Character maps

In my campaign I had a few issues I wanted to address: 1) I wanted a landing page for my campaign where I could drop the players between sessions. 2) I just started using portrait tokens and I wanted to reinforce the connection between image and character. 3) My campaign is fairly reliant on political interactions between the players and various factions, so there are a LOT of NPCs (way more than the major ones shown here) and I wanted to help the players keep track of the different character connections in the campaign. In order to handle these issues, I developed a character map. That is, a display of the party and major NPCs and their connections. I thought other DMs might find this interesting, so I figured I'd drop this here. Have any of you other DMs on here tried something like this? For full size, click here .

FANTASTIC idea! This is really great! The players can see what the dynamics are, with just a glance. Very nice!

NO but I might use it

This would be great if it didn't involve me doing all the work :) I kind of have delegated this to my players. They have the responsibility to keep proper record about the NPCs they meet and what they know about them. I might later (if and hopefully when I have more time) start doing something like this. It would be great if there was a simple and fast-to-use software for this.

Pretty cool, I  actually might use this to show locations on a "world map" type thing. Our group already uses a wiki to organize the relationships between characters, NPCs, and villains.

Dylan - I started such a page for the exact same reasons you mentioned.  Since it's a mystery/investigation type game, I modeled it after a cork board one of the player's mentioned keeping in his office. The real surprise was in going in to grab this screenshot, at least one of my players went absolutely nuts (in a good way) and drew in the lines and notes - making use of the Post-It notes I had placed on to the map.

Maetco: I did all of this using roll20 (besides the campaign name at the top which I made using photoshop. It's actually surprisingly easy, just drop the tokens in and connect on the map layer. Dave: That's awesome! I really like the style choice there, and it's always great when one of your players takes initiative. I have a small bloc of players that seems allergic to proactive gaming like this.

This is very inspiring. I'm half tempted to create a marketplace set based on this idea.

Dylan G. said: Maetco: I did all of this using roll20 (besides the campaign name at the top which I made using photoshop. It's actually surprisingly easy, just drop the tokens in and connect on the map layer. Now I have to try and see for myself. I hope you feel good about yourself :)

Freaking awesome idea!  I'm going to put it to work in my campaign.

Maetco said: Now I have to try and see for myself. I hope you feel good about yourself :) More specifically, for this I set the background to black and dropped the fog on the background layer to give it something a little more cinematic. Then I dropped the portraits on the token layer (I made each one to be 2x2 units, or 140x140), and used the polygon/line tool to draw the various relationships on the map layer. The magical circle was a token I found searching "circle" and serves to add further flavor. I would definitely have a clear idea of the different color codes you will use before putting them down, as changing colors (and deleting lines) can be problematic if the interface bugs. Hope this helps!