Would like a stylish map of Nexus City for a homegrown RPG setting

[ravells]

Hi Shawn,

I think if you're asking people to do stuff for free they would want the rights to it anyway as a matter of course (usually). As to a fair price, it's hard to say. As I said, city maps tend to be on the expensive side, but it also depends on how much detail you need. It wouldn't take long to do a stylised map, say, with the districts set out in different colours but I get the feeling that you are after more detail than that. Once you get down to drawing individual buildings, that's where the time really starts to add up. There are programmes out there (Profantasy's city designer, for example) that might help in automatically drawing buildings for you. In my own experience prices for maps can vary from about $20 for something very simple to $500 for something very complex and time consuming.

I threw together something very quickly with pre-built models in City Engine (software which builds 3d cities), and attach a screenshot. It's not much but there you go!

best

Ravs

[Shawn Grigson]

Hey, not bad! Is that what you guys are capable of in a few short hours? I'm impressed But it's actually more photo-realistic than what I had in mind.

It's hard to describe what I'm looking for, though I'm sure I've seen maps like what I'm thinking before in fantasy novels. But I'll try to refine the picture a bit more.

Something hand-drawn, or at least something that appears hand-drawn, with embellishments and illuminations in various areas (ie., "Here there be monsters" with a picture of a sea monster in the waves of the ocean). The architecture of the different wards I mentioned wasn't really 'building by building' (which would be INSANE) but more of a 'ward map', showing the layout of the city, with the wards themselves shown, and maybe a few (signature) buildings rendered within them in the 3/4 style (3/4 because you could then have things like minarets rising up over the ward walls, or in the Lotus District having the characteristic upturned corners of classical Japanese architecture). The Citadel itself would also be a sort of centerpiece, and also hand-drawn. Perhaps the borders of some of the characteristic wards would be shadowed or surrounded by some hand-drawn buildings, with the interior of the ward itself left more undefined, simply with blocks and streets within rendered 2D, overhead view.

You sometimes see things like this in a fantasy novel. Say you'll have a keep and the surrounding city in map form, with streets named and little squares representing the blocks of the city and the buildings within them, without any real detail of the buildings themselves (they mostly get rendered as little squares or rhomboids), save maybe for one of "Pigfoot Inn" (of special significance to the story) being given a special 3/4 treatment, and then you get to the keep itself, and it's fully rendered within the courtyard, with tall towers and pennons flying from the tallest points.

Stylized was pretty much what I had in mind. There needs to be room for me to add random things into the ward depending on the needs of the story, so having every single building fleshed out would defeat the purpose.

Does that make a bit more sense? Easier or harder than what you had in mind?

Kurui, if you wanted to do a character drawing for fun, there's always the demigod ruler of Nexus himself. He's actually based on a previous player character of divine origin (from a Scion campaign). A child of Heimdall, he stood nearly seven feet tall, broad shouldered, blonde-haired with a single braid hanging down from his forehead. He carried a matched set of two gun-swords of dwarven make, inscribed with Norse runes on the blades, and wore a long, black, wolf fur cloak. I'd shock the hell out of the players if, along with the map, there was a rendering of him to place on the site as well. But of course that's just an 'if you feel like it' kind of thing.