need help figuring out how to make a map for a vehicle chase combat encounter

[Salgood]

Heyyyyyy so im dming a campaign for a 1850s Lovecraft type setting and the characters just finished a fight and are heading to Washington to get interrogated by some Pinkertons that's one of the players are connected with and i wanted to try and get into some stuff about corruption with the big government group that one of the players is heavily connected with and how that goes against there motives but ive noticed combat has been a bit boring recently and also that weve not been doing as much combat as usual and wanna give the next combat encounter a bit of a twist having it take place in vehicles and not in there normal environment but i cant find anywhere that allows me to make maps for roads and tracks and all that stuff so im not sure how i can make a terrain for them so they can visualize it. also sorry about the rant on the stuff before dont get alot of chances to talk about the setting and im vry proud of how its turning out lol

[pabelfly]

I played a vehicle combat session (5e, but I'm sure it could transfer over). It took place in a circular arena with some basic weapons and abilities for the vehicles, and it was pretty fun.

Alternatively, you could have the players fight in, or atop horse carriages, and the characters can direct the driver to manoeuver the carriage to decide how close or how far away they are from enemies.

[Gruftzwerg]

I did a caravan chase once. I used some map-tiles from my Diablo II d20 set for it. I really like those map-tiles since you can create maps on the fly with em.

You can use the smaller 2x3 or 2x4 tiles as vehicle on a battlemap. This allows to leave/enter the vehicles and to drive the characters around within the vehicles.
You can even make your own tiles with some cardboard.

[Darg]

For such long distances and high speeds we simply make an abstract xy(z) graph with a random center point and use coordinates to keep track of positions. Instead of measuring in feet, we measure squares to keep numbers simple. 100 ft is 20 squares for example. 60 mph is 105 squares per round. We skip the map entirely because it's just not feasible to make it work.

[BioCharge]

I once had a vehicle chase where my players were in an armored car being chased by motorbike mounted hellknights, each having sidecars. I had the map centered on the player's vehicle and juat moved the terrain as it became relevant. If all the vehicles go at a relatively similar speed, you can just assume any actions taken to move are all happening at the same time, and thua don't move their tokens unless they take further action to actually change relative positions.

Though this was mostly easy because the party were all in the same vehicle. I don't know about your exact scenario, but maybe you could do something similar?

[Elkad]

As others said.
PC vehicle is the reference point of the map. Everything else (terrain, enemies, NPCs pushing strollers across the street) is relative to that.


It never occurred to me to think of space as the thing that was moving.