Beliard

[Coreyartus]

I can't find a map for one of the town in an adventure I'm DMing for my gaming group. I've looked all over, and there weren't any maps that I could find that I could use in a pinch.

So, because I am beginning to Really Love cartography, I made my own.

I've never constructed a "town map" before (all of my previous experimentation has been in dungeon battle maps), and let me tell ya--making a village is a different beast. I was at a loss, so I went looking for tutorials here, and found Larb's award winning tutorial on towns and villages for Photoshop (found HERE). It was written for Photoshop CS3, and I have CC2015, so some of the tools were in different places, and I learned how much I have to learn about the Line Tool (argh).

But using it as inspiration, and with some wonderful advice from some of the other posters here, I was able to make my first village map for my game tomorrow night! Woohoo!

Beliard (it may sound familiar to some of you as you may be running Princes of the Apocalypse right now) doesn't have a map provided in the book. It simply says it's a cattle town, with lots of retired adventurers from a nearby city, and a single large oft-extended inn that caters to the traveling folk who are on the major trade thoroughfare that passes through this bucolic village. It has a large pond for the cattle as well. It's not a big community. And it's not really very dangerous. It's almost a one-horse town.

But I anticipate my players may be spending some time here, and hobnobbing with NPCs for lots of backstory, so I wanted to make it a legitimate locale.

So I made a map.

Thanks, Larb, for your wonderful tutorial! And thanks Bogle and Kiba for the great advice! It's not a work of art, but dagnabbit it'll do the job. Whew! Crisis averted! My players will thank you, too!

[Larb]

I'm glad you found the tutorial helpful! The end result is very nice.