Pathfinder Kingmaker Homebrew

[LASture]

Hello, I'm currently a DM for a homebrewed version of the Pathfinder Kingmaker module. It's a good module and I had fun playing with friends, but a few months ago my old DM was no longer able to run the campaign so I decided to take a crack at it. It has room for expansion and being as creative as I am, I decided to just hijack the entire setting and take it completely off the rails and add more spice to the recipe. What does this mean for the world map? Well for starters it has to be redone.

I had originally remade the entire first area of the first book;



Then I decided to fit this into a bigger world picture, and fit the entire setting into a home-brew campaign I've been running for a few years.

I'm currently redoing the entire region map, bigger and badder than before, but I've run into a small snag.

- My treelines are a constant pain in the butt to make and I need a better solution/brush.

I currently use Photoshop CS5, so I was wondering if anybody could point me in the direction of a brush or tutorial that would help out, I'd appreciate it. Right now I'm just drawing a ton of vertical lines for the treeline and it's going to absolutely murder my hand by the time I'm done with the region map.

[Chashio]

You just need something for the front edge of the treeline? The trunks? You could try a pattern of vertical lines as a dual brush setting. Or, since that's completely over-thinking it... just a round brush, flattened vertically with a bit of jitter added to it, should do nicely.

[Azélor]

Hey ! welcome to the Guild.

I found this tutorial and it should explain what you want to know about brushes. How To Make Your Own Custom Photoshop Brushes

I like the general look of the map and especially the forests but at some places the elements do not mix very well. If I where you, I would not hesitate to hide the lower parts of mountains with trees in moderation. This also solve the problem of transition between mountains and land. (it can be a problem sometime)
Right now, some mountains overlap the forest. It's also true for some of the rivers. Oh well it's not that bad but it's something that could be improved.

About the rivers: the flowing direction of water is not clear in the east. Right now, it's flowing to the east and to the south at the same time. It can't flow in two directions at the same time. You probably need to get rid of one river near the twin lakes. And also make sure that the easternmost lake has only one output.

[LASture]

Hey, thanks for the tips; as silly as it is I hadn't thought about making my own brush but that would certainly fit the bill. Gonna take both your advice and see what I can come up with in the next couple of days. I'll update the thread as progress continues.

I should also mention that the rivers and whatnot are coming straight from the book, but I understand your criticism and think I might bootleg some changes to the layout to suit me better as well.

[LASture]

Alright so I've been side-tracked with a bunch of projects but I finally managed to sit down and get some time to pull off a minor update: I experimented around a bit with making some brushes, and have a nice tree-trunk brush. However, while messing around I decided to try creating some more realistic/natural looking tree groupings. This was pulled off by making a custom brush that would scatter circles of varying sizes, and a pattern overlay that would add bumps in such a way to look a bit more like tree-top cover. This is all heavily work in progress but I think it definitely is a move in the right direction.

[xpian]

The hexes, the dark water, the color shades of green...it all gives me a feel of the Svalitch Woods surrounding Castle Ravenloft.

[LASture]

This is still a super rough work in progress, I'm going to be cleaning up the trees and water layout quite a bit. I'm basically going off of the Kingmaker Greenbelt map and extending/modifying it to fit my purposes for the revamped campaign. There's quite a few oddities with how the land is laid out and I intend to alter it a little bit, but I'm also going to throw in some supernatural structures and whatnot. I'll eventually put down a slight sepia tones to it to give it a "printed on parchment" feel. I'm pretty happy with the progress that's coming along though. Once I'm all done I'll share the madness of my brushes for people to try their own hand at it.

[LASture]

Still working on the map off-and-on between other projects. The grand scale of things will have to wait, as it's continuously being changed and modified depending on what the group does (it's kind of a big sand-box campaign). Here is a work in progress where I'm still messing around with putting trees on/behind mountains. Not satisfied with the look yet, but it's good enough for now.