Mos Shuuta Expanded: Free maps/map creation materials

By Maveritchell, in Star Wars: Edge of the Empire RPG

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I'm not sure whether this fits best in here or in the GM section, but here goes:

For a contest over at the r/swrpg subreddit, I decided it would be fun to put together a set of maps for Edge of the Empire. I haven't ever made 2D RPG maps before, but I've done a lot of work as a designer in 3D and I have a little bit of 2D art experience, so I figured I could adapt my processes and make this happen.

What I ended up making is a kit that includes fully-realized maps (either without grids or with 5-foot grid layouts) as well as a large archive of assets that should allow any enterprising GM to make his own maps. Everything here is original (but obviously all Star-Wars-inspired), with the caveats that I traced the outlines of the starships and used base terrain/floor textures from CGTextures (a great free source for textures, if anyone's interested).

Included in this kit are:

Maps:

  • Mos Shuuta Gamorrean barracks
  • Mos Shuuta junk shop
  • Mos Shuuta slagworks
  • Mos Shuuta streets
  • Mos Shuuta warehouse
  • Tatooine docking bay (modeled off of Docking Bay 94) in these variants:
    • Empty
    • YT-1300 (with interior map)
    • Lambda-class shuttle (with interior map)

Legos/Props:

  • Standalone YT-1300 (full interior map)
  • Standalone Lambda-class shuttle (full interior map)
  • Tatooine tileable ground textures
  • 11 Tatooine wall lego pieces
  • 56 assorted props (including droids and land vehicles)
  • Document with links to reference articles on props that represent specific items (e.g. "Speeder5.tga is an X-34 landspeeder")

Pictures: (just some examples - not the whole thing!)

http://i.imgur.com/qznQH9h.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/4PDi6eR.jpg

Download : Updated download link in this thread .

I'd like to make more of these types of kits in the future. Let me know your thoughts on this, and if you get around to using this, please share with me how you used it! If you have a recorded game, point me to it. I'd love to see what maps you make with this toolbox, too. Thanks, and enjoy!

If anyone has any questions on how to use the pieces to put together your own maps, let me know, I'm happy to explain.

Edited by Maveritchell
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these are so great!
just what the community needs!
what did you use to create the maps?

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I'm only looking at the two samples right now on my phone, but they look impressive. I'll download the rest later to my laptop and have a real look.

I like the ship floor plans. Do you take requests?

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these are so great!

just what the community needs!

what did you use to create the maps?

I used Paint.NET, which is a free tool similar to Photoshop. It's not as robust, but for a hobbyist like me, it's absolutely worth its price of $0.

I'm only looking at the two samples right now on my phone, but they look impressive. I'll download the rest later to my laptop and have a real look.

I like the ship floor plans. Do you take requests?

It probably depends on the request. Right now I'm spending most of my free time developing maps for the module I'm working on, but if it's something small, I'm happy to oblige.

Edited by Maveritchell
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awesome.
great work indeed.

can't wait to try these out...

Posted at

these are so great!

just what the community needs!

what did you use to create the maps?

I used Paint.NET, which is a free tool similar to Photoshop. It's not as robust, but for a hobbyist like me, it's absolutely worth its price of $0.

I'm only looking at the two samples right now on my phone, but they look impressive. I'll download the rest later to my laptop and have a real look.

I like the ship floor plans. Do you take requests?

It probably depends on the request. Right now I'm spending most of my free time developing maps for the module I'm working on, but if it's something small, I'm happy to oblige.

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I was hoping for some deckplans of the Citadel light freighter and/or the YT-2400.

No promises, but a YT-2400 will almost certainly be something I make at some point. And while I consider myself pretty versed in SW lore, I'm drawing a blank on the first ship you listed (Google doesn't seem to point me towards it either). Is that a fanon designation, maybe?

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The Citadel is in the EotE book. It was also in earlier versions of SW rpgs. I don't know of its appeared elsewhere.

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The Citadel is in the EotE book. It was also in earlier versions of SW rpgs. I don't know of its appeared elsewhere.

I assume, then, that it's this ship ? That's a little less likely than making the YT-2400, but if I get to the point where I'm just building a suite of deckplans, I'll add it to the list.

Edited by Maveritchell
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Yes, that's the one.

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Nice work, I thought you were talking about this though.

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Well done that man!!!!!

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man, these are great. Kinda wish I had them last week when I played the Beginner adventure.

any plans on doing Long Arm of the Hutt? Like the caves or something at the beginning?

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Somehow I missed these before, they are great, so have a > bump <

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Wow, those are awesome indeed! I am downloading paint.net as we speak to try my hand at this.

EDIT: Any help you can give on how you go about using paint and the tiles you have created to create a larger map would be appreciated. I've got some experience using an old (ancient) Photoshop to retouch pictures, but have not done much graphic design. Do you simply create a new picture and copy existing pictures into that picture, arranging them into a map, or is there a better way?

Since I tend to use mostly my own material when GMing Star Wars I carefully hoard any maps I find likely to be of some use sometimes down the line. Your stuff is a gold mine, and I hope I can use what you have built to make more.

As a side-note I would love a sticky thread dedicated to maps of all sorts. This would be the perfect stuff to start with...

Edited by Kymrel
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EDIT: Any help you can give on how you go about using paint and the tiles you have created to create a larger map would be appreciated. I've got some experience using an old (ancient) Photoshop to retouch pictures, but have not done much graphic design. Do you simply create a new picture and copy existing pictures into that picture, arranging them into a map, or is there a better way?

Here's a quick set of instructions I typed up elsewhere:

Making a map using tools from Mos Shuuta Expanded:

You'll need an image editor that supports layering to really work with the tools provided here. Photoshop is the classic example, but for those of you without the means to buy PS, I'd recommend either GIMP or Paint.NET. Personally, I prefer Paint.NET (it's what I used to make these), but both are very capable pieces of software and especially worthwhile at the price of free.

Note that all my resources (except for the maps, which are .png) use the .tga file format, which I don't think opens in regular MS Paint, so you'll want one of the above pieces of software for that alone.

Once you've got your preferred image-editing software open, you'll want to set the size of your map. I like working in powers of two (a habit from game art), but if you're not using a grid, you can pretty much scale things however you want. If you're working on a grid, I have everything in this pack set up to work on grid squares of 64x64px (with that being a 5-foot square). All my vehicles are more-or-less to scale at this measurement, if you're into that sort of thing.

The easy way to go about this will be to import an image as your starting area. I've included the "tatground(1-3).tga" files as 1024x1024 tiles (look in the "Buildings_MosShuuta" folder), which will work well for the entire background of a small-sized map. I've found that most maps I like in the small/medium range are actually a bit larger than that, though (most of the included maps here are about twice that size, or 2048x1024), so you can scale your background accordingly and simply tile the ground textures. They are all set to be seamlessly tileable.

(It's also worth mentioning at this point that if you get much above a 2048x1024-sized map, you won't be able to import it into Roll20 with a free account, at least not in a single piece/upload. I had to split my docking bay into five pieces to get it all up.)

Once you have that, it's probably a good idea to overlay a grid on your map to start designing, even if you don't want to use a grid in the end product. It's simply a really valuable tool to the designer in terms of organizing spatial relationships.

Once you have a grid set up, you'll want to pull out the lego building pieces (found in the same folder as the ground textures). You'll find that they fit nicely together as long as you keep one side of the wall aligned to a grid line. These pieces are designed so that you can have "slack" in a piece - if one is too long, you can simply erase the extra. The texture I've used for the wall pieces is indiscriminate enough to blend well with almost any other part of the same texture.

Once you have your walls put together, you may want to cap off the ends (the parts that don't have black lines covering them). I used lines of 5-px width to outline these, so just switch to a black colored brush and use a line tool at 5-px width to cap these off.

Then you have the fun part - adding in the props! These can pretty much go in however you want. All I would point out here is that you can do a lot with the layers, for example, I often made sure to layer some boxes underneath my shelves and some above them, so that they looked like they were stacked on multiple levels.

Finally, you can add a touch of polish to your maps by adding shadows. The easy/cheap solution to this is to make (effectively) a blurry drop-shadow, which you can accomplish this way: Merge all your props into one layer, duplicate that layer, turn the brightness on that layer way down (so that all your duplicate props appear black) and then blur that layer ever-so-slightly. Once you've done that, offset that layer in one direction for however far you want your shadows to fall. You can be a little more precise with this, but this is the quick and easy way.

Anything from here on out is just being creative! The majority of the maps I've included here are made with only the lego pieces I've added, with the exceptions being the starships and the docking bay (which required too much specificity to nail down with legos). You can do a lot with these stock pieces - let me know if you have any questions!

Basically, your supposition is correct. You're going to create a background (per instructions above) and then layer the individual map components (provided as props) on top.

If you have a hard figuring out how to do something in Paint.NET, let me know - I can recommend a procedure or possibly a plugin to use to accomplish what you're trying.

Edited by Maveritchell
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Wow, thanks a lot. I'll have a go when I nail down some locations for my upcoming campaign :)