Making Maps for Street Wolves

I’ve watched a lot of Seth Skorkowsky’s videos of rpg reviews and something that really stuck with me was his instance that an adventure should always have a map if there are going to be key scenes involving those locations. Even if it’s just a sketch of the location, it’s better than nothing.

When making the Street Wolves Jumpstart, I remember that, but there’s weren’t many locations that were guaranteed  to happen in the included adventure, “Two of Hearts.” I had no idea how to make a map and I wasn’t confident in doing a sketch, so I unfortunately  ignored Mr. Skorkowsky’s sage advice (with the plan of returning to it later).

For the Street Wolves core book, I did follow the advice to include a map. There are two locations in the included adventure “Melt With You.” Not wanting to get too into the weeds with map making software, I decided to head to Adobe Illustrator and see if I could come up with a blueprint that would work. What I ended up with matches the style of Street Wolves, is simple, and accomplishes the goal of giving GMs an idea of the layout of two locations the players will likely end up in a fight.

Now that I’ve started working on a Street Wolves VTT Foundry module, I feel like these simple blueprints won’t work as well for that experience. VTT players want tactical maps a lot of the time.

So I fired up a program I bought called Arkenforge. Arkenforge was a one time purchase that I had gotten via Kickstarter a long while ago with the purpose of potentially making more high fidelity tactical maps.

Arkenforge has a few asset packs that kinda work with Street Wolves, which is a huge bonus since most maps seem to be geared towards fantasy, not the 1980s on Earth. Assets from their cyberpunk and post apocalyptic packs work out pretty decently on the whole, despite missing some stuff that I’d like.

This is what I came up with for the apartment map from “Melt With You.” There are some things I don’t like, and some assets that I could use that aren’t there, but overall it’s not too shabby.

Working with Arkenforge is okay. It’s not the easiest program I’ve ever used, but it does do the trick so far. I was able to make a map of what was basically in my head in only a couple of hours.

Now… I’m thinking it may be time to go back to the location from “Two of Hearts” that I skipped. It probably would be a decent bonus to include that adventure into the Foundry module wouldn’t it?