Thread: Silverstaff

Looks like a good start! Looking forward to seeing how this progresses.

This really is huge. That's gonna be a lot of work! I will stay tuned...

I'm doing a lot of stuff at the moment! In addition to working on my campaign map, I have been working on my group's latest discovery: The City of Stillmeadows.

First, I wanted to a bit of design testing so I have been playing with a combination of textures and ideas:



On the left is a combination of mountains with a rough central valleys, replete with a river and lake system and a few inner peaks. Below that is a forested area with non-plains ground cover. Then a snow-peaked system with a central glacier and snow-engulfed mountains. A few cities for added effects.

I'm not certain how I want to go about tackling the entire world. Since I've had the campaign world mapped out for quite some time, I think I want to tackle sections/kingdoms of the world in detail and work outward from one section. This should allow me to make sure that I don't make mistakes that I'll have to go back to correct in the future.

With that in mind, I will be starting in the southwest corner of my map. The first step is working on the Kingdom of Cerdonia and Terul. I hope to have it finished shortly, so you can see some progress!

Both mtns look good except the one with the rivers has a heavy texture of brown in the lowland - soften that up a bit to bring the eye back to focus on the peaks. The forest colors are too vivid - they don't match the greens in the mtns which are good. The cities look like something from Civilization but the castle one is hard to really see against the grass (I see spires with flags so I assume it's a castle). So, just a few refinements and it's all good.

This is an area of my campaign world where genocide, mayhem and wanton destruction has occurred on a monumental scale. It represents the southwest tip of the continent.

The original Kingdom of Cerdonia encompassed all of the current kingdom and Terul. A dozen years ago, humanoid armies at the behest of a mysterious force laid siege to the peaceful Kingdom of Cerdonia. They arose from the Hidden Hills and Burnt Swamp as well as further west in fantastic ships and boats. These watercraft have since been destroyed by the combined efforts of many western nations not wishing their use against themselves further up either coast. Most of he population of Cerdonia, which was unable to escape the onslaught of the humanoid armies, perished in a cataclysmic genocide. Many did flee to the Keep of Resnin, and reformulated a new Kingdom based both on the Keep and New Southhaven (formerly Fisherman's Elbow). Others sought asylum in the Brotherhood of the Hammer, who at first didn't realize the magnitude of the invasion. Still others fled through the Sentinel Pass to safety in Zirdreff further east.

The evil Terul arose from the ashes they brought to the original Kingdom of Cerdonia. They destroyed Southhaven and from the destruction rose a stinking cesspool called Pict. They laid waste to the magnificent Forest of Reyhull north of the Sentinel Mountians in the area along the String River. The once fertile valley in and around present-day Pict lay rotting and fallow. Orcs, Goblins, Kobolds and the rest don't make good farmers. Terul has been fighting a constant war against the remnants of Cerdonia and a coalition of Western Kingdoms who so far have managed to keep the hordes bottled up in the Sentinel Pass. Highly skilled coalition forces have proven superior to humanoid incursions through any of the smaller passes in the Sentinel Mountains.

For some unknown reason, the humanoid armies fear the Forest of Myllen, for they have left that tract of wild growth untarnished.

The Brotherhood of the Hammer has successfully thwarted above-ground incursions due to their superior mountain fighting abilities. It has also been a boon that few daring humanoid units have attempted to fight their way into the Rusty Hedlands through the Forest of Myllen. However, several dwarven mines have had to be abandoned and sealed in the Southern Highlands as the cunning humanoids have found ancient passageways through the Underdark into them.

The Western Coalition armies have a seemingly never ending supply of fresh recruits each spring willing to test their mettle against the humanoids in the Sentinel Pass. Likewise, New Southhaven sees an influx of supplies and men-at-arms to bolster its ranks. Scholars are unsure, however, whether the incessant tide of humanoids can be stemmed for the long term. Only time will tell.....



The next section I will do will be just to the east of this map. Zirdreff and the County of Eight Peaks.

I'm going to shelve this thread. Although I like where it is going, I've been learning a lot of stuff here. Tools like layering, shadowing, blurring, etc. Although a lot of the tools may not work in FM8, I think I want to do a lot of testing in Photoshop, The Gimp and FM8 to get the overall look I want. I also think I want to change up the shape of the continent I've been using. I'll keep the place names, nations and history behind it, but with much more powerful tools at my disposal [other than the hex paper and colored pencils of the 80s], I want to see what I can come up with.