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Larion

The Vycana Strait - A Political Map

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Quote Originally Posted by Larion View Post
So this is a new style of map I've been working on. Rather than focus on geographical features like I normally do, I decided to go for a more political look. I made it entirely in photoshop from scratch, it took me a little over 3 hours, and I like the way it has turned out.

I pulled inspiration from the American Civil War, with a North vs. South layout. For anyone who cares, the war is centered on slavery, hence the line near the bottom reading
"Depicting the Second Slave War". I received quite a bit of feedback for a previous map, and I took lots of the advice and used it in the creation of this map. I added in more details, including population levels, major geographical names, and a home made mountain graphic.

I hope you like it, and I hope to receive even more feedback so I can keep working on this new style. Thanks!

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Comments

  1. WoroRelu's Avatar
    I love this map. I don't know your thoughts on this, would love to hear back about it, but I think an interesting aspect to the maps would be statistics regarding slave populations? Maybe the number of freed/escaped slaves living where, the number of slaves involved in revolutionary or counter-revolutionary actions in the disputed territories, the slave population in relation to the free/serf/etc. population in the region that continues to allow slavery, etc. Essentially, the role of slavery in the war and regions outside of being the primary cause/justification for the conflict.
  2. Larion's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by WoroRelu
    I love this map. I don't know your thoughts on this, would love to hear back about it, but I think an interesting aspect to the maps would be statistics regarding slave populations? Maybe the number of freed/escaped slaves living where, the number of slaves involved in revolutionary or counter-revolutionary actions in the disputed territories, the slave population in relation to the free/serf/etc. population in the region that continues to allow slavery, etc. Essentially, the role of slavery in the war and regions outside of being the primary cause/justification for the conflict.
    Glad you like it! when I made the map, I did the bare minimum for research on medieval demographics. However, I'd REALLY like to take it to the next step. I think the most fun way to do that would be to make a copy of the map and edit it so instead of showing political borders, it would instead have a color scale indicating population levels per sq/mile. Then, since you and I both would like even more information, I could add a side panel with some more details. What do you think?

    And I suppose I could make other maps detailing other significant statistics. Temperature map, maybe? But one step at a time, haha.
  3. WoroRelu's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by Larion
    Glad you like it! when I made the map, I did the bare minimum for research on medieval demographics. However, I'd REALLY like to take it to the next step. I think the most fun way to do that would be to make a copy of the map and edit it so instead of showing political borders, it would instead have a color scale indicating population levels per sq/mile. Then, since you and I both would like even more information, I could add a side panel with some more details. What do you think?

    And I suppose I could make other maps detailing other significant statistics. Temperature map, maybe? But one step at a time, haha.
    That sounds fantastic! If you're looking perhaps for reading that might inspire or give you some idea of demographic-type things (though if creatively you don't like doing that, completely discount this) Kenzer and Co. publishes a setting called Kingdoms of Kalamar that is pretty big on gritty realism, might give you an example of slave and general medieval demographics - another one is Harn (I don't know how to get the ^ above the a) but I haven't read up on it much.

    I'm going to subscribe, because I want to see how your world builds up. What are you using for primary development/editing? I know you said Photoshop, but is it primarily raster tablet painting or are you using shapes/paths for form construction?