Throneport: Random WIP city for a possible setting.

[thebax2k]

I like the shallows that your map now has Talroth, it adds a little extra pizzaz to the map.

I know you are trying to avoid the computer generated "CC2look" with your map in favor of something that appears hand drawn, but the color palette you are using right now (dark brown and purple) looks synthetic and processed (not that that's a bad thing, there are many digital maps, especially by cartographers like Christopher West and keith Curtis I am quite fond of).

If you are going for a more "hand drawn" look, there are several options you can use. You can go with bright primary colors on a white background. Or you can go with the "aged parchment" look for the background to your map (I'll see if I can find a tutorial on the guild, I know there's been one). It really all depends on what type of look you want. Medieval maps tended to be more artistic than functional, showing buildings and landmarks rather than blocks and street grid. Your map seems to be more on the functional side, so anachronistically, you might want to look at 18th and 19th century city maps.

Also, is the terrain your city is on or near similar to northern France, Holland, and Germany or Greece (meaning do you have fertile plains and forest covered lands around the city or high cliffs of granite and bedrock)? If the terrain is more akin to northern Europe, then your harbor looks off. The sea opening (or openings) to the harbor would be wider do to tidal action and erosion. If the terrain is more akin to Greece, than the shape looks right, but I doubt you'd have a marsh nearby. I actually thought the shape of your first map looked better/more natural.

As for the Temple of the Six, is it the only religion in your Kingdom or are other religions (albeit grudgingly) permitted? If so, if might be smart to have a temple quarter. If not, given that you say six is an important number to the faith, then in a city the size you are depicting, you should have one main temple and five smaller shrines--I counted three in the initial map all told.

Although its was created for a sci-fi setting, I find Zierra in another thread here on the guild an interesting contrast to your map. It's your call whether or not you want to include piers, but I do think they add a bit or realism/versimilitude to aeronox's port city. I also like the fact that the road grid is denser in the oldest part of his city (which I assume is the west side) reflecting the greater buildup and competition for land over time.

I like your concepts of walls with moats/canals. Not only is it defensible, but it clearly delineates where the protected sections of your city are. I would have a walled bastion/fort or two as a place for a last stand during a siege or a base to reestablish control from during riots.

Keep refining your concept Talroth. What you have is very promising, I'm curious how it turns out in further iterations.

[Talroth]

The reason for the the way the temples are is they were each built over time. Eventually one ruler or another would have been bullied by a greedy priest into thinking he was less faithful than he should be, and that the souls of his people were suffering. Thus funding for a new temple came about. Now, the temples marked on the map aren't simple things, they're really rather massive, the largest being a structure that would cover most of the Vatican City in Rome.

(For the religion in this part of the world, while there are many minor deities worshiped, such acts are heresy in the eyes of the mainstream religion, and you're liable to come to an unpleasant end if you don't covert quickly when asked to do so by the mob with pitchforks and torches. However there are two main stream religions, The Temple of Six, where all 6 gods are worshiped equally with one being the God King, and then there is the Temple of Hawth, who only really differ in claiming the God Hawth is King rather than Praidan, and he is solely worshiped 6 days out of 7, the others getting quick dues on the 7th day. Temple of 6 has one day in 7 dedicated to each god, and the 7th a day for all.)


Geology of the new map. It is based on a small pool along the Bay of Fundy near where I grew up. (East coast of Canada) I just upped the scale of the pool by a little bit. Well, by a lot, seeing as the pool was fed from a stream less than a meter wide. Basically the bay is a mostly fresh water lake, and NOT a main tidal zone, only at high tide is there any salt water flowing back into the bay/lake.

But I will agree, the size of the harbor mouths is an issue for me, I might do some numbers and a quick simulation to see just how bad the current really would have been, but without a large in/out of the tide, they should be more than enough to handle the (somewhat slow) rivers draining out and still allow boats to travel through them without being torn to shreds. And I need to redo the water colour on the second map, I goofed when picking the colours, they look much more like a real natural blue colouring I've used in real life on the first one. I'll also try bleaching out the background (brown) colour more, the .jpegs look darker than I actually intended.

I guess I'll do further work on both of the outline maps, redoing the first city, and compare with what I come up with on the second.

I might rip apart the eastern end of the shield island in the second map, making smaller reef like islands there and on the main land and drop the lake to a tidal bay.