With all the talk of relationship maps these days, I figured that it was time for a new Endeavor. So here it is. It could have just as easily been "Make the coolest character", "Design the most awesome weapon", or "Draw a pretty gaming map". But R-Maps have been on people's minds for a bit, and I think it's about time they got their due. So, A Contest!

Here's the rules:

1) The contest starts NOW (March 21st). It ends on JUNE 30th. That's over three months, a considerable amount of time.

2) You have to draw a relationship map for a roleplaying game you are either an active player or GM in. The sessions of the game must occur between now and June 30th. If you are in the middle of a campaign now, you can draw upon that game for your R-Map. But you can not submit a map for this contest for a game that you are no longer playing in, or ended already. You have three months, that's plenty enough time to get some gaming down and build a kickin' R-Map.

3) Your map can be any size, shape, color. It can present any kind of data that you wish, in any order or format. You can use whatever you want to make it. I suggest using computer tools to make it, but if you want to draw by hand and scan it in, or take pictures of it, or make a Flash toy and submit a link, that is fine, too.

4) There is only one final judge: Me. There are only a few criteria: Creativitity (colors? shapes? interesting ways of conveying data?), Understandability (does it convey the character relationships in the game? Is it too cluttered? Does it give us a taste of your campaign?), and Awesome (Is it Awesome? Is it AWESOME!!! ?).

5) When you submit your R-Map, please submit a paragraph or two about the game in question, so that we can get get an idea of how the pieces fit together. You can write as much as you want, but no more than 1/2 to 1 page. This won't be judged as part of your R-map.
5.1) Also, post the tools you used to make the R-Map.
5.2) If you have any interesting stories about making the R-Map (like how you had a difficulty with making it, or if it actually helped change your view of the game as per Thomas D below) post something about that, too. But this is totally not a requirement, and won't give any brownie points to the score. Imagine this as the "plaque" underneath or next to the painting that says something about it.

6) What's the point of this thread? Just some experiments: To see if there's any art or skill to making a good Relationship Map. To see if something graphical yet utilitarian can be "pimped out" and made pretty. And, because I know there are a lot of creative gamers out there, and want to see what they can do with this thing.

7) You may submit any number of R-Maps as you want for any number of games (if they meet Rule Two, above). You can submit multiple R-Maps for the same game, but each will be judged on its own.

8) The top three entries will win a prize, which will most likely be "stuff" (could be a $5 Gift Certificate to Hot Topic, could be a Book, could be a mug, dunno yet). If there are more than 25 entries, then the pool will expand to the "top five".

9) You have to agree to make your R-Map accessible. What I mean by that is, "I will save them to the S-G server for posterity". You can't decide to take it down later. That's all.

10) How to submit your map: Post a link to it here, or just PM me telling me that you're done. After that, I'll start a new thread about collecting and hosting these maps.

Feel free to post questions here, or links to helpful resources.

I own Adobe Illustrator, and I am not afraid to use it.

Thanks, Andy. I'm looking for ways to display the complex relationships for 'The Naked City: a game of Film Noir', so I'll be watching this contest closely.

I love these things - i'm looking forward to seeing other people's maps!

I've already posted an old one for my ongoing BW game in an earlier thread - as my group intends to play through the next three months i'll probably be posting the game's evolving r-map(s) to this contest. I expect it'll be a challenge to keep track of the important information in an attractive & usable format! ;)

(edit: and i expect i'll continue using Open Office's built in drawing program...)

Well, I own 64 Crayola Crayons!

Adobe Illustrator? Bah! Bah, I say!

Awesome. Andy's post got me to do up a relationship map for my Foundation game. As I was doing it, I realized that Brian's character only had ties back into the other PCs and the main NPC. What's more, there's an NPC that's been established as the father to one of three characters (including Brian's). Looking at the map, I see that the other two possible sons have ties to other NPCs, so it was a no-brainer to hook up Father with Brian's character.

Anyhoo, my first draft at this is right here, in PDF format . I'll refine it and pertify it on up for the actual contest. If you'd like to comment on it, please do.

PCs are Marquez, Dunnhocker, Shininghill, LeVay, and Godrick. They're all part of a group called SR1 and their supervisor is Alicia Gurwitch. Relationships by the name are what that person thinks of the other. For instance, Amanda Tapstone thinks Sigmund LeVay is something from the past to put behind her. Diane Moss feels attraction for Terry Porter while Terry respects Diane.

Semp: Great question, man! Also, see my New Rule 5, 5.1 and 5.2 above, which directly came out of the discussion here!

I'm in. Gliffy roxxors.

Posted By: Caesar_XThomas, this is super cool and I like that most of the characters have a two-way relationship that doesn't always match up. But it would bewayeasier to read with arrows pointing to the recipient. What do you think?

Yeah, that was a quick and dirty version, including tons of moving around of groupings so it's not super hard to follow. If I was doing this for real in this format, I'd include arrowheads.

For this version, I used Illustrator CS2. I loves me the Adobe.

More 5.2:
The Colonel has something personal against Alicia Gurwitch, but I didn't know what. Throwing some labels around got me the backstory.
The Colonel and Father were working together. Why? Again, the map pointed out what was missing: The Colonel is going to have Father use Marquez against Gurwitch.
Eddie Godrick and his supervisor, Alicia Gurwitch, are lovers, but how did they get this way? Solving The Colonel's relationship with Alicia got me to that point.

Here is the preliminary map, still missing some relationships, all the labels and the legend, but starting to take shape. Oh yes, I'm feeling chipper! Wait until I have the Exodus II map up. :-)

I am going to win.

Here is the first draft - I have a couple of more missions to potentially add.

It's hugely important. Eventually there is going to be a war between purple and yellow. Yes, not many friendly ties. There may be some personal links eventually that are nicer. But in a superspy world, there's players and there's victims and not much else...

Wow, this looks great and the standard is already being set very high. I've a Cold City game that will be kicking off in the near future, so I feel some relationship map endeavours may come in to play for that.

As a point of interest, I think I'll see if I can find the paper we wrote down all the places and people for our Contenders game last year and put that into some for of RM. It was a great game with some fantastic relationships, so it might be worth trying.

Cheers
Malcolm

I've got an awesome one, but it takes up two poster-boards. I'll take some photos, see what I can do.

I don't want to step on the contest, but if any artist/illustrator types want to help create a Noir R-Map for The Naked City playtests, give me a whisper. I have some thematic ideas I want to explore, but lack of art skills are holding me back:)

Big changes are in store for my Atlantean Foundation game this weekend, which should significantly alter that first draft way up there on March 21st. I'll probably do up a relationship map based on the fallout from this upcoming session for our contest.

I just wanted to throw another tool out there that I just came across today:

Cumulate

It's a pretty sweet online drawing-type tool that looks like it'd be perfect for this sort of thing. I'm probably way too late to get in on the contest, but maybe y'all will find this useful...

This rel graph is for a two-four session Traveller game developed to play test our latest hybrid rule set. It's only supposed to handle about 10 hours of play so it's fairly sparse. It's pretty much all generated automatically from a text file using Graphviz. I use colour coding to show hostility to the player character team to save me a cluster of arrows from everyone to them and I include organizations, governments, and other entities as well as people, encoding those entities in the node shape. So far this has been a pretty powerful tool for developing an engaging muddle for the characters to get dumped into. Much easier for me than writing a linear narration of the state of things.

Edited to add a link to the source code for the diagram. Working like this lets me draw with pen and paper and then rapidly translate it to a graphical form without playing around with painting programs (I already did that bit with the pen, thanks).

Awesome!

Also, to note: ONE MONTH LEFT!!!

-Andy

pells, that's very cool. I actually like the draft being in French - I don't think anybody's going to mistake Pyromancien or Orcs Noir. I am definitely interested in a legend for line colors, but even without that it gets the gears turning.

Thanks to those who have been posting updates to evolving relationship maps --honestly I hadn't considered using them as a way to document the state of an ongoing game as I use them as a mechanism for establishing the opening state. I find that the volatility of a rel map -- by placing a single new entity and drawing a line everything can change -- makes it much easier to establish an interesting and real-feeling environment to drop players into. Armed with your ideas I'll be adding the rel map to my arsenal of tools for documenting a continuing campaign too.

So, here's my official entry to this contest !!! The map is HERE.

We kinda of struggle to put more information on it, in addition to the legend, but we weren't glad with the result, so I'll just put them in this post (note that the translation is mine and I'm a native french speaker. For Avalanche, I do have a real translator, an Irish guy, who did a very, very good job.)

Presentation
The lands of exile, 1351. The last human kingdom of Ethernya is scattered and living with many internal quarrels, divided between two capitals who share very few common interests. In the north, Raijuvak represents the last stand of men against the oppressing thread of the white orcs, who seek, each winter, to extend the borders of their territory. In the south, Carcandasse, a rich city, where politic intrigues determine the faith of the kingdom everyday ; where the people is oppressed by a power who only seeks its own survival ; where everything is a charade. In this context, where the survival of humankind is at stake, many of the alliances that were formed long ago seem fragile. And as those who stand in the shadow finally reveal themselves, as black orcs emerge from the darkness after an absence of a thousand years, as dark secrets are revealed, what will become of this kingdom ?

Reading the Roadmap
Avalanche is a prewritten scenario which approachs the plot from a very high point of view, ommiting details and secondaries characters on purpose ; charge to the DM to create them at his table. This scenario is very politic, taking into account, first and foremost, the interactions between groups. It is them who have the real power, and not the individuals, except those who lead the races or organisations, whose decisions influence the various alliances. So groups should the starting point to read and understand this map.
Speaking of groups, you'll notice that some are "complex" ; they are constitued of many other groups, each one having its own hierarchy, and even sometimes its own agenda. This is the case of the council of Raijuvak or the guild of thieves, for instance.
Finally, note that this map represents the links as they are when starting the campaign. So, they are meant to evolve, but at a very slow pace, as Avalanche represents a campaign that takes place over a time of one year (presented as a calendar of events).

Tools and other matters
This map was done using photoshop. As what tools used the various illustrators, I can't tell ...
Speaking of illustrators, and the wonderful job they do, since I didn't credit them on the map (couldn't find the space) I invite you to visit my website to get the chance to know them and see some of their work in full illustrations.
Given the number of elements and links (more than hundred) to build this rmap, this was really (but really) a challenge for us to do it. And I think we came up with something quite clear to read and understand.
Anyway, I believe Rmap are fun (to read and to do) and also a great asset (if not a must) for any setting/plots related projects.
In fact, we love this so much, we are thinking of producing a different map, with all the changes needed, for all "parts" of Avalanche (which are seasons).
So, thanks a lot for this contest !!!

Last questions
I'm still wondering about the eligility of my rmap to this contest, as the PCs are not there, and it doesn't reflect our last game. We can always make the changes quite easily. That said, I'll be leaving for the beach for two weeks in vacations, so Sylvain (the guy who did all the real work for this rmap) should follow this thread and post a new version if necessary.

Working on a relationship map for major entities in Reign, Greg Stolze's nifty new ORE product. That map has a bunch of my own stuff, the guts of Reign that I can decode, and some invented relationships that are not otherwise explicit in the game. Work in progress.

Finished, and with a week to spare!

You can find the finished version in the files section at the [url= ]http://games.groups.yahoo.com/group/indie-netgaming/?yguid=212462550] Indie-Netgaming Yahoo group.

Or link to it directly here.

I cheated a little in that I've included characters from previous play of the game world. Under the rationale that they all are extant, and could have been run into during the course of play over the last three months. Large numbers of them were, in fact. The ones that are most active can be found near the "New Kids" portion of the Green Lake region of the map.

Even if disqualified for this, the map is going to be very helpful to the players of my game. I hope.

The map is created using Excel mostly because it's what I had on hand. You'll need a copy of excel to view the file. When it opens up, it's zoomed out to where you can see the entire map. To see the detail with any clarity, you'll need to be at 100%. At any other zoom level, the font size gets modified, and parts of boxes won't appear.

There is a legend in the lower right hand corner that explains the features of the map.

There were several other features that I considered adding, but it was already a ridiculous effort just to get all of the characters on the map. I thought about color coding the character boxes for, perhaps, gender. It's also possible to put in a lot more information in a box, and just size it so that only the relationship summary shows (like it does now). Allowing somebody to open up a box wider to read all of the details. I may someday do that, but it'll be a collossal effort.

I'm sure it's going to be difficult to read. But that's just part and parcel of the complexity of the map - I'm not sure there's a way around this. The casual reader may not be able to get what a lot of it's about. But it may be impressive just for the sheer magnitude of it. And some might find it interesting to explore around the map.

Again, for my players who have some context, I'm sure it'll be more useful. And it'll act as a point of reference for people. With me on hand, I can explain the nature of any of the relationships where they might not be aware.

One interesting thing I discovered in doing the map are connections that I had forgotten that I'd put together. There may well be implications of some of the arrangements of which I had previously not been aware that emerge from these various interconnections.

Anyhow, I'm very happy with it, and I hope people have fun checking it out. :-)

Thanks Andy,
Mike

Hey Rich, what did you use to draw yours?

-Andy

I posted a PDF version of my map in the IN Group, too, for those who might not have Excel (thanks Tom!) Some of the formatting is a little mucked up, but otherwise it's quite a good copy of the original.

Mike

Hi Andy,

I've PMed you re my Ptolus 3.5 rel map.

Awesome!

Also, since it's the weekend and all, I'm gonna give entrants an extra day or two to submit, since I won't be able to get around to judging until early next week anyway.

-Andy

Are we supposed to post the map elsewhere or is this thread okay?

As a secondary entry, here is a much more streamlined R-map for Exodus II, our sci-fi HeroQuest game (GM: johnzo).

Posted By: Blake H"...here's my R-map entries for my Wushu homebrew Exalted game. One is the PC map, the other is the big picture political map I'm handing out to players for orientation purposes."

These were well worth waiting for. They're some of the nicest I've seen on the thread, probably THE two nicest.

Mine was posted earlier in the thread, since we're using this thread. :)

Speaking of which, I'm quite behind on judging due to work and life, and this coming weekend is Go Play Southeast. I'm going to redisplay all the entrants, group them into categories, and rate them from there, most likely the following weekend (July 28-29).

Thanks!
-Andy