Hills and Swamp 3x3

[BeZurKur]

I'll be posting here as I go with a brief rundown on my steps. This is by no means a tutorial because the truth is: I have no freaking clue of what I'm doing! Here is some background to what I'm trying. I'm running an online game for 4e D&D. I first drew the map of the area the game will take place and showed it during character generation. You can see it here.

The players then decided they were going to base their operation from the small village of Kyndale. For the first session, I drew an area map posted below. I didn't post it before because it was a quick job that heavily borrowed elements from the first and didn't have much to contribute.

After the first session, the players determined they will explore the Twilight Swamp. You can see it to the southwest of Kyndale. Now I'm off to drawing that map. However, for this one, I wanted to do something different than the hand-drawn parchment style of the earlier two. I checked out Google maps and other drawn maps for that scale -- approximately 3x3 miles. From Google maps, terrain has shadows and discernible ridges. Forest show as textured bumps with shadows too. Other cartographers went with a 3D look. Now I had a direction.

I first considered doing the map with a 3D program and taking a snapshot from above, but the terrain didn't look good overhead. Shooting it from a different angle looked a lot better, but it was useless as a map. I don't know if it will work, but I'm going to try taking the pictures of the hills from a slight angle then dropping them into Gimp and tweaking from there. Below are some 3D symbols of a few hills. Over the weekend, I will draw four more and see what I can do in Gimp with it. This may work or be a complete waste of time. We'll see.