My first map
With it being my New Year's Resolution to put my investment into CC3 to some use, I thought I would prostrate myself before the community with my first humble offering of the new setting for a mini-campaign I'm planning to run later in the year. All the plots centre around a town, Skaldreach, and the local silver mine, with some incidental adventures in the old, now abandoned mine, a local sorcerer building a new tower nearby (and draining the town of labour) and encouraging the players to explorer the dense and ominous forest - pretty much every cliché going, in fact :-).
Anyway, enough background, any tips, advice or thoughts would be _very_ welcome 'cos I'd love to be able to produce maps half as good as some others on this forum! Things I like are the representations of the farmland around the neighbouring villages and getting the lake nestled in the mountains, but I don't really like the roads or the uniformity of the grasslands. Any thoughts?
Many thanks,
Lee
P.S. Happy New Year!!
Anyway, enough background, any tips, advice or thoughts would be _very_ welcome 'cos I'd love to be able to produce maps half as good as some others on this forum! Things I like are the representations of the farmland around the neighbouring villages and getting the lake nestled in the mountains, but I don't really like the roads or the uniformity of the grasslands. Any thoughts?
Many thanks,
Lee
P.S. Happy New Year!!
Comments
Here are some ideas if you want to play around with it some more:
- I'd add a few low, green hills to the grassland area and perhaps some sprinkled single trees to give it variety.
- There's a grasslands symbol in the vegetation catalog (the very last one), that you could use to depict pastures and fields around the villages.
- Try changing the river and lake's fill style to the SS1A Water bitmpa fill - that might look nice too.
- Is the river running from the mountains all through the forest? A pity it's not visible for most of the way. I'd consider redoing the forest to show the river,
- I'd make the roads all the same color (dark brown) and differentiate their importance by the line width. Generally I prefer smooth paths for roads to fractal ones.
- I sprinkled some trees (one of the villages now even has a little orchard on the outskirts of its farmland) to break up the green space and a few grasslands symbols with a healthy dose of transparency seems to have helped. I finished it off with a dead forest near the old mine (I wonder if the players will connect the poisoned forest with the abandoned mine...?).
- I've changed the lake fill, as suggested, and changed the river colour to match (the fill style didn't quite work on the rivers - I can see it working on a zoomed in map where there is more detail in the river, though, and may use it on one of the village maps). A bit of splitting and grouping later and the river now tucks into the bottom of the lake rather than spurting out half way up, too.
- The river does run through the forest, but the players don't know exactly how or where, so I've deliberately hidden its route (and tributaries) under the forest canopy - I need to do a more detailed 'GM' map of the forest so I can locate all the Sylvan Gateways (magical portals to the Fey Realms) the rivers, clearings and other areas of note - but for this map, the only detail the players will have is that the forest is big and largely unexplored.
- The 'Straight to Smooth' tool was very helpful with the rivers and minor roads and I took your advice on the road colouring - I've left the transparency on the abandoned road up to the old mine and redrewn the main road as a wider path\polygon rather than a fractal.
Anyway, the map seems a lot more aesthetically pleasing now without being cluttered, and has even provided a few more ideas for the local economy and adventure seeds, so mucho thanks for the advice - I even got to play with a few more CC3 tools, which can only be good!Cheers,
Lee
Now to start on a map of the mine that looks hand drawn that I can give to the players. Pity I'm back at work and won't have much time to work on it :-(
Cheers,
Lee
I think it will be good if you post each time a new version of the map. It's difficult to make comparison if we only have the last version ;-).
Anyway, that's a good start. I like the style and the orchards details. Still, I have a few points:
- the compass is maybe a bit too large. Moreover, it does not have any useful indication on it (in particular, where is N? Top, bottom, left, ...?)
- the river looks strange in a few spots on the mountains, in particular where it flows over the mountain symbol. Try to move the mountains that are below the river.
- I think that your idea of handing out to the players a not-so-accurate map is great! This will add some flavour to the exploration. You say the forest is mainly unexploerd and this reflects in the inaccurate map. But in your map in fact the forest IS mapped... with a homogenous forest canopy that does not reflect "reality". You could maybe only outline the forest with trees, and then fade into an "uncharted forest" blank area... It's then the players' job to fill the blanks :-)
Of course, those are personal opinions. And sorry for the poor explanation of them ;-)
Regards,
AF
You're right that there's no text anywhere on the map yet and I'm planning to use the forest as a place to put a key - I have in mind a semi-transparent rectangular panel over some of the forest and some discreet numeric labels on the map, but I've not been very successful so far...
Many thanks for the feedback - I might have a go at tiering semi-transparent smooth polygons over the forest to slowly 'phase-out' the tree symbols the farther away from the settled lands the map goes. Sounds like a project for the weekend!
I much appreciate the feedback and suggestions,
Lee