Crimmor the city is laid out in a haphazard manner, much like an actual medieval city. There's no modern grid pattern, its mostly just a jumble of streets that go every which way and are rarely straight. I still get lost, and I built the place!
To ease things I've color coded the extensive set of map points visible on the minimap.
Red: marks safehouses, the guildhall, and the players house, these are
friendly locations where resting is allowed (no resting on the streets
or in some random merchants store!). Red also marks active quest
locations, so your minimap will highlight where you need to go for
quests. The red quest markers are only active while the quest for that
location is open. For locations that have multiple notes, such as a
store that becomes involved in a quest, the quest note takes precedence
so there are not two notes at the same point. (I'm not recoloring a
single note, I use multiple notes and display/hide as appropriate.
Green: these notes indicate a location name, Wight Alley, The Drae, Firesteep Square, Carn Market, etc. These are both for flavor as well as a potential marker to guide players on quests involving locating things ("He hangs out at Carn Market in Purse Ward").
Default color: generic points of interest such as stores.
Blue (may change, the shade I picked looks close to the green) : Dead drops, which function as quest givers. These are only located in the wards of the city you work as a fixer for.
Yellow (may change, looks close to default ingame): area transitions between the sections of the city.
Hi Kamal,
ReplyDeleteI like your usage of the coloured map notes. Good idea! You answered my question about how you were doing this in your own comment when you said you hide/display them accordingly. (I guessed it was this way.)
I'm so glad there are others like you still working on a project like I am. It helps knowing that.
Cheers!
Lance.
One thingthat I missed addressing in the post. I'm handling the highlighting of quest mapnotes in this manner, as well as putting in generic notes for stores and places, because the pc is a local of the city. As a local, and especially because they are part of the Shadow Thieves, the pc would know where these places were. So my handling of mapmarkers assumes the pc knows where things are, unlike an adventurer in an unknown dungeon or town they are visiting.
ReplyDeleteThere's still extra words in conversations and the journal to impart some of that location knowledge to the player, opposed to the pc who "knows it". So a line/journal ingame might reference both the location and the area of the city, when most "realistically" they would only say the location because the pc knows what part of the city that location is in.