Worst Map Ever! - Square Earth

Well, we're about 20 hours away from Hurricane Irene hitting Pennsylvania and my hometown goes under a state of emergency in 18 hours. Normal folks are on a milk, bread and battery spree. I, on the other hand, spent my night finishing the worst map ever!

With a new expansion due out in a few weeks for big blue, I wanted to pay homage to one of my favorite Silver Age concepts, a cube-shaped earth. Here on Square Earth everything is backwards.

The inherent problem of designing maps on a square grid system is that the grid forces your art into a restrictive 90 degree left-right mindset. You tend to start lining up everything on right angles and parallels. This map was so fun to design because every element forced me to get out of that 90 degree mindset. Of course the terrain coding brings it back from being too non-linear.


It was a fun to represent the three visible sides of the square earth as well and the following rotated images will help you see each respective side, right-side-up.




The map had three levels of elevation. Elevation 1 is the sides of the buildings on the left of the earth cube. Elevation 2 is the ground level on the topside of the earth cube and Elevation 3 is the tops of the buildings on the topside of the earth cube.

The special terrain will have the following rules. "Special Terrain is considered adjacent to any elevation level it borders. All successful attack rolls to a target occupying Special Terrain cause knockback. " The logic behind this is that space should be void of elevation and I like the idea of permanent knockback representing the lack of gravity.

As always, thank you for reading and stay tuned to this site as we have a huge announcement coming up!

Stay safe!

-CL

Map Preview: The Evil Scientist's Lair

Comic Bookdom has no drought of awesome evil super geniuses and they always get equally awesome super lairs. Laser trips, poison gas traps, buzz saws, crocodile pits: there are multiple ways to pick your doom in one of their hideouts. With the Superman expansion around the corner, I wanted to pay homage to all those great mad labs we've read about in old pulp comics and watched in James Bond movies.

I wanted to create a map where each side could pick which corridor they took to reach their opponent and each of the corridors had its own specific drawbacks.

With this map our heroes have three options to choose from: the flamethrower hall, the buzz saw hall and the shark pit hall.

The buzz saw hall lacks any hindering or water terrain; there are no obstructions to movement. But the hall is only one square wide and the blocking maze cuts off any chance of long-ranged combat. You take this path and you can get thru at full speed but you need to be wary of what bruisers your opponent could send your way.

The shark pit hall is very open for ranged combat however without any fliers, it will take a few rounds to get from one side of this hall to the other.

The same idea applies to the flamethrower hall. It will take some time to traverse the hall, and you'll get a slight defense bonus but your opponent will also benefit.

The evil scientist's lair also sports the ubiquitous death ray, lab gorilla, nuclear bomb and defunct robot that you'd expect from your standard issue evil lair. All in all, I can't wait to print this guy and give it a try. I've already got one being sent to me from PosterBrain.com.

Also I'm putting the final touches on the next professionally printed map for sale, so keep checking the website.

Thanks for reading!