Phaedra: Land of the Enlightened

[Ixtli]

My friends and I came up with a game last year in college we called Empires. It started out simple, with just whatever stats we came up with. Well this year we played it again, after giving Rum, our DM, the whole damn summer of playing it to build it into a more solid form.

I started my nation out with four cities and a few villages on this fairly large island. It was really roughly drawn, so I decided it would be the perfect project to begin with for re-entering fantasy cartography.

As we played, I conquered the whole island and began building more things. I got really into it, figuring out what cities had which industries, creating special buildings and locations that would make some places stand out. In one city I decided to create a wonder of the world and built a giant lighthouse.

Unfortunately, a magical plague began devastating our world because one of the players decided to explore something he shouldn't have. We tried for a few years to cleanse the world, but everything was in vain. So I decided to pray to the gods for salvation. I failed. Then, my nation collectively decided to sacrifice themselves to save the world as a mass magical ritual. So we saved the world, and died. But for that, Rum decided the few remaining of my race were now immortal.

The point in time for the map is before the mass suicide of my people. I intend on making it full color and very detailed. But for right now I'm just trying to get the primary land features placed (Mountains, Hills, Rivers, Forests, Cliffs, Coastlines, and Canyons). Eventually there will also be town/city icons. They'll use the same base icon, but if there is something special in the city that will be included in the icon, such as a prominent statue, a university, or a cathedral/monastery.

The map is much, much larger than the picture here. Its an 18x24. So far I've created the base coastline and I've only been really working on this small area of the map.

I've decided to save a WIP for this map every hour, mostly just so that I can see what I'm doing and remind myself how to do it again for my next map. For each WIP I'll post only what has actually been done, because uploading the whole map would be ridiculous.

Since it's been such a long time since I actually did any cartography stuff, and since it's my first time using a tablet, any advice would be fantastic.

WIP, Hour 1

[arsheesh]

Very cool background story. The WIP looks great so far, looking forward to following your progress on this.

Cheers,
-Arsheesh