July Entry: The Seven Dials

[ravells]

I thought I wasn't going to have any time this month for the challenge, but a virus has bought me a day so I put this together today.

From a technical standpoint I wanted to put my budget vector drawing program, Serif Drawplus, through its paces and I was pleasantly surprised at the results. It's incredibly easy to use (I have illustrator but all the options scare the beejeebers out of me, so I hope to 'graduate' to it once I feel I am proficient with Drawplus). It could use some post work (the mountain textures in the north are really badly pixellated), but I thought I'd post it as is.

Mapwise, I went for something artsy and illustrative, but in retrospect I wish I'd chosen a smaller scale. My initial idea was to have a country in which all the main characters of popular fairy stories lived. So on the street corner you might see the little match girl and there would be a house with a big beanstalk growing out of it (owned by Jack's mother). In the end I found a fill texture I fell in love with (the land texture), but it required a much bigger scale, so I made up my own fairy tale to fit the texture around which everything else was built.

The story is 'The Seven Dials'. Kendra and her brother Tom live in Andor's reach. Tom is Kidnapped and Kendra sets out to find him. She follows his trail across the land (apologies for the lack of imagination for the naming of the regions) and along the way she learns various magic numbers but without knowing their purpose. When, after many adventures, she finds Tom at Eastwatch castle, he is imprisoned. The dungeon door requires the correct combination from seven dials which are set within it. These are the magic numbers that Kendra has learned which she uses to free Tom and escape.