Tag Archives: maps

Links

Links of Interest, 6 October 2013

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Far too quiet around here lately, a post a month or so for far too long! I do apologize; I’m still gaming regularly but my painting has dwindled to a terrible ZERO figures finished since May of this year and since I finished the buildings in August I’ve done no scenery work, either!

I’m going to get the painting desk dusted off and back in production fairly soon; I’d hoped for this weekend but real life and work got in the way. I’ve also got a pile of small and medium-sized partially-finished scenery projects to complete, so I might re-start the whole process by clearing some of them up.

In the meantime, here’s a pair of links, both map related!

Someone in Hungary has digitized a huge collection of 1910 Austro-Hungarian maps of Central Europe in 1:200,000 scale. It covers the entire Austro-Hungarian Empire and nearby portions of neighbouring states, so the whole thing covers from Istanbul in the lower right up to southern/central Germany (around Cologne) in the top left. The quality of the scans is very good, and the relevance for World War One or Russian Civil War gamers should be obvious!

In a pulpier vein, via the always-awesome Propnomicon, this 1885 map of Chinatown in San Fransisco. I’ve linked to both Propnomicon and the David Rumsey Historical Map Collection websites before, but they’re both well worth exploring!

Inspiration, Links

Links of Interest, 8th Feb 2013

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First “Links of Interest” miscellaneous post for 2013, so it’s a long one!

The fantastic blog Wargaming with Silver Whistle is, like I was recently, also making fields. His are spectacular, and might inspire me to re-visit the subject again in the near future! He’s got fields and allotments, large wheatfields, and finally some haystacks, all lavishly illustrated.

TutoFig.com is a multilingual European website that aggregates links to all sorts of tutorials – figure painting, sculpting, terrain, and all sorts of other stuff. Lots of high-quality links there, and I’m flattered they linked to my hot-glue fields tutorial, which is how I discovered them in turn.

Staying with the scenery theme, The DM’s Craft Youtube channel has lots of short terrain videos, focusing on the quick-and-cheap (but effective!) end of terrain making, and especially the many, many uses to which one can put a hot glue gun!

Moving on to the Russian Civil War and World War One, the Photo Palace blog, WW1 & RCW Photos Found is a post about an amazing collection of photos by an American who was working with the YMCA in both France and Russia during World War One, and who then escaped the Russian Revolution via Siberia and China – and he took photos the whole way, as well as buying photo postcards and such as he travelled. There’s only a few photos from the collection up online right now, which is unfortunate, but they’re really neat, atmospheric photos! The same blog also has French WW1 Photos Found Still in Camera, but again, too few of the actual photos posted online so far!

The US Army’s famous West Point Military Academy has, unsurprisingly, a first-rate History Department, who have put online their Atlas of Military History. There’s no maps of the Russian Civil War, despite American forces being involved both in Northern Russian and Siberia as part of Allied Intervention forces, but there are great clear maps of World War One on the Western Front, as well as maps for nearly every other war the Yanks have been involved in.

Looking for information on Russian armoured cars I found PDF archives of the “Armoured Car Journal” from the early/mid 1990s, with several interesting World War One articles, although nothing specifically on the Russian Civil War.

Finally, if you’re doing up artwork, cards or other handouts for gaming, another source of nice textures and background images is always useful, so here’s some Free (CC-BY Licensed) textures collected on Flickr – hat tip to Sidney Roundwood for the link.

Historicals, Inspiration, Links, Pulp

1920s Atlas Scans

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The website Hipkiss’ Scans of Old Maps has the 1920 London Geographical Institute’s The People’s Atlas scanned as fairly high quality images.

It covers the whole world, but with larger and more detailed maps for the British Empire/Commonwealth and Europe. It also includes details on transport infrastructure and routes, travel times and similar which might be of interest for those planning a tabletop game campaign or RPG in the interwar era, and a number of maps of World War One (the Great War) and it’s aftermath.

The same site has Bartholomews Pocket Atlas and Guide to London from 1922 available, and a huge variety of other stuff on his Maps page.

Even better, the site owner points out that all his maps are from before 1923, therefore as far as he can tell, they’re public domain (out of copyright, that is) so there are no restrictions on what we can do with them.

Well worth looking at; I’ll probably get the files at work and print a few out too!