Saventh Yhi
Copyright Paizo Publishing LLC.
The name of the city means "The City of the Seven Spear" on an old Golarion dialect (Aztlani?). This city is the equivalent of El Dorado in the Pathfidner roleplaying game. This one is for the AP Serpent's Skull and appeared on the #3 issue.
The biggest changes in final version of the map, Rob's version, are that the city surrounded by colorful trees and has his neat hand-made look.
As Pitax, this one was a city design only but this time James Jacobs asked me to do a "final" map, all neatly finished and shiny. You can see the difference as this one has sharper colors and nice and crispy "inked"outline, thou I didn't had any key names or any other detail except the name of the wards, which was pretty much generic. This map had one BIG requirement: it needed seven spots/temples that were to match a city that lied exatly undertneath this one. The other only points/requirements I was asked for was that one ward was "isolated" from the other districts by mountains and accesible by mountain trails, that the central isle was removed from the main land by broken bridges, that one district were overrun by jungle. Everything else was left up to me.
My original idea was to have this city entirely out of city carved into a huge rock mountain worn down by running and filtering water. You could say that the entire city lies in a single (fragmented maybe) block of stone, hence the scarce vegetation on top and on the cliffs, that was my excuse for the city to be "lost" and not easely accesible other than walking into it inside one of the rives that run into this basin throug carved out rived caves and tunnels, if you see one of the rives on the from the "east" pops out of nowhere, that would be a cave. I added some round caves on the edges as to note some sort of "cenotes" formation, round pools of deep running water which sometimes lie underneath the surface. Also, a main feature of the map are a couple BIG dams, which were used to harness the rivers and control them on rainy seasons, thou now that the city is abandoned you can see several rivers running wild all around the place, circling the city's "control" measures. I flooded the lowest distric to denote the city's various height levels and to add a little flavor to the place (having a temple sunked into water) and I had a few blocks of the city liyng entirely under water for flavor too.
regarding the water, as you can see is all clear and sparky despite the fact of the city beign a big lake with rivers running in but none running out. This means that either the water is all pure and magical, or the water is running out fast somewhere or else it would be all stagnant and swampy, not to mention all entirely flooded! There is a very good reason for this and you can find out where the water goes on the AP Serpen's Skull adventure #5
Regarding the buildings, the architecture is Aztlani which is a micture of Roman with Aztec, so you can see lots of piramids and domes with plenty of square buildings around.
This version of the map says "abandoned", which was a the mildy "destroyed" city. The origianl map is all crispy, this is the second version with some buildings damaged (not entirely visible unless you Zoom in) and there is a third version with most of the buildings destroyed and many of the roads damaged too.
I think I abused a bit some filters (effects) and it makes it look way to digital... I'll try and avoid entirely this effects on future maps.
I'll shut up now and let you check it out!
