, we need to put things that are more important or more powerful than even these humans that are capable of creating these spaceships. So we're going to put in some robots and evil AI and a big pulsating blob of malign alien intelligence that's strangling the life out of the engine course. Stuff like that is really going to help us land that theme. We're also going to put in a bay of these hypersleep pods that is open to the vacuum of space. Something has clearly gone very wrong in this place and everybody on this ship is already dead when you land on it. The major challenge that I have as a map maker when I'm thinking about sci-fi maps is I immediately want to veer into something closer to Star Wars which is basically Dungeons & Dragons in space. Genre mainstays like Star Trek wouldn't necessarily benefit from a map. I'm thinking of like Darmok and Jalad at Tenadra. Do you really need a map to run that adventure? No, this is all a social interaction. So when I'm trying to design a map that really uses the things that I think uniquely belong to science fiction, I mean how many different kinds of maps can I find? There's not a lot of variety. How many different kinds of med-bays and control posts and engine blocks can I really draw before I'm just recycling ideas? But this is my problem. A failure of my own imagination and genre fluency is not a problem with the genre itself. I've seen a couple of venture modules for Traveler reviewed over on Seth Skorkowsky's channel and he's also done some with the new Alien RPG. I've also seen Pound of Flesh for Mothership. That seems like something I need to study a lot more closely. I'll have some links in the description below to those reviews that I mentioned, but I would really love to hear from you like what are the adventure modules and maps that I should be looking at for sci-fi. I would really love to grow into this area just because I find it so daunting and challenging. I would rather have my art practice defined by the things that I will try than have it defined by the things that I won't try. I think that's it for this episode. Special thanks again to Ben from Questing Beasts and all of the lovely folks from that community for really coming over and helping out the channel. It really makes a big difference. This episode topic was suggested by Sean who commented in the watercolor video and I really take a lot of your topic suggestions in mind and I put this up for a vote on my Twitter account so go ahead and follow me over there if you want to participate in future polls. If you heard something interesting or useful, maybe leave me a like, maybe subscribe to the channel and maybe I'll see you on the old roads. Until next time, farewell.