The Village of Hanroads

[Piscivorous]

I constructed this map about six months ago for my D&D campaign. I couldn't find a village map to steal, um er, borrow that had the feel I was looking for, so I made this over the course of about 6 hours over two days. The PCs were just traveling through, but were hired by an NPC, to look into the murder of a townsman that was being pinned on an employee of his.
My first step was to generate a random village layout using RPG Citymap Generator. Once I got a village layout with roads and streams I liked, I imported it to Photoshop. I created my layers and moved the import background layer to the top, while dropping the opacity. First things was the grassland background which I basically just painted in using a terrain texture. Using pasis' excellent terrain creation layer, I created the forests, hills, streams, roads and farmland. I then labeled everything. I then moved the background back to the bottom.
Once I was satisfied with the look, I saved it and imported the map into Fractal Mapper 8. I created a png of the original RPG Citymap map and stretched it over the Photoshop map, then dropped its opacity so I could see where the buildings needed to be placed. Using building pngs from Dundjinni and that nice Schley compass rose, I set up the buildings (adding a few more where needed to round out the village and fill it out.
The only drawback to using pre-made building pngs is that if they have been shadowed, they become a little less artistic when they need to be rotated because a global shadow effect is lost.

Anyway, here is the village of Hanroads.

[arsheesh]

Hey that turned out rather nicely, especially for only 6 hours of work.

Cheers,
-Arsheesh