Kingdom of Sundaris and the City State of Tarkuth

[Jason Stevenson]

This is my first digital country map for a D&D setting I'm hoping to use some day. The map shows the kingdom of Sundaris, a bankrupt nation recently taken over by an expanding empire, and the city state of Tarkuth, a micro-nation with exceptional trade routes and an inter-dimensional rift at its heart. The map shows major settlements, elevation, general environment such as woodland and marshes, main roads and a few labelled lakes and mountain peaks. I had a lot of fun making this and learned a lot.

The process of making it involved producing an initial randomly generated coastline and height map thanks to this amazing tool: https://topps.diku.dk/torbenm/maps.msp . With this I drew out elevation levels by hand in Clip Studio Paint, added rivers based on the terrain and elevation, placed city markers based on their surroundings (close to rivers/lakes, on the coast, in bays, near to woodlands, etc.), and added layer patterns for the forests and marshes and erased the areas I didn't want the pattern to be (I later learned I could have used a layer mask which is a lot easier and means not worrying about mistakes). This region is near to the equator, is heavily forested and as such has a hot and humid environment. This influenced the placement of cities as many would be close to the shore as to get the sea breeze. The key, information boxes and map labels I added in Photoshop as Clip Studio doesn't let me bend and arc words, I also find Photoshop easier to use when organising text or neatly formatting things. The names of cities and terrain features are primarily based on the languages and settlements in and around the Middle East and India.

(Sorry the image file is so large, I may have gone a little over the top on the canvas size and resolution)

[Redrobes]

Thats a great map. My only criticism is that there is no antialiasing in most of it. For example where you have the words and fonts in particular the edges of them are jagged with the pixellated rendering. I dont know why that might be the case since almost all paint packages render fonts in particular with antialiased stroke. Photoshop obviously does do antialiased font rendering so I am unsure why it is this way. In any case if you want you can render the whole map twice the size and then blur it slightly and then reduce it in half and then it should fix all that up. If your text has been baked into the bitmaps by this point then your out of luck and maybe something to investigate for next time.

The style and colour and text placement etc are all really good.

[Jason Stevenson]

Thats a great map. My only criticism is that there is no antialiasing in most of it. For example where you have the words and fonts in particular the edges of them are jagged with the pixellated rendering. I dont know why that might be the case since almost all paint packages render fonts in particular with antialiased stroke. Photoshop obviously does do antialiased font rendering so I am unsure why it is this way. In any case if you want you can render the whole map twice the size and then blur it slightly and then reduce it in half and then it should fix all that up. If your text has been baked into the bitmaps by this point then your out of luck and maybe something to investigate for next time.

The style and colour and text placement etc are all really good.

Thanks, I see what you mean. I still have the psd file with separated text and image layers so I can go back and look into it. It's probably just a box that was unticked that I didn't notice. I'll keep it in mind for future maps.

[Naima]

This is my first digital country map for a D&D setting I'm hoping to use some day. The map shows the kingdom of Sundaris, a bankrupt nation recently taken over by an expanding empire, and the city state of Tarkuth, a micro-nation with exceptional trade routes and an inter-dimensional rift at its heart. The map shows major settlements, elevation, general environment such as woodland and marshes, main roads and a few labelled lakes and mountain peaks. I had a lot of fun making this and learned a lot.

The process of making it involved producing an initial randomly generated coastline and height map thanks to this amazing tool: https://topps.diku.dk/torbenm/maps.msp . With this I drew out elevation levels by hand in Clip Studio Paint, added rivers based on the terrain and elevation, placed city markers based on their surroundings (close to rivers/lakes, on the coast, in bays, near to woodlands, etc.), and added layer patterns for the forests and marshes and erased the areas I didn't want the pattern to be (I later learned I could have used a layer mask which is a lot easier and means not worrying about mistakes). This region is near to the equator, is heavily forested and as such has a hot and humid environment. This influenced the placement of cities as many would be close to the shore as to get the sea breeze. The key, information boxes and map labels I added in Photoshop as Clip Studio doesn't let me bend and arc words, I also find Photoshop easier to use when organising text or neatly formatting things. The names of cities and terrain features are primarily based on the languages and settlements in and around the Middle East and India.

(Sorry the image file is so large, I may have gone a little over the top on the canvas size and resolution)

Very good map.

[Hieronymus_Blaze]

A lot of effort and research went into this. Nice job!

[Ilanthar]

I agree with Redrobes! Great map, but it would be even better with an antialias.