I love a good map

Hand drawn by me.

This is the map I drew for both my current G+ Hangouts Chanbara game, and my play-by-post RPOL.net Chanbara game. I think one problem I had when trying to run Flying Swordsmen was that I created a huge China-sized China equivalent empire for the game to take place in. And each area/province had only a short paragraph describing it. X1 Isle of Dread was my model in this. While in general I prefer that as it gives the GM plenty of space to make the world their own, it also didn't have a "default home town/area" like Threshold and the Grand Duchy of Karameikos as detailed in the Expert Set book.

So for Chanbara, I'll be both giving a broad overview of the setting, the Jade Islands, as well as providing a bit more detail on Enzan Province and the immediate surroundings. While this will make the book longer (I've given up my plans to try and fit everything into 64 pages, but I'm pretty sure it will come in at 96 pages or less), it will hopefully also give GMs and players a bit more utility.

I haven't detailed most of the adventure worthy locations on it yet, but I have two or three already done or in the works. I also tried to include more fantastic locations than I normally do, but I know it could still use a few more. Of course, the white space on the map contains many small villages, shrines, and other unmarked locations, so there's plenty of room to fit more in as I think them up -- for my own game. For GMs who want to run Chanbara and use my default setting, that space is up to them to fill!

Now I need to get back to work on the wilderness random encounter tables.