I’ve been daydreaming about running a space opera campaign and finally started looking around for resources. One of the most basic would be a star field map that I could use as a background for ship tactical battles, discovery missions to build some tension, or to just show the relative positions of potential combatants.
A couple hours of looking for “VTT space battle maps” and various other key word searches resulted in… not much. Anything that I ran across was extremely distracting at best, or just plain hideous to view. I finally gave up in disgust, having searched several sites that sell such things as well as using my Google-fu with no luck.
This should be a basic commodity and it not being readily available from a variety of sources is a bit disconcerting. So I spent a part of my morning working in Photoshop and made 10 different battle maps for space combat. He is one of the low-res maps that I created:
Clicking the map links off to the full-scale image, so if you are here looking for a map like this, feel free to use it.
Why stuff like this isn’t more widely available is a mystery. My guess would be that most settle from some imagery from Hubble or something similar – I was something less distracting but that still gets the ‘you are in space’ point across.
I will probably get around to selling stuff like this early next January. There is no point in complicating my tax return at this point in the year and places like DriveThruRPG will send tax statements at the end of the year.
-Kilgore
