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Geomorphs - ship and facility geomorphic tiles


Maps for science fiction games

Much of the action in SF roleplay games takes place in ships, on space stations, and in ground facilities. In some cases commercial and fan scenarios include maps, but games masters will often need maps of their own.

This page details two webpages I have developed to list ("Geolist") and display ("Geoplot") geomorphic tiles so that you can develop detailed maps.

Please carefully note the copyright and licence information at the bottom of the page.


Robert Pearce's Traveller Geomorphs

Robert Pearce has addressed this need with his excellent Starship Geomorphs for Traveller.

This book contains over a thousand rectangular tile that can be printed and butted together to make extensive highly-detailed maps.

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Eric B. Smiths's geomorph .PNG files

Eric Smith saw Robert's files and converted them to transparent .PNG format so that they could easily combined using an image editor program. Details are given on this gurpsland page by Eric.

These tiles have also been colourised by rpgmorphius on www.rpgmorphius.com
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My contribution to this project

I use the tiles in my games but found that I was spending a lot of time:

  1. trying to find the right tile to use.
  2. using a graphics program to link the tiles together so that I could produce maps for my games.

I have therefore developed two web pages, Geolist and Geoplot, to help with these problems.


Geolist

Geolist lists the tiles (the high res print ones from rpgmorbius) and allows you to filter them by keywords. The keywords are in the filenames of the original tiles, which I have renamed with shorter titles.

For example, '101 [100x100] Multipurpose (Offices, Fuel, Engineering, Medical, Escape Pod, Staterooms, Galley & Mess).png' is renamed to '101A.png'.

Filtering by 'cargo lounge [100x100]', for example, will reduce the list to about 28 tiles. All of these will contain 'cargo' 'lounge' and '[100x100]'.

Geolist will show thumbnails of the tiles if there are fewer than fifty in the filtered list.

You can add some URL elements to change the scale of the thumbnails, by adding 'size=' and a number. For example like this:

You can also use 'filter=' to predefine the filter. Use '%20' to separate terms.

Example: show the tiles with 'arboretum' and '[50x50]' keywords, using small thumbnails:

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List the geomorphs and filter for keywords.


Geoplot

Geoplot displays a series of tiles that are defined in the parameters of the URL. The parameters give the position of the tile and its orientation.

You can also define the scaling, add a title, and display a square grid.

Full details of this are given on the Geoplot URL params page.

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Use the URL to define a series of tiles to display.


Tips for using Geolist and Geoplot

  • Open Geoplot and Geolist in separate browser windows so you can refer to both at the same time.
  • Set up a blank Geoplot with just a grid (https://iandrea.co.uk/sf/geo/code/geoplot.html?grid=0,0,20,20 for example). If you hover your mouse over a square it will show you the coordinates. This will help you work out where to place your tiles.


Important copyright and licence information

Starship Geomorphs v2.0 is Copyright © 2020 by Pearce Design Studio, LLC and is licensed under a Creative Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial 4.0 International License.

The Traveller game in all forms is owned by Far Future Enterprises. Copyright 1977-2020 Far Future Enterprises. Traveller is a registered trademark of Far Future Enterprises. Far Future permits web sites and fanzines for this game, provided it contains this notice, that Far Future is notified, and subject to a withdrawal of permission on a 90 days notice. The contents of this page are for personal, non-commercial use only. Any use of Far Future Enterprises's copyrighted material or trademarks anywhere in these documents should not be viewed as a challenge to those copyrights or trademark.

The work on this page and its subpages is Copyright © 2023 by Ian Hayward and is licensed under a Creative Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial 4.0 International License.