The Library of Crevan: Isometric fun with John Speed
I love the John Speed style, but I was never quite satisfied with my trials with the style. In particular, I found it very hard to align the buildings/walls with the streets: no matter what I tried, it always came out wonky.
I was playing around a bit with the various Annuals, and I found the isometric dungeon one. I played around with it, and then I found the command to draw an isometric grid on a sheet. Something clicked, and this is the result!
I started out with a layout on graph paper. The concept is loosely inspired by the fortified church of Biertan -- but of course all angles are straight, because that's much easier to do in isometric perspective. The building is a temple/library for the god of knowledge in my Streamdales campaign, aiming to contain the sum of all human knowledge. It is built somewhere out in the boonies, fortified with walls/ramparts to keep any book-burning heathens out!
I created a sheet with an isometric grid, and experimented with the sizing of the John Speed symbols to fit them right into the grid. Using the symbols (and some anchor-lines) I created the building, with some polygons in white to hide stuff that would be invisible under the roof etcetera. I created a lot of sheets to keep the ordering of the symbols correct -- nothing looks as jarring as a wall that ends 'flat' on the floor!
I placed this isometric view of the library in the top right corner, and created a top-down view of the grounds in the lower left corner. A dagger and book (symbols of Crevan) next to that, and next to that the key. A flavour-text in the top left corner rounds it out.
I'm pretty pleased with the result: the style is really attractive for these kinds of 'birds eye view' of places!
A slightly larger (920 x 760) version can be found here.
I was playing around a bit with the various Annuals, and I found the isometric dungeon one. I played around with it, and then I found the command to draw an isometric grid on a sheet. Something clicked, and this is the result!
I started out with a layout on graph paper. The concept is loosely inspired by the fortified church of Biertan -- but of course all angles are straight, because that's much easier to do in isometric perspective. The building is a temple/library for the god of knowledge in my Streamdales campaign, aiming to contain the sum of all human knowledge. It is built somewhere out in the boonies, fortified with walls/ramparts to keep any book-burning heathens out!
I created a sheet with an isometric grid, and experimented with the sizing of the John Speed symbols to fit them right into the grid. Using the symbols (and some anchor-lines) I created the building, with some polygons in white to hide stuff that would be invisible under the roof etcetera. I created a lot of sheets to keep the ordering of the symbols correct -- nothing looks as jarring as a wall that ends 'flat' on the floor!
I placed this isometric view of the library in the top right corner, and created a top-down view of the grounds in the lower left corner. A dagger and book (symbols of Crevan) next to that, and next to that the key. A flavour-text in the top left corner rounds it out.
I'm pretty pleased with the result: the style is really attractive for these kinds of 'birds eye view' of places!
A slightly larger (920 x 760) version can be found here.
Comments
Ken
I'm just a bit surprised by the lack of any economic buildings. As it is it looks like it's situated in a major town. A realistic religious centre would have many extra buildings to take care of visitors and supply basic food and goods. The plan of St. Gall monastery is a good example of this. This is just nitpicking, of course, for a fantasy campaign with create food spells and such, this works really well.
I also edited the text a bit so that it wouldn't fall across the keep anymore.
Of course, BlindMapmaker is right that a temple/monastery/library like that will need a lot of support structures to be able to exist. And yes, the main library building is surrounded by farms, orchards and small cottages for visiting scholars. I decided against drawing these because of space considerations: I wanted to focus on the main keep because that's where the action will take place in my game.
(Also, the imperial military are quite allergic to non-military organisations having (access to) a keep that could withstand a siege -- because of reasons. The ramparts are meant to keep a semi-determined band of hooligans out, not a disciplined army. That means only the keep needs protection, and the supporting infrastructure is of secondary importance.)
And moving the text a bit made it even better.
I like the parchement version, perhaps some transparency effect on the light gray fills to make the texture of the parchement see through?
Btw is there any reason for the filling of the ramparts on the isometric view? The main building isn't...
I've kept the text trimmed, and, with the excellent help of Joachim, I managed to get the effect on the top-down view of the keep that I wanted. I also added a black glow to the top-down rampart, which gives it a bit more 'definition'.
I gave the ramparts a grey color to differentiate them from the keep. Without it, the isometric view contains a lot of parallel lines on the side that make it hard to see what is what.
So now I have this!
~Dogtag
If you are going to use a lot of symbols, you can also edit the actual symbol catalog (or a copy of it) to remove the background before even placing them. If so, just edit the symbol from the symbol manager and delete the white background there (Here you don't have to explode them first).
If you generally have many of the same symbol, you can also edit them form the symbol manager in the actual map as well, this is quicker if you have a lot of the exact same symbol, and not too many different ones.