City of Duat in Anubia

[Gamerprinter]

So this idea started from my Gnollean beetle ship deck plans, and the 5 man flying beetle assault vehicle I created over the past couple weeks. I need to design a city as part of the Advanced Tutorial Guides, with several start and stops. So will use this city design as a working tutorial in that guide. This is the capital city of the advanced gnoll species featured with the deck plans in their empire of Anubia (their specific crystal sphere). However, since I'm basically creating an ancient Egyptian based city using maps, illustrations, photos and floor plans of the Temple of Amun in Karnak, the Egyptian pyramids, and other specifically authentic Egytian sites. This city could easily be used in other fantasy settings and campaigns with an ancient Egypt theme.

While Duat seems an odd name. Researching Anubis, at least during the First Kingdom Period of Ancient Egypt, before Osiris appeared in the pantheon, it was Anubis who is the guardian of the Underworld, which the Egyptians called Duat. Anubis, at the time, was responsible for measuring your soul against the weight of a feather, as your judgment for the afterlife - though all that became Osiris's job in the later periods. Anubis was still the deity of funerary rites and embalming. So I decided to build a city that has living areas intermixed by necropoli, cemeteries, large tombs and temples - a city of the living and the dead.

All this is being created in Xara Designer Pro 9 (though Xara Photo & Graphic Designer 10 does everything you need to create a map - I use the full program for other things, than just mapping...) Xara is a vector drawing program (XP&GD10 is $89) with powerful beveling (better than most vector apps, IMO) tools as well as the rest I need to create any kind of map.

I'll post in the order of inspiration, and as components as I build this map.

First I created a vector "statue" of Anubis, in his full jackal form, as in the earliest statues. The Egyptian headdress is found on standing human-form Anubis statues, but not the full jackal form. As my personal twist I included it on this form, so its more my own, though authentically based.

Next I created a typical Egyptian temple floorplan ready for use in a game. Once I placed it on the map and realized how large an area I required for the total city, including an interior floorplan, though needed, was too small of details, once I reduced the total to the size required in the map design. So I created roofed version of the temple, and put it in a temple complex with a pair of smaller temples, and a pair even smaller still. Assumption there are less columns in smaller version, more for larger. The interior design I created is probably for the medium sized temple.

Finally the religious center placed at the city center. The start of the main city entry gates with side openings leading to different quarters of the city. I've determined the total space needed for the planned city and placed a wall around it (to give you an idea of the grand plan of this!) I plan to create at least a dozen specific Egyptian styled complexes for military, royal, administrative, etc first. I'll decide which "quarter" they best fit, place them on the city map, then begin to design the quarters around them, for the needed multitude of households and commercial operations. A slave quarter is planned, as well as main market quarter, the religious/admnistrative quarter is another, though I haven't determined the rest (maybe more than 4 quarters - I use the term "quarter" loosely.)

I made a few changes to the religious center prior to working out the main city walls. I scaled the palm trees down, extended the grassy "park" around the center, and added 2 obelisks. There's a pair in front of one of the gates at the entry. There will be many more pairs throughout the city, being the most common dedication statuary found in the city.

Anyway, progress...

GP