Overland Country Map WIP

Submitted for your approval... LOL! Looking for comments, suggestions, or critiques from the CC3+ mapping family. I'm pretty happy with it, but there's always room for improvement.

So that's one (mostly) down, only another 50ish to go...!

Comments

  • DogtagDogtag Moderator, Betatester Traveler
    edited October 2017
    Nice! I particularly like how you "faded" the surrounding areas to focus on the primary map area. I do similar things with my floor plans but now I need to start thinking about doing it for regional maps too. The general lay of the land, settlements, and areas of interest just seem to invite adventure and curiosity. The names are pretty good too. Bravo, sir, bravo. Thanks for sharing!

    Some questions/suggestions:
    • While I really like that faded surrounds technique, maybe consider reducing the fade a bit to give the surrounds a touch more color and detail? I think it looks good now but I'm wondering if it might look better if the surrounding areas were a touch more visible.
    • The red border along the west and southwest is dotted but the other borders are solid. Is that intentional? For example, do the different styles indicate particular things, like an accepted vs disputed border? If not, I recommend either picking one style and sticking with it, or use the two styles to identify different types of borders.
    • On the subject of borders, apart from the northern border, they seem strangely straight and arbitrary. To me, it makes more sense for the borders to follow natural dividers, like mountains and water, or non-natural but naturally-dividing, like roads or walls. This jumps out at me especially (but not only) in the northeast, with the hills south of Wildmount. There's a small triangle of land between the road south and the mountains that seems like it really ought to be part of Vhiatany, especially since the road has a small curve into that area but there don't appear to be any major settlements or routes from the neighboring land where those neighbors could enforce the border. Similarly (but again, not only) the areas west and south of Brookside, in the southwest.
    My personal litmus test for a map is, does it make me want to explore and adventure there? And, yeah, this qualifies with flying colors! Plop my character down in Oakton, Riverport, or Woodsman's Pass, and show me to the nearest tavern to start!

    I'm eager to see more. Rock on!  \m/

    Cheers,
    ~Dogtag
  • ScottAScottA Surveyor
    Thanks, Dogtag! I appreciate your comments. A few quick answers:

    The dotted vs solid borders: this nation is part of an empire, so the dotted border leads into another country that is also a part of the larger empire, while the solid border is to neighboring, non-empire nations. It makes more sense seen in whole on the continent map! I do see that I need to trim and fix up the borders some, though, now that I'm seeing them at this size (not always easy to spot things in the mapping screen in CC3+!).

    Most of the nations have odd borders, following rivers, coastlines, mountain ranges, etc. There is one with a very specific geometric shape pretty much in the center of the continent, and this is a neighboring state, thus the sharp edges on the one side, and another part of the empire on the other.

    I'll have to play with the opacity of the mask around the area and see how it looks with less fade.
  • DogtagDogtag Moderator, Betatester Traveler
  • This map is fantastic! Are all of those fills part of Herman Weilink? I've never really payed attention to the fills, other than the farmlands, scrub and such... this makes me want to go back and take a look at them! I also love the shading of the outside territories to bring the main portion of the map into the central view... ingenious!

    The only, only thing I would suggest for this map: I noticed you fractalized most of your rivers, but not all of them. Slumbrous Beck and Clax Creek seem a little too smooth in comparison to the rest of the water ways... or are these perhaps man made?

    Otherwise, I doff my cap to you, Sir!
  • ScottAScottA Surveyor
    Thanks, LadyStorm!

    Well... yes and no. The fills are all Herman Weilink, but I've edited some of them to create my own (so I guess they are HW-based). Like the autumn forest is the HW forest but I overlayed a photograph of a real forest with autumn coloring and then decreased its opacity and added blur until I still had the colors but not the images of the individual trees. The badlands fill I created with the HW badlands, an aerial photo of a real badlands area again with lowered opacity until just the texture remained, and HW hill symbols with a custom color and adjusted XY levels so that they were tall and pointy yet still rounded on top. I've got probably another dozen similarly customized HW fills I used in my big world map.

    I may have missed fractalizing a river or two. I'll check them out. I'm actually not 100% sure I like them fractalized vs their original smooth lines. Fractalization feels like it fits my world better than smooth, but some of the fractalizing needs adjusting as you end up with some unrealistic sharp angles for a river! So still not sure if I should stick with fractal rivers or make them all smooth again....
  • ScottAScottA Surveyor
    edited October 2017
    ...and I think there's so much stuff in this map because it is the home-base for my ongoing campaign (Winterhaven is their base -- I posted a picture of that map a little while ago), so the players have spent the most time in this area.
  • Wow, this is neat. I like that fade technique for the central campaign area. Is that something you plan to remove if the players explore a faded region?
  • ScottAScottA Surveyor
    This is just one nation on my continent map, so each one looks like this. As they cross country borders there will be another full map of that nation.
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