Lumadair and the Caves of Dread (Pencil Sketch annual)
Royal Scribe
🖼️ 280 images Mapmaker
Way back in March, I took a section of my campaign world called the Republic of Lumadair, and used a Fractal Terrains export of the coast to render it in three different ways in CC3+. One version was in this year's Parchment Maps style. Another was to used beveled shading as Ralf demonstrated in this video. And the third was to do it in Mike Schley's style.
I thought about creating a fourth version now using this month's Pencil Sketch style, but decided the scale of the other maps didn't work as well. The other maps were 6,109 x 2,445 miles! Even if I zoomed in to just include Lumadair and not the lands on nearby continents, that still would have required a map that was about 3,100 x 1,800 miles. So I decided to just do a section of Lumadair, the part where the nation's capital city is located.
For reference, here's that portion as exported from the Mike Schley version:
I love how this style can supplement other styles of maps. I had the idea that maybe the adventurers stumbled across someone else's sketch, like a treasure map. Or maybe they've been sent on a quest and they sketched this from a map in their benefactor's fortress.
With the other maps, I imported the Fractal Terrains coastline (lots of nodes!) as well some of the contour lines (tons more nodes!). For this map, I deliberately didn't do that. I imported a JPG bitmap of the Schley map as a drawing guide but then used the Land tool to manually redraw the portions of Lumadair, the southern continent (which is Lennox), and the islands. It's supposed to be someone's sketch, after all, and not an exact replica of every node!
This style has light mountains (just outlines) and dark ones (filled in). I wasn't sure if there was an expected usage for each, but I decided to use the light ones for the taller mountains, as if they were the snow-capped ones.
I added in a cave mouth and labeled it the "Caves of Dread." My thought is that the adventurers are starting in the southern continent's town of Avernol, and their goal is to get to the Caverns of Dread. Most likely, they'll book passage on a ship from Avernol to the capital of Lumadair and hike from there. (Whoever sketched this map didn't even know the name of the capital city.)
Anyway, my thanks to @C.C. Charron for another great addition to the annuals. I can imagine that game masters will have a lot of fun creating treasure maps and other handouts for their players with this style.
Comments
Oh! I think I just discovered something I didn't realize. Are we limited to only 25 albums in the galleries? I could have sworn that I had a "Republic of Lumadair" gallery but didn't see it. So I created a new album for this map and the previous ones. Now I see that I still only have 25 albums, with this new one pushing out whatever was the oldest.
Should I be putting more images in fewer albums? Is there a limit to the number of images per album, or the total number of images in one's gallery? And what happens to the ones in the oldest albums that got pushed out? (I still have everything on my hard drive, so nothing is lost -- just wondering.)
There shouldn't be a max limit, but I have currently set it to 25 images per page so people with slower or metered connections can still use the albums without having the entire internet thrown at them at once.
But I noticed that the gallery page itself seems to lack page navigation controls, so everything beyond the 25th gallery get hidden. Seems like something the coders of the gallery plugin forgot about and nobody noticed before now. All the galleries are there, but they're not accessible. I'll try to figure out a way to fix it when I get some time.
Ahhh, good, I was hoping it was something like that. Thank you!
Should be fixed now. Turns out that the gallery plugin interpreted the trailing page number (which you can see in many URL's for anything with more than one page) as an album ID, and also lacked the code for knowing the count of albums a user had beyond what is shown on the first page.
Added the necessary code to detect this misplaced page number now, so if I did everything correctly, the pagination on the gallery index page should now work fine.
I'll leave it up to you to decide if you really want that many individual galleries.
Thank you! I had created a gallery for each project but maybe that's not as useful for people viewing my stuff. I will ponder whether I should consolidate. Appreciate how quickly you were able to resolve this.
It's completely up to you how you group things.
I don't have that many maps to show, but I tend to group similar types of map - like cities, overland, and dungeon, though I do have folders for single projects as well.
I've grouped my Gallery maps by topics that I'll recognise and remember, which should also help guide anyone trying to look for something there as well, with the thumbnail image per topic. I don't think you can second-guess all the possible permutations others might find most useful for how to store maps on the Gallery, so I wouldn't worry over it unduly!
As most of my maps there are for the Atlas, there's an existing structure to follow with those anyway for me, storing them by region.
Very pleased this had been spotted as a problem and resolved, as it turns out I had a couple of folders on the "missing" page 2 that I'd completely forgotten were there! So thanks very much Royal Scribe and Monsen!