My Lohwand Campaign Map: Created in PowerPoint

Lohwand

A friend used to always say that PowerPoint was "the poor man's graphic program" and he was right! This is a map of Lohwand, or at least its current iteration. I've decided to give 54mm Toy Soldiers a go, and have decided to do something akin to Tony Bath's Hyboria campaign from way-back-when.

As you can see by glancing at the place names, I've shamelessly stolen from a great many sources, be they Fantasy and Sci/Fi writers or role-playing games: Tolkien's "Middle Earth", MAR Barker's "Tekumel", Burrough's "John Carter of Mars", the "World of Greyhawk", Greg Stafford's "Glorantha", Michael Moorcock's Elric, Corum and Hawkmoon sagas, plus others. Some are from authors whose names I forget, and a few are even my own invention.

What is All Mine is the map, which as you can see, looks vaguely like Europe and the Mediterranean, only I didn't want to bother with a few thousand miles of Asia so I cut right through to the Far East. Its got "goodies" and "baddies", Law and Chaos, major protagonists and minor.

The map is made in PowerPoint. I sized the page to be 34" tall by 54" wide to give me plenty of space and went to work with the freehand drawing tool. I built it up in bits that are layered over one another. Using the fill tool I worked out a colour palette to show the major terrain types: generic open country, deserts, marshes, plains/steppes, dense forests or jungle, hills, high mountains, lakes, rivers and sea, plus active volcanoes.

I used the draw order tools to put things on top or in back as needed. The main background is a full sized rectangle set to be the very back/bottom of everything else. I added the red border to allow me to hide rough edges and give me something to align the edge bits against. Using edit shapes and selecting the edit points I could alter the freehand shapes as I needed, zooming in to 100% to make the task easier. Then checking how things looked by playing a slideshow. And not forgetting to Save Often. Nor the undo button, especially if I accidentally moved something. A proper graphics program would have a way to "lock" items in place, and maybe PowerPoint does, but I haven't figured it out yet.

This is still a work in progress, but I think the next step is to start detailing various areas. Maybe make a copy of the slide and focus on one area, deleting the rest and enlarging it to the size of the whole slide. Or perhaps take a screen cap of an area and use it as a background to layer more detailed information on top of.

If I tell you that the Tharkallan Empire is some sort of Dark Fantasy Roman Empire then there are enough clues on the map to work out most of the other protagonists. They "Celts", "Germans", "Greeks", "Persians", etc. Not everything is straight forward, of course, and I'm playing somewhat loose with timelines and "tech levels". I've always had an idea to play a campaign with the same areas and/or countries through all the various eras of history. Of course the details of the regions change but broadly speaking the landscape would remain roughly the same. So for this project I am thinking four or five  "Ages" - apologies to Tolkien!

First Age - The Age of Magic (with early gunpowder counting as "magic");
Second Age - The Age of Gunpowder (Pike & Shot);
Third Age - The Age of Reason (Horse & Musket);
Fourth Age - The Age of Invention (19th Century);
Fifth Age - The Age of Destruction (early 20th Century).
Sixth Age - The Age of Science (Sci/fi);
Seventh Age - The Age of Apocalypse (Mad Max or similar).

OK, that's Seven "Ages", but really they are all theoretical seeing as I am at the very start of number one.

For rules, I am thinking something with smallish unit sizes, so Studio Tomahawk's "Saga: Age of Magic", or Warlord Games' "Warlords of Erewhon", or one of the "Lion/Dragon Rampant" or "Pikeman's Lament" series of rules from Osprey. Or any of a dozen other less well known options. Its likely to be a solo affair, so I might cobble together my own set of rules as well. I need to look at my various Peter Pig rules again; they have a lot of good ideas in those rules, regardless of era!

At the moment, however, I'm more-or-less settled on "Saga: Age of Magic" and have been planning my factions based on those rules for fighting the battles. With modifications, of course! I've already been tinkering with the factions lists. I'll be ignoring some of the restrictions and adding some things of my own.

The "Tharkallan Empire" is being set up to be my main "evil" protagonist with the "Atlan Confederacy" (Amazons) as the main "good" protagonist. Tharkalla is patterned after Rome and I intend to use the Expeditionary Force figures, despite them being 60mm. I reckon they are just taller folk; obviously they are not patterned that closely on Ancient Rome! Ilmiora and Vilmar, and the others close by, are all going to be "Greek City State" proxies. Nemedia is, in my backstory, the first of the city states to be incorporated into the Empire. I decided to use the name "Nemedia" mainly so I could have my own "Nemedian Chronicle" as a sort of "Campaign Diary".

Anyway, that's where I got to so far. Lots more to do.