*** March 2010 Mapping Challenge - The Town of Iwaizumi

[torstan]

We're very pleased to announce that this month's mapping challenge is in collaboration with Open Design - an ENnie award winning design company headed up by Wolfgang Baur. The challenge is to map a location for the patronage project The Red Eye of Azathoth. For this challenge the patrons and designers of the project have provided an art brief for the map. You will be required to work to this art brief for your submission to count as a valid entry.

You can find out more about the project here as well as through the KQ public reports and previews in these articles: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.

There are a number of prizes at stake:
• The winner receives the much coveted golden compass award.
• The winning map wil be published in the Red Eye of Azathoth.
• The winner will receive a pdf copy of the Red Eye of Azathoth.
• The winner will receive a year pdf subscription to Kobold Quarterly.

The judging conditions for this month's contest are slightly more complex than normal. There will be a public vote to decide the winner, however the designers of the Red Eye of Azathoth reserve the right to pick a separate winner. It is highly likely that these will coincide but in the event that they do not then the prizes will be divided. The winner of the public vote will get a gold compass. The map picked by the Open Design team will win the Kobold Quarterly subscription, the copy of Red Eye of Azathoth and have their map published in the adventure with full credits.

As with all challenges you must precede any map thumbnail with the tag:
### Latest WIP ###
for the thumbnail scraper to pick it up.

The challenge will close on the 27th of March. We're posting this nice and early to give everyone a good run at this.

Without further ado, here is the art brief for this month's challenge:

Map Brief, Town of Iwaizumi, 1287 C.E. (1287 A.D.)
Red Eye of Azathoth, Chapter 2

This chapter is set in Iwaizumi, a small town in the northeastern part of Honshu, the largest island of Japan. This part of the country is known as the “Tibet of Japan” (click for satellite image) – steep mountain valleys, rushing mountain streams, and winter snows make travel difficult.

Iwaizumi is intended to be a remote location in which the investigators are stuck by the winter snows. An inset region map showing the mountain road and valleys would be a nice touch but is not required by any means.

Iwaizumi is located at the junction of two rivers, one flowing east-west and one joining from the north. Two notable features outside Iwaizumi should be noted on the map, at least as directions:
1. the water-rich limestone caves of Ryusendo, which are up the northern river about an hour's march for armoured men.
2. Mount Sakainokami, southwest of town.

About 250 people live in Iwaizumi. The exact locations of buildings within the town are not important. For the sake of the plot, there must be the following items labeled or on a legend:

• a central square,
• a shrine to the local deities,
• a large fortified wooden house with guest quarters for the village governor, and
• twenty or so peasant houses clustered around the central square and governor’s house, including rice, wheat, and vegetable farmers, a beekeeper, sheep herders, and so forth.
• a mill,
• a tannery,
• a bridge over the east-west flowing main river, and
• a ford across the north-south flowing tributary.

The first attached image shows a recreated historic Japanese village as an example; it is intended to show the spacing between buildings, the locations of fields, etc.



The second shows typical pitched-roof houses/buildings.



For period or tone reference, the third image is a painting of samurai attacking a snowbound village.



The final map needs to be full letter page in size (8.5 inches by 11 inches) and 300dpi.

Good luck to all contestants!