[WIP] The Griffon's Eyrie Redux: Spectrum Overland
Royal Scribe
🖼️ 344 images Mapmaker
Last month, I mapped a Griffon's Eyrie using Darkland Overland. I was looking for a little distraction today and decided to revisit it using the Spectrum Overland style.
Still a work in progress -- I want to add more trees, and I haven't had a chance to look at it closely enough to see if there are weird sorting issues or things I need to cover up with trees. But anyway, here it is. Everything comes from Spectrum Overland (even the nesting material) except the eggs are from Creepy Crypts.
Then I decided to see what a nighttime version would look like. This brings in a Starfield bitmap from Cosmographer.
And for something a little more galactic, here's the Hubble bitmap fill from Cosmographer.
Comments
At this scale, maybe it’s more of a roc’s eyrie.
Get some magma flowing under there, and it's a perfect god's frying pan - breakfast time already 😉.
And now I'm wondering if instead of being a griffon or roc's eyrie, maybe it's a wyvern's?
Haven't had much time to get back to it, but here's a slight tweak. Added some trees, made the sky bluer, but the big change was to the lake. I wasn't fond of how it looked like the waterfall stuck into the lake, so now the river pools into a lake but then continues as a river until rushing rapids leads to a waterfall off the cliff.
I was going to comment on this, but you were quicker!
Usually, a river flowing between mountains, hills etc is a more interesting sight than one flowing "from the mountain".
Except perhaps for Mike Schley's icon, which has a waterfall flowing from the mountain.
p.s. check the trees (and palms) in the lower left corner, some of them are being swallowed by the green hill.
Thank you, good eye!
Made some adjustments, including (if this doesn't step on any toes) changing it to be a wyvern's eyrie. Fixed some trees on the wrong sheet, and decided to change the sea at the base on the cliffs so that's it's only off to one side, with jungle on the other side.
Adjusted the nighttime one, too. Previously, I mimicked night by adding the SOLID 30 fill over everything. This time I used lighting effects instead with a 65% ambient light. That allowed me to add a little extra light over the eggs. It's subtle, maybe too subtle to notice (though it's a bit more apparent when compared to a version that has that turned off). I had a moon but I didn't care for it, so I removed it. Does anyone know if there are crescent moon symbols? My campaign world has three moons, but I wouldn't want them to always all be full.
Here it is with the galactic night sky.
And just so you can see it with and without the extra light over the eggs, here's a side by side comparison with the light symbol sheet hidden and unhidden.
A better map already, simply for the name-change, of course 😉.
The sea looks a bit odd now though, as if it's actually a sea of mist, not water. Previously, the base of the cliffs had hints of white about them, a little like spray, and the sea surface had some texture to it. Now it just seems oddly textureless and flat.
For the crescent moon, we've had this discussion before, sort-of, in regard to using the CA22 Star Systems dynamic-lighting planet symbols. It's not really possible to use the dynamic lighting to create a proper crescent, though you can get a crude earthlit-crescent-ish effect, using a negative value for the Global Sun's Inclination (try around -20 to -40 degrees). Beyond that, you could simply take a suitable flat planet image, even a photo of Earth's Moon, and create a mask for the unlit part of the crescent using one of the darker Solid bitmap fills.
Ahhh, I think I drew the water too far under the cliffs for the glow to show. I will try redrawing it.
Not sure I want a moon with this map but I have an idea that I will experiment with….
Here's the daytime with the redrawn water:
And here it is at night with a kludgy crescent moon. I couldn't find moon symbols in Cosmographer that I really liked, so this is a public domain image from NASA. It's a full moon, but then I put the SOLID 80 fill on top of the entire moon on a sheet called MOON PHASE. Then I added the Color Key Cutout effect to that sheet and drew a circle with a width of 10 over the part of the moon that I wanted to show, so that it would cut out the portion of the SOLID 80 that I didn't want. Still not sure I even want a moon in this map, but the moon symbol, phase effects, and lighting effect are all on a MOON layer so it's easy enough to hide it.