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Thread: WIP: Sankhamn area

  1. #1
    Guild Applicant
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    Wip WIP: Sankhamn area

    Life does have a tendency to get in the way, so my first WIP thread does come a considerable amount of time after my introduction post.

    At any rate, the map is for a campaign world that I'm developing while GMing D&D 3.5. The area in question is a cape or peninsula divided from the rest of the mainland by mountains. It contains one major town, some smaller settlements, a lot of forest (apart from the area around the large town) and a fairly large swamp on the western part of the area.

    The style of the map at the moment is very much black and white, and utilizing various symbols and brushes that I found on the forum here. I haven't been able to find any information of good ways to show swamps on maps, so I improvised using various types of tree symbols to denote the differences. If anyone has better ways to do this, I'm all ears.

    The somewhat uneven lines leading along the coast and north from the town of Sankhamn are roads, that definitely need to be cleaned up and made clearer - at least one person has asked if they're rivers, probably a lot due to the uneven thickness.

    I also haven't put in any rivers yet - there should be something like it leading into the swamp area, and possibly inside the swamp as well.

    The main problem I find with the map at this point is that with all the tree symbols and the like, it just feels too busy, and it's easy to miss the more important town/settlement symbols - I should also label more of the settlements, but I decided to hold off on that until I've made some more decisions on the general style and what to do with the busy feel.

    Ideally, I'd like the map to retain somewhat of a hand-drawn feel - something that can be used both as a reference for me and as a handout to the players (though I'd obviously be using some layers to hide things that shouldn't be on the map their characters would have).
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  2. #2
    Community Leader Gandwarf's Avatar
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    Nice map so far. I like the symbols you are using and the swamp area is great.
    You might want to put in some more mountains and crowd them together. It doesn't look like a mountain range to me, but rather a collection of lone mountains.

    The same goes for the forest. It could use more symbols. If you don't want to put in anymore trees you could also drop the idividual symbols and draw areas of forest (like a texture). Not sure how that would look, but you could experiment.

    To make the city and towns pop out you could try things like adding a glow effect or giving the symbols color.

    Personally, I would make the roads dotted.

    Have some rep for posting your first map.
    Check out my City Designer 3 tutorials. See my fantasy (city) maps in this thread.

    Gandwarf has fallen into shadow...

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