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  1. #1
    Guild Apprentice surfarcher's Avatar
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    Post Road structure and representation...

    I've been working through RobA's "Using GIMP to Create an Artistic Regional RPG Map".

    He indicates that roads in the pre-modern area weren't straight.

    While that's true as a rule until about the 1950s there is a big exception to that. And that's where you had a major ancient empire that relied heavily on it's engineering core for support structures and occupied it's legions outside conflict for engineering construction (a way to prevent dissent - idle soldiers can foment all kinds of trouble). Obviously I'm talking about the Romans...

    My campaign is in the D&D 4e "Point of Light" setting and I have based a number of my concepts of Nerath on the Roman Empire. As a result the road system left behind by them features dead staright roads, unless insurmountable geographical factors dictate otherwise (given the use of magic this generally means something like an ocean in the way).

    Naturally these major byways don't link every town and villiage to every other - those are the kinds of wandering roads follow the path of least resistance that you would expect. But most large towns and all cities are on at least on of these imperial roads.

    The concern I have here is that representing these imperial roads in exactly the same way as non-imperial roads may look confusing and just plain wrong.

    So I'd love to hear any thoughts folks have on representing both styles of road on maps of this style.

    TIA for any and all constructive posts!
    -doug

  2. #2

    Post True to history, but...

    Yes, Roman roads tended to be straight, when they could be, except when close to extreme geography - mountains, rivers, canyons, etc. Such could be said of some meso-American road systems as well. By and large most societies did not build straight roads until late in the modern era.

    However, do all fantasy world, have a "Roman Empire" that built straight roads in the past - of course the answer is, it depends. Many fantasy worlds do not have an historical advanced technology culture that has fallen into ruin, yet still have some straight roads as left-over architecture.

    Comparing to Earth history, you have a point, and only limited, since not all fantasy based realms are based on Earth history, near Earth history... you can't depend upon that as a "trueism".

    Interesting thoughts, though.

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    Guild Apprentice surfarcher's Avatar
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    Cheers GP

    I'm the DM, cartographer and campaign designer so I have a free hand... Except that I am a slave to internal consistency

    Drawing parallels between Nerath and the Romans is handy in a lot of ways and the empire only left the local campaign area about 100 years ago so their roads are still very servicable.

    But I still have the problem of placing both types of road on my map, making them distinct from one another and still aesthetically pleasing

    Right now I am thinking a light fawn/brown dotted line for the non-imperial roads and the yellow/black dashed style for the imperial roads... And am hoping it won't be too garish
    -doug

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    Guild Artisan Juggernaut1981's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by surfarcher View Post
    Right now I am thinking a light fawn/brown dotted line for the non-imperial roads and the yellow/black dashed style for the imperial roads... And am hoping it won't be too garish
    Black & Yellow are the one of the highest contrast colour combinations, hence their use in things such as crash test simulations, road signs and measuring tapes.

    I'd suggest, solid and outlined. Local roads would get the "outline" and Imperial Roads would get solid.
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    Dash patterns work well for differentiating between trails, main roads, etc. you could even resort to the old double line like we use to depict highways now, rather than colour.

    -Rob A>

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    Guild Artisan Juggernaut1981's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by surfarcher View Post
    I've been working through RobA's "Using GIMP to Create an Artistic Regional RPG Map".

    He indicates that roads in the pre-modern area weren't straight.
    Speaking as the kid of an engineer who now works in an engineering-type company... straight flat roads are hard to make.

    The biggest issue is time. Sure, the Roman's built lots of straight roads across plains and rolling hills. They get to anything else and they have two options: cut a hole or fill a hole. To do either one you need to move a LOT of rock and dirt. Now, even with Bigby's Interposing Bulldozer you still get issues with filling in a valley/gorge/canyon/big hole until you have a flat surface.

    So the majority of roads, run all over the place, except when you get to nice plains/rolling hills and have a very fussy organised civilisation that feels the need to move large numbers of people around regularly (i.e. Armies)
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    Guild Apprentice surfarcher's Avatar
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    Cheers everyone!

    Quote Originally Posted by Juggernaut1981 View Post
    Speaking as the kid of an engineer who now works in an engineering-type company... straight flat roads are hard to make.

    The biggest issue is time. Sure, the Roman's built lots of straight roads across plains and rolling hills. They get to anything else and they have two options: cut a hole or fill a hole. To do either one you need to move a LOT of rock and dirt. Now, even with Bigby's Interposing Bulldozer you still get issues with filling in a valley/gorge/canyon/big hole until you have a flat surface.
    Yeah my understanding was they are damned hard to make. Since we are talking Romans - they didn't go for perfectly level over distance, just smooth and straight over distance and level across width. Considering it was all powered by the human back it's pretty damned impressive.

    Quote Originally Posted by Juggernaut1981 View Post
    So the majority of roads, run all over the place, except when you get to nice plains/rolling hills and have a very fussy organised civilisation that feels the need to move large numbers of people around regularly (i.e. Armies)
    Exactly where I was coming from. Those roads were built for armies and just happened to get used by everyone else. As a result they weren't always that useful to other folk. For example a good number of them in mountainous regions were unusable by merchants relying on livestock because the slopes they went up were dangerous even for soldiers on foot! And there's more. But the Legions' engineers neverthless made exceptionally straight (topview) roads.

    Even a very high level ritual caster would chew through a lot of time and components (=money) filling in even a medium gorge and I doubt it'd be perfectly flat afterwards (it'll settle over time). My thought was magic would simply be used for removal of rock and soil that wouldn't be viable by hand (think disintigrate) and to assist in support structure construction like bridges (yeah the Romans built those for their roads+armies too). So basically I've already elected to stay more or less with what the Romans did but to up the grand scale of some select structures to fit in with the scale of a fantasy world.

    Quote Originally Posted by Juggernaut1981 View Post
    Black & Yellow are the one of the highest contrast colour combinations, hence their use in things such as crash test simulations, road signs and measuring tapes.

    I'd suggest, solid and outlined. Local roads would get the "outline" and Imperial Roads would get solid.
    The yellow/black dash pattern was in RobAs tute. But I think you just sold me on solid & outline.

    I'm also liking the idea of basially treating the imperial roads as the FRPG world's freeways and the non-imperial one's as regular early medieval roads (connectors between lesser population centers). For me that fits well.

    As long as it's going to look right in the end

    Thanks again for sharing your ideas all!
    -doug

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    Guild Artisan Juggernaut1981's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by surfarcher View Post
    Even a very high level ritual caster would chew through a lot of time and components (=money) filling in even a medium gorge and I doubt it'd be perfectly flat afterwards (it'll settle over time). My thought was magic would simply be used for removal of rock and soil that wouldn't be viable by hand (think disintigrate) and to assist in support structure construction like bridges (yeah the Romans built those for their roads+armies too). So basically I've already elected to stay more or less with what the Romans did but to up the grand scale of some select structures to fit in with the scale of a fantasy world.
    As someone who has played more Wizards than any other class, I'd have been using a 6ft stack of Rock to Mud spells, not Disintegrate. Mountainside turns to mud, slides into valley, large rocks fall after, wait for spell to end AND REPEAT. It gets you a shorter mountain (which may be useful for garrisons/fortification/defensive position buildings) and gives you a taller valley (for your road).

    But then, I also was renowned for trying to solve combats by not actually having the combat... as evidenced by the Rock to Mud trick above...
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    Administrator Redrobes's Avatar
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    Most of the roman roads I see are pretty straight but not at all flat.

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    Guild Apprentice surfarcher's Avatar
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    This has turned into an interesting discussion!


    Juggernaut1981,
    Nice idea! Unfortunately Rock to Mud didn't make the cut to 4e but there's no reason it or something similar couldn't have been used by the engineering teams who built the roads.


    Everyone else,
    I'm enjoying the ideas and thoughts immensely!
    -doug

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