Quote Originally Posted by Sigurd View Post
There are two issues with very detailed city maps.

1. They are generally a lot of work .

2. The detail is best made in conjunction (before, after, during) the creation of a story. It is often a better strategy to leave sections vague and then tighten them up when there is something going to happen there.

Part of this is technical - the screen shows so much detail at once so multiple maps at different zoom levels give you clearer images. And part of this is psychological - if I envision any major city I know, details might be directions (ie Joes house is north of the river) but they are never spacial there's too much detail (ie Joes house is 3.5 kilometers from the river but only 2.3kilometers from the little tree with the withered branch on the northern side, about halfway up the trunk below the crown but above the paintmark from mardi gras '87). I think a less defined city with plausible neighborhood maps is the more real one for story telling.

Different scales have different things to tell you. Whole city maps tell you regions, physical characteristics, and maybe roads. These should inform your choice for neighborhood and more detail. The neighborhood maps are don't retell the broad city information and they are free to concentrate on smaller buildings, factions etc....

This is not to say that in a truly mature project detail couldn't be shared and reinforced wherever possible. But maturity takes a while and a lot of concentration.

Even a picture of the real world has to settle on a single level of magnification. If you try to view all the magnification levels at once its just a blur.

If you want drill down detail, look into something like Viewing Dale. I think that's the sort of thing viewer can understand. As it zooms in it redraws what you are looking at for more clarity. Necessarily, what you are not looking at mostly falls away.


Scale and what can be shown is one of the issues I'm curious in.


To assemble something for a module, without making your own, you're probably best to find building maps you want and locate them on bigger maps with a star or a label. Unless you are using the city Castle or the high temple it might not be represented on a city scale map.


Sigurd
Yes, clearly you've spent some time thinking about city-maps!!!

Indeed, I'm not young'un - I've been DMing for a couple of decades and I've already been down most of these roads (so to speak).

Earlier generations of my city-mapping were focused exactly as you said - with different scales for different views of the city (meta-view and local-views). This is the ONLY way to deal with large cities.

That's why I've switched to small cities (5-10k pop). This is both more historically accurate AND easier to work with since I can eliminate the 'meta' scale and do the whole town at the micro-scale.

As I noted in a post above, I want my maps to print out complete on 8.5" x 11" sheet of paper so they can actually be used for a city-level campaign (involving Thieves and gangs).