Calidar: Emirates of Narwan Topographical and Hex Maps

[Thorf]

Recently I've been working on new maps for Bruce Heard's World of Calidar through a Patreon project. These are the first completed maps, detailing the arid lands of the Emirates of Narwan.

Narwan's deserts are the result of a mix of dry climate conditions and the presence of jinn in the region. The terrain is somewhat of a remix of the real world's Lebanon with the Arabian peninsula, with patchy desert dominated by a number of permanent and season rivers. The Narwani are worshippers of the sun god, Soltan, and their society is strictly monolatrous. The human population coexists and intermingles with the jinn, who are forbidden from holding public positions due to past conflicts.

The map is derived from a smaller scale map of the wider area, known as the Great Caldera (which I previously posted here). Underlying the terrain is a DEM that I created four years ago using Photoshop and Wilbur. I made the DEM at quite a high resolution, so I can create one further level of zoom beyond this map detailing the individual sheikhdoms.

The DEM is coloured in Photoshop, combined with lighting layers generated in Blender using Daniel Huffman's excellent Blender Tutorial, parchment texturing, and vector work from Adobe Illustrator.

The hex map is adapted from the topographic map, detailing the terrain in a rather different way than the topographic map, which I feel is quite complementary. I put a lot of thought into what terrain type to use for each hex, and these choices will eventually be reflected back into the topographic maps when I work on larger scale sheikhdom maps at a later date.

The hex map is composed entirely of Illustrator vector work, though I composited all the layers in Photoshop in order to make use of Photoshop's layer effects.

The public versions of these maps are 150 DPI, while the full resolution versions are 300 DPI.

I've written a little more about these maps on my web site.