Originally Posted by
Sanderling
The style is gorgeous, the colors are lovely, and you’ve really mastered the look of a densely tangled metropolis. I can barely fathom the work and expertise that goes into something like this, and the map fairly radiates a remarkable artistry and skill.
That said, there are a couple of things which I’m a little puzzled about, and I may not understand the setting well enough to follow what’s being done on the map. My first impression is that this is a city on a large hill or small mountain, and the many switchbacks on the roads would seem to bear that out.
Except the river wouldn’t be flowing up and then down the hill – I know this is in the Forgotten Realms, which can be high-magic in places, but they usually don’t bother riverbeds like that. So, my best guess is that the topography of the Citadel is actually a depression or series of terraces sloping down to the River Argent. That makes the most sense; but every time I look at the map, the shading registers as a flat-topped hill with steep lower flanks. Is this a hill or a terraced valley? Am I missing something vital here?
I’m also having a hard time with the scale bar, which seems too small in its increments to account for the sense of sheer mass implied by the city’s layout. According to the scale bar, the entire Davenport Estate is only 100 x 150 feet, which seems rather cramped for something in the Elite District. Other locations seem likewise compressed – the Davenport Theater is apparently only 50-odd feet across, very small in comparison to the Globe of Shakespeare’s time, which was about 100 feet in diameter. Most of the docks here are less than 100 feet long, several of them much less than 50 feet, which isn’t a lot of room when you’re mooring and unloading a fleet of commercial vessels.
I could see some of the taverns and smaller inns as about 50 feet on a side (how much room do goblin wenches take up, after all?) but the City Watch Headquarters looks to be about 20 feet on a side, and the Highborne Lodge, which sounds like it should be quite swanky and expansive, looks about the same size as the taverns.
Maybe the city really is an extremely tight-packed, dense and compact affair; but whenever I look at the map it feels much larger than the scale bar wants to allow. I may not be picking up on details or cues which would clarify everything, but just looking at the map gives me the impression of a grandly sprawling metropolis. The style is genuinely beautiful, but the longer I look at this city the more puzzled I become.
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