Drawing and painting my first map

Ok, I'll be honest, I left after the session on a real bummer. Totally deflated. Annoyed at myself for not giving the players the full experience I wanted to. And having struggled with playing out some of the characters.

I blame not leaving a clear enough first objective. The Foreshadowing scenes I set up went well. Too well, the party instantly jumped on it to pursue and ignored the first task at hand. Then much improv and (what felt like to me) an encounter lacking the impact it would have had, and a final encounter missed altogether. Lesson learned I guess.

Anyhow, if anyone would like the printable map, I shall post a link shortly.



Thank you for the kind words.

The map is indeed glorious! Is that really painted? You should see my main world map. 1 pixel = 1/2 mile and its just a terrible overview with nothing on it until the players start getting curious about an area. This, this is truly amazing and a promising start to a DMs career.

Don't be hard on yourself at all. You dove right in with a homebrew world and campaign and that makes you one of the great ones. With practice, you'll get better, but having just finished a 3 year campaign and 8 months into a separate campaign, I had a pair of sessions on the same day that left me depressed about my capabilities for days. There will always be rough ones, always days you didn't prep what you really needed, or your energy was down. Heck, the second one I beat myself up about the players all said was a pretty dang good session, they were excited for the next one. The point is, I bet your players had a good time (even if it's partly because they don't know what they missed), and as long as your intentions were good, they'll keep coming back long enough for you to have some sessions you're really proud of.

I appreciate the advice. My initial disappointment / depression has died down, I was actually ready to drop the campaign lol.

Thanks, that's very re-assuring to hear! A three year campaign is amazing! What an achievement to keep it running so long, very lucky players. 

Afterwards I messaged all the players thanking them for coming and how I had a blast GM'ing (Though I didn't feel it at the time of writing the message at all) despite a steep learning curve and how well they all did. I've since gotten feedback and they enjoyed it, thought I was really open to their courses of action and had a really solid first session. So I was being way too hard on myself as you said.

I'm just not at a stage of comfortably roleplaying NPC's and using different voices but sure, I just need to keep my confidence up I think. 


I sketched it out, took a photograph and then painted over it digitally, you should see the horrible first attempt lol.