Doheag - SS5 Walled City - First Attempt

I was quite excited when SS5 - Cities of Schley came out.  This was my first attempt at a large city, using those styles and symbols.  Not a lot of terrain here, but the focus was on building the inside of the walled city.  As I've learned more about the effects, I began changing those around, which started to give it more depth and color.  I realize that the text is small, but this large city was broken into four parts for Roll20 and used there.  I separated out the numbers and legend and used them on the GM layer (rendered as a separate map).  That way, the GM can add his layers to Roll20 after the map is laid down. 

I welcome any critiques or suggestions, and I will likely update the map with those as soon as I can.  So far, this is as well as I can do alone.  Thank you for all the advice and support on this forum. 

Doheag - The sacred inner city of Doheag, and the surrounding town and countryside is one of the oldest continuously inhabited locations in Sycharia and the center of the Doheaga religion. 

Doheag City.fcw
High Resolution Image - Doheag City
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Comments

  • MonsenMonsen Administrator 🖼️ 46 images Cartographer
    Map looks very nice.

    My main critique is the layout. Since city walls will always be something that is added to an existing settlement, they will need to follow the city limits, which would never have evolved to be nice and rectangular. There are usually also terrain features that forces the layout of the city wall.
    The layout of the buildings do look a tad bit too organized as well.
    And since a city wall was always built for defensive purposes, the city wanted everyone to live inside the city walls (and the people wanted to live within the safety of the walls), it typically meant that any space inside the city walls were taken advantage off to the full extent possible, packing things tightly. Some special sections (like your walled of inner area and walled of mansions) might be able to keep their terrain, but the rest of the inside of the walls would generally be filled up.

    Of course, you may have in-game reasons for why this city didn't evolve like a typical city, it is your city after all, but if you do, I always recommend giving the reason a second think-over to decide if these really are valid reasons.
  • Thank you, Monsen. Just a thought, what if there was NO wall? The most important part of this city is the religious center, anyway.
    By the way, I used to live in Italy and that thought about the organic growth of a city and its walls never occurred to me. :(

    And, by the way, I LOVE your mines. I was told that I had to make a dwarven mine, and then I found your wonderful artwork.
  • MonsenMonsen Administrator 🖼️ 46 images Cartographer
    A city without a wall does grow a bit differently, because there isn't the same pressure to stay within the walls. The city certainly won't be rectangular, but without space restrictions, people will be more likely to build in the outskirts because they can more easily fit in a larger building there than in the center.

    The mines are not mine. I can't draw to save my life. I can put it together to decent maps in CC3+, but I am not capable of making artwork myself.
  • jslaytonjslayton Moderator, ProFantasy Mapmaker
    The plan of a a city has a lot to do with its reason for being there and how it came to be. If a city is built all at once according to a plan, it might well be nicely laid out with square or star-shaped walls. A classic example of this sort of planned development is Timgad in Africa (a basic Roman walled grid plan that spilled into chaos outside the walls). The planned area is usually fairly small (Timgad was planned for about 15 000 according to its Wikipedia page). Note that walls are only useful if you're expecting attacks or want to control the population of the city.
    For cities that grow organically over time around some resource (say, the lowest fordable point on a river), the street pattern is more likely to look like the wandering of cows (minimal energy paths converging on the central resource) and walls are more likely to be generally roundish if present. Organic cities also tend to develop multiple centers over time as the population grows.
    I recommend looking at the cores of the some of the old cities around the world. You'll see wide variation in street pattern and walls due largely to geography, history, and technology of the location. We don't build physical walls much anymore because high mobility, flying things, and massive available firepower tend to make them irrelevant. You will still find walls for population control, though.
  • Monsen, oops. Would have been great to make those, though. Sometimes I think I have the right person but I'm terrible with names. So, I removed the wall. With the exception of some roads to nowhere that need to be fixed and adjusting some terrain, I think it now looks a little more like a town built around the religious city center. I do like this concept much better.

    Jslaton, wonderful historical example. Thank you for that and the advice. Now I'm thinking of a town/city as more of an organic, living thing that I can try to find examples of. I should have paid more attention to my geography teachers.
  • MonsenMonsen Administrator 🖼️ 46 images Cartographer
    I think it looks much better without the wall.

    Walls are quite expensive to build too, so unless there is a good reason for it, leaving it out is the more reasonable alternative. You should probably remove the gatehouses too though, doesn't make sense with a gate everyone can go around.
  • The gates must be for aesthetic purposes only. You can't see it, but they're covered in flowers and decorative ceramics. (JK)
  • Got very confused by all the talk of walls that aren't there, till I realised the map must have been updated since those comments were written... The walled temple precinct was all I could see, and that made perfect sense to me, because it was quite a common occurrence in ancient cities especially.

    And the mines would perhaps be Munson's Mines from three years ago in the Cartographer's Annual.
  • Thanks, Wyvern. As people give me critiques, I try to make changes to the map as soon as I can. The links to the maps here automatically update when I update my map in Google Drive. I still have work to do on this one since I removed the wall.
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