Limited Warfare
jslayton
Moderator, ProFantasy Mapmaker
Cartographer's Guild is having their monthly(ish) challenge at Current Mapping Challenge (cartographersguild.com) and were a bit low on entries this time around, so I whipped one up:
The topic was "Passage of Time" and my entry is inspired by current world events.
Yeah, not a great effort. If you decide to vote over there at the end of the month, be sure to vote for the folks who invested time and talent into what they did! If you want to enter your own map, do so as soon as you can!
Comments
I think with a few trees and roads in and out it will probably do pretty well :)
And it's so long since I last did a challenge, Joe, that I can't remember when they start and end.
It doesn't help the starting and ending times stuff because the two challenges are staggered (start of the month for the regular and mid-month for the Lite) and they sometimes will stretch two or three months if the community leaders are busy.
I had considered putting trees in there, but I realized that it would be a pain to put in dead trees in the same spots. I need a tool to let me replace specific symbols with other symbols. The Symbol Manager will let me replace all of the symbols of a specific type and that might be good enough for this purpose, but it wasn't what I really wanted. There also isn't a great diversity of dead and dying trees in the catalogs and this was not a particularly lengthy effort where I could spend a long time trying to go find some.
So this one ends, or is supposed to end on September 30th?
Oh I see...
The pain with automatic replacing symbols in the same spots is that it is vulnerable to the scale and origin of the symbols you switch. Most of them are not designed to allow perfect replacement, so even doing it automated usually means things doesn't look quite right. In most cases, when a style have both living and dead trees, the dead trees aren't the exact same tree as the living one (but without leaves), but rather a new tree the artist drew.
What about using one of the dark terrains from Darklands around the ruined city area to give it a darker more ruined feel.
Using stuff from Darklands would require that I have Darklands on this machine. This installation has a rather strange and limited assortment of things on it and that effort was a quick map while I was thinking about it (before I completely forgot yet again).
As far as symbol replacement goes, I do agree that direct replacement can have significant pitfalls, especially if trying to go across styles. The issue of quality artwork also comes into play here, as artists have very limited time to generate a symbol set and by the time that n instances of "tree" and "forest" and "building" are done, there is little time (or, really interest) for generating n instances of "sickly tree", "winter tree", or "dead tree".
It would be fun if there could be a way of procedurally generating some of these items, but that sort of thing would really require 3D (or clever 2D) model components with specialized rules for combining to generate a result. HOUSE gets part of the way there on my wish list, but the engine behind it is really a masterful blend of technical coding and clever artwork that really can't be used for things like trees and forests and towns. It's historically been really hard to beat a good artist because they have internalized the rules of form and balance, but I fear that the last couple of years have shown that it's getting pretty easy to steal an artist's style (especially the prolific ones) with accessible software.
You could just use a dark brown shading.
Yep, changing the shading might be good. Putting a semi-transparent darkish gray blob around the village over the desert fill on the right-hand side might indicate more of a "recent fires" vibe. I would have put a road into town with a bridge if I'd been able to see some appropriate roads, but getting a good match to the hand-drawn styling of the paths in town with just the basic CC3+ tools is a bit more difficult that I was willing to do. Plopping the tower down in the center of the road would push harder of the notion of disdain for and control of locals, I think.
I like the map and the idea. Also thanks for the distraction of doing cavern maps.