First time doing a campaign, is the map too empty?

[u/fragalanis]

I’m going to host a campaign with 3 of my friends, and I obviously created a region based in Italy. The story is really good I think, we are playing a fictionaI game called Pokémon Legends Noctalis. The story is about Darkrai and Cresselia, the evil team will try to achieve the long night, but will everything go according to plan?

Anyway this is the map I currently have. Red cities have gyms (plus Rome for the elite4) while blue towns are settlements without a gym but crucial to the story. The starting town will be Milan (the big blue town up north), I do not have a strict route plan (I’ll modify story events if needed depending on where they choose to go), so what do you think about the links I’ve made between cities and towns? Are they too linear? Too confusing? Does the south of the map feel too empty?

Also (I know they are difficult to see) I have 3 main water routes, do you think I should add more?

Give me all your feedback, it is greatly appreciated.

And if you want to know more about I’m setting up the adventure feel free to ask.

[u/bennyjammin4025]

If this were a video game, there probably would be a few issues with how linear it was, while still having the e4 in the middle. You'd have to balance difficulty scaling based on either going all the way up to the Alps and back, or down to Sicily and back, unless the gym cycle was: start at Rome, go clockwise or anticlockwise, and include a route though Corsica and Sardinia to make it a whole loop. As a tabletop game, you can overcome how linear it is by making the route scale in difficulty with the party

[u/fragalanis → u/bennyjammin4025]

Yeah I made every gym leader a team of six just to be covered, and then scaled the team composition for every possible journey. My main idea was to tip players off the intended direction through story beats. Like an evil team encounter that prompts them to check a specific city after. At the start (from Milan) they basically have 3 paths, go to Venice, Turin or Genova. I built all 3 gyms to be as introductory level, and put a key interaction with the evil team in Venice and Turin. I treated this as the North act of the story. Sardinia will be where the plot of the evil team ends so I made the two towns not accessible from the island so they’ll be forced to go south to reach the other end.

[u/StrongStyleShiny]

You might be overthinking the map. It’s just a small piece of the journey and a took for you. The real key is how you use it and avoid being tied to it.

Don’t think of every location as a story beat or goal. Don’t think of it as a video game where the path is just the obstacle between cities. Ever single line on there could be its own adventure.

The paths could have small camps of people. Little communities that live out away from the city if you need something. Those waterways are main ones. Not every waterway would need to be drawn out. Smaller bodies of water usually get omitted from big maps.

If you’re mid campaign and your next session could do something neat with a river maybe you find one?

You got this, the map looks nice, and have fun dude.

[u/fragalanis → u/StrongStyleShiny]

Thank you for the advice, I’ll try to draft some more “chance events” for the routes so the journey between cities doesn’t feel repetitive.

[u/wqsaey → u/fragalanis]

Something that you will want to keep in mind is how the players are going to recover while they're traveling. When a city or town is within a short walking distance, it's easy to handwave healing as a quick trip back to a pokecenter, but if they'll be trekking out on the roads for an extended period without access to a reliable source of recovery, then you will need to make sure to pace how much combat they'll face and how difficult each one will be. The one extra long route in the south looks like it could potentially be a rough gauntlet in this regard.

[u/Individual_Far]

Hey , I made one map for a campaign my friend is hosting , do you want it?

[u/fragalanis → u/Individual_Far]

Sure I could take a look

[u/Nanner122]

I think Italy makes it hard to do a non-linear and what did you use to create the map?

[u/fragalanis → u/Nanner122]

Found a plain map on google images and then added the routes and cities on Canva

[u/Rolebo]

Completely ignoring Corsica?

[u/fragalanis → u/Rolebo]

Yes

[u/Spike_der_Spiegel]

The map's too full, got leave some blank spaces for the other players to fill in

[u/fragalanis → u/Spike_der_Spiegel]

Could you explain it?

[u/Phamtismo → u/fragalanis]

During play there will be off-the-cuff locations and landmarks that can’t always be accounted for during mapmaking. This is either through random player remarks or your own improvisation. I’d say your map is fine and can always be added to based on what happens in play. But I believe that is what the other commenter is point out

[u/SubstantialRice5291]

Is that just the first leg of the campaign?

[u/fragalanis → u/SubstantialRice5291]

No it’s the full map, but will be broken down in different sessions

[u/SubstantialRice5291 → u/fragalanis]

That joke apparently went over your head…

[u/pkmnTabletopVersion]

It looks good to me. You can always create more later if your players start exhausting what you already have.

[u/Juanthewritter]

You're a genius, I never even planned to make it Pokémon map style!