Jacob looked up. He heard the rumble overhead and knew that he would only have minutes to find shelter before the black rain fell and burned any flesh or clothing that came in contact with it. He raced down the middle of the broken asphalt road until he saw the large, intact brick school, now covered in overgrowth.
Cautiously and quietly, Jacob drew his ASP pistol and approached. He strained to hear anything out of the ordinary, but everything was deathly quiet. He knew that a building like this would be the perfect home for a band of marauders or one of the mutated creatures that now roamed the earth, but he didn’t have a lot of choices.
Jacob reached the front door and yanked on the handle, but the door wouldn’t budge. Closing his eyes, he concentrated and then spoke a word of power in a low whisper. The magical energy coalesced around him and his muscles began to pulsate. Once again, he pulled on the doors, but this time they opened easily despite the groaning protest of the rusted hinges.
As soon as he stepped past the threshold, he heard several deep, throaty growls echo in the empty hallway.
Where do you go from here? If you were me, you were forced to pull out an old erasable mat and squiggle some lines to create a poor representation of a modern structure. For years, I could never find modern maps for my Spycraft or Cyberpunk-type games. Once in a while, I’d stumble on a pretty poor plan of a museum or a couple of floors of a hospital and I was pretty ecstatic.
This got pretty old. I wanted something else and I knew that there were other gamers like me that needed modern structures for pulp, horror, cyberpunk and other more modern genres. That is when I talked to my wife, who has never gamed a day in her life. She is, however, an interior designer and an experienced commercial architectural drafter. This was the birth of Fabled Environments and our first map, Modern Floorplans: An Average Modern High Rise. This map featured a lobby, repeating floorplan and restaurant that we envisioned as the top floor. Krista’s only stipulation in doing these was that the maps had to be high quality and they would be as realistic as possible.
We had a problem, though. We had no way to get these into the hands of gamers. We soon solved this problem as we partnered with 12toMidnight as an imprint and were introduced to the fine folks at RPGNow/DriveThruRPG. We went independent a few years later and the rest is history.
Since we started, Fabled Environments has been nominated for two ENnies and we have worked with several game companies including Silver Gryphon Games and Gun Metal Games. Now we are in another phase. While still producing smaller structures like our Drugstore, Bank and Victorian Mansion, we needed a platform to produce larger, complicated structures.
Last year we launched our first Kickstarter to accomplish just that. The first Kickstarter was a 1.5 Million square feet mall produced at 1″=5 feet scale, just like all of our maps. We also pulled portions of this map out for ease of play and called these “Venues”. These are pretty classic areas where most combat will occur such as a portion of mall walkway with storefronts and the food court area, to name a few.
This was pretty successful, so we were encouraged to keep going. The result is our current Kickstarter, Fabled Environments: A High School Floor Plan For RPGs. The school is two-stories and will be designed to house 1000 students. We will detail several sections of the map and the stretch goals will add on or flesh out the rest.
This one has a couple of firsts for us. This Kickstarter marks the first time that we have offered stretch goals produced by other artists and authors. We are featuring two adventures as separate stretch goals by Silver Gryphon Games, over two dozen figure flats by Arion Games which will be complemented by character descriptions by none other than Clint Black of Pinnacle Entertainment Group. This is also the first time that we will offer both hex and grid as two of the many switchable layers in the map.
We are super excited about this and we hope you take a moment to check out this amazing labor of love!
