The city of Mogh Darul

Today’s post is an even shorter one, as I will just show you the finished version of the city map from the last post. The close-up of the temple on the left is gone and has been replaced with a map legend and some additional lore about the city. If you want to read the text check out the full resolution picture in the Gallery. Be aware though, that the text still contains the occasional mistake, as I didn’t get around to proofreading it. The legend as a whole was a bit of a rush job, and could be improved significantly, but this’ll have to do.

The map

Now, all I have to do is wait, and see how well I do. I won’t get first place, since there are quite few maps which look a lot better than mine, but competitions are always a great way to improve.

Littlebrook

Littlebrook is another small town from my D&D setting. The town itself hasn’t been relevant for the game as of yet, and it might never be so. However, it did give me the perfect opportunity to practice and learn. Specifically, I wanted to draw the map following this fantastic tutorial by Jonathan Roberts. The tutorial is written for Photoshop, but most of the aspects are easily translatable to GIMP.

And here’s the final product:

As you can see Littlebrook lies within a very hilly region with the occasional little forest between the hills. I like the way the hills and the forests turned out. I am, however, not too happy about the river. I, probably, should have snaked it more between the hills, rather than keeping it this straight. While I am never completely happy with any of my maps, I do very much like the overall look and colours of this one.  nice side benefit of this style is that it draws decent town maps relatively quickly, as it was far less time-consuming than my Stormcliff map.

Whereas my previous maps have all been initially drawn on paper, and then edited digitally, Littlebrook was drawn digitally from the get-go. The line work is still hand drawn though, as I made use of a Wacom Intuos tablet.

Following now are a few pictures of the first steps, as I would usually draw them on paper, but digitally this time. There’s hardly any difference.

The Sketch:

I know, my handwriting is horrible, but luckily that is not going to stay in the picture. Nothing is set in stone at this point, and can easily change in the next steps.

The Outlines:

After the sketch it is time to refine the outlines of the various shapes. You can see that some things moved around. There are more hills than on the initial sketch, and the tress are placed slightly differently. The town is already pretty much done at this point, as I wasn’t planning on adding any more detail than the simple black shapes. The roads have disappeared, but they will be added back in at a later stage.

The Details:

The detail lines will further enhance the outlines drawn previously, and give shape to everything. While previously all you had were random black lines, now the lines start to look like what they are supposed to look like. Usually I keep all the outlines I draw. In this case, however, I removed the outlines I had drawn for the hills and only relied on the detail lines. That is because the outlines I had drawn were too separated. Only using the detail lines makes it look like the hills are naturally flowing into each other.

This is usually the stage, at which point I would stop drawing on paper and scan the map to finish it digitally. When I draw on paper, I draw everything, including the detail lines by pencil first. Then I draw over the lines I want to keep with a black pen, and erase the pencil marks. There will always be a few marks and smudges left after erasing the pencil lines, but these can be edited out after scanning it in. In any way, both methods lead to very similar results, as you can see by comparing this to the scans from my previous posts.

I will definitely do more digital only drawings in the future. However, I don’t think I will completely switch to digital only, because it just does not feel the same as drawing on paper.

The Town of Stormcliff

Every D&D campaign needs a hub-city or town where the party can rest and gather their strength in-between adventures. After doing the continental and regional maps it was time to draw the map of Stormcliff, the party’s safe haven.

Above is a first sketch of Stormcliff. As the name suggests the town rests upon a cliff. Outside of town in the bay, there are three separate rock formations jutting out of the water, rising to the same height as the cliffs. These islands are connected to the rest of the town via a number of bridges.

Overall the sketch helped me get a good idea of the layout of the town, and was of great help whenever the party asked for directions. However, it was never meant to be the final version as there are quite a few aspects which I don’t like at all. For instance, while I wanted a hand drawn feel for the map the buildings just look horrible. Furthermore, to avoid empty space outside the town I pampered the area with farmland, and not in a particularly pretty way. Last, but not least, the town looks bigger than I wanted it to. Stormcliff is not meant to be a large city. It was supposed to be a smaller town, which would not overwhelm the players, but still offer them a few interesting opportunities for exploration.

As such, I set out to redraw the map. I opted to start from scratch and not simply change the look of the buildings from the sketch as I also wanted to draw the coastlines differently.

As you can see, I opened the bay up quite a bit, so I could increase the size of the islands. I also increased the size of the houses, so that there are fewer of them, thus reducing the perceived size of the town. Additionally, rather than having the outside plastered with farmlands, I opted to add additional features to provide a little more variety. For instance, there are now houses outside the city walls close to the gates not linked to any farmland, and there is a hill next to the town on the left. Moreover, the occasional tree dots the landscape.

As with my previous maps the line work is done by hand on a piece of paper, which is then scanned in. The colouring, shading and labels are added digitally, which resuled in the final map depicted below.

The shading further reinforces the impression that the sea-level is actually quite a bit lower than the town. The colours help with contrasting different parts of the town. For instance, to the right of the river there are more gray stone buildings in Stormcliff, indicating that the people living here are probably better off, than those living on the left side of the river.

To conclude, I vastly prefer the new version of Stormcliff. Even without the colouring I think it looks a lot better. For one of my future maps I plan on drawing a larger city as well. I do not know, however, when I will get around to it, as drawing city maps can be very time-consuming.

The Stormlands

After having done the continental map from my previous post it was time to zoom in a little and map out the starting region for the party. The good thing about having done the continental map first, was that the outline for the individual region was already there. All I had to do was zoom in.

However, the coastlines which looked good from far away, don’t hold up in this zoomed in perspective. Therefore, I printed the zoomed-in version, and used it as a guideline to redo the coastlines and fill in the details of the landscape.

The outline of the Stormlands hasn’t changed much, but the coastlines look a lot more natural now. I then went on to add and detail additional features of the map, such as the mountains, the forests, and the rivers. As the world is a fantasy setting and magic exists, I also wanted to add a fantastical feature to the map. That feature takes on the form of a floating forest, which can be seen on the left hand side, close to the coastline. The floating forest consists of islands of earth that have risen out of the ground and hover in mid-air. Right now, it is difficult to pick out the islands as floating in the air, but that was something I was hoping to remedy later when adding shading.

With the new line work completed it was time to scan the image in and do the rest digitally, using GIMP. And here’s the final product:

Overall I am quite happy with how the map turned out. The shading of the Floating Forest helps provide the impression that these are islands hovering in mid-air. Obviously the name right next to the feature helps as well. As I haven’t mapped out the neighbouring regions to the Stormlands yet, I covered those areas up with clouds focussing the view on the Stormlands alone.

If you are looking at the map and think there’s something funny about it, you would be right. The problem with the map is that different features are drawn in different perspectives. The forests are clearly drawn from a top-down view, whereas the mountains are drawn from a more tilted perspective. This conflict gives the map this funny feeling and is definitely something I have to work on in the future.

Welcome to Tilby’s Topography

Introduction

Hello there, and welcome to Tilby’s Topography, a place for Dungeons & Dragons related fantasy maps, and the occasional other stuff. I discovered the joy for mapping during various stunts as a game master for a variety of RPG campaigns. I recently decided to take mapping a bit more seriously and try to become really good at it. This blog will serve as my way to chronicle and catalogue my progress in this endeavour.

First Map

To start the blog off I’ll showcase the initial map I drew for my current D&D campaign. Welcome to the continent of Arudien:

Generally, starting off a campaign in a homebrew setting, does not require this type of “macro” preparation. Having an idea of the starting village and its immediate surroundings gets the job done just as well. The purpose of this continental map, however, was to provide myself and the players with an overview of the current political situation. As such, the only topographical features of the map are major mountain ranges, rivers, lakes, and cities. The initial map was hand drawn using pen & paper and then scanned to create a digital copy (can be seen below). I then used Gimp to create and add all the additional effects. Overall I was very happy with how it turned out.