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Looks fairly natural to me. I notice the big trading post building that has been around a while disappears later on. Could be a date of some note perhaps?
Town of Silvershore WIP
I'm doing a small town as a homebase for my fantasy RPG group and wanted to try something a bit different. I had a good idea of how the town started out - A small group of farms at the edge of civilization (at least as far as humans are concerned), where a trading consortium decides to set up a trading post (it is on a road leading to a large dwarven city). The problem was that I didn't really know how it looked 200 years later, which is the current date. So I decided to do some rough sketches of its growth through those 200 years, from a few dozen people to its current size of 1.800 citizens.
The sketches aren't supposed to be of any particular years, but rather a way to guess at how roads would change and some areas would go from a few scattered houses to more densely populated blocks.
This probably isn't a 100% realistic (I'm not an urban planner or historian), but it gives me a rough idea of where there are some older buildings and which areas are built recently.
Let me know what you think.
Looks fairly natural to me. I notice the big trading post building that has been around a while disappears later on. Could be a date of some note perhaps?
Good planning
It reminds me somewhat of where I was born, just a somewhat wider town
Good luck with mapping it. Any clue where those main roads lead to?
I was thinking that a fire had cleaned up midtown. The new trading post is the big building at the top of the map.Originally Posted by Larb
Then it has some realism I guess :-) I am doing a regional map, which you can find a WIP of here. The west road leads to a few more farms, the north road to the Westfell mountain range and some dwarven trading opportunities, and the south-east road leads to the city of Breylon, from where the orginal settler of this town originated.Good planning
It reminds me somewhat of where I was born, just a somewhat wider town
Good luck with mapping it. Any clue where those main roads lead to?
I've added buildings to the town map and cleaned up the roads. While the look of the buildings are very similar to some of those used by other guild members (and inspired by them), I did draw these myself. It gave me a bit more control over their final appearance.
I realised that I had forgotten to add a harbor to my original sketches, so things got moved around a bit, to accommodate that.
Slowly moving along on this one. I found a way to draw my trees that I actually like and have played around with a border and map legend.
I think I'm at a point now, where the map is usable, but there are still a lot of small changes and additions that need to be made and a few things I want to add.
Looks really nice!
On a 'historical' note, if you look at old European cities, you can actually 'see' the development based on the pattern around significant landmarks. The churches and the market squares are more or less in the city centers, and have the best real-estate, even today. All the major roads lead into these, and not usually in a grid-pattern. If you look-up Lille, or Arras, in France, you will see some good examples of star-like road patterns to these landmarks, and a sudden burst of land or greenery where space is a commodity...
Also, I like the idea of Silvershore being by the water, but there seems to be sparse development by the bridge or shoreline.
I'm just being picky. This map is awesome!
Thanks.
Good points on the churches. The reason for not doing it quite like that for this town, is partly that with a pantheon of gods rather than a single deity, the individual shrines/temples doesn't play a big enough part in peoples' lives, to make one of them a noticeable focal point, partly that the town's origin was very trade oriented, and partly that the big temple is a relatively new construction.
As for the sparse development along the shore, it is mostly an oversight on my part. I only realised rather late, that I hadn't given it any thought and didn't want to make too many changes at that stage. My thought is, that the mansions near the shore, are situated on a high hill and that the only access to the beach, is a narrow gully that the road follows to a fairly narrow and small beach. I am working on a good way to show where there are hills on the map, but haven't quite figured it out yet.
My biggest mistake with this map, was that I was too focused on keeping the scale I had set for it and has ended up being constrained by the size of the paper I want it printed on. Fortunately that is a bit easier to fix, than if it was hand drawn, so I will probably enlarge the map at some point and give the town a sudden growth spurt on the other side of the river (which, by the way, is way too narrow for what I originally had in mind).
You should flesh out the history maps a bit more. I usually work backwards. It is easier to cut and remove buildings. Buildings also have rooms added as time passes and lots fill up leaving only light wells when all the land is used up. The growth of some cities are well documented, like Boston and New York City, USA and London, England. An organic grid like this is very believable in my opinion and though you might end up with more allies and lots are cut and sold in the old parts of town. I really love how the final product is turning out.
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