[Award Winner] Step by Step workflow: Saventh-Yhi, City of the Seven Spears

[Hugo Solis]

The inking step in this case take quite a long time, mstly for all the topographic leves and the few hundred buildings. I didn't wanted to make too many "copy-paste" buildings but after doing a couple dozen "unique" blocks I dropped the dream of unique buildings and started copy pasting more of the same. I tried to make as many changes as possible on the blocks so that the copy-paste repetition. Even so there a maaany unique buildings around, specially the larger-than-a-house ones.

The building design isn't much at random. You'll see neat two-row aligned clusters of 8-12 square piramid-like buildings near the biggest ziggurats, those are supposed to be military quarters. The sigle row ones that are alike are supposed to be priest quarters. The rest of clustered mixed shaped blocks are the regular homes and business/store buildings. There are many "palaces" around and you'll see those mostly perced on the rock columns on the edges.

A little "secret" of mine when I furnish a city is to think GM minded. I always try to place buildings as if my players were walking through the city and "living" it, so the city needs to make sense and to have every type of building a real fantasy city would have. In geneal nobody notices this, but it helps me visualize it and helsp me enjoy the process a lot more, kinda like as if I was describing/writting the city as I draw it.

I'll get to the details of the wards in the next post.