Wish List: City/Dungeon Top-Down Mountain Peaks, Ridges & Crags
I think this is more of a wish-list request than a "does anyone know where to find" query, but maybe...?
There are some great city- and dungeon-scale slopes and cliffs symbols across various annuals. The City Walls annuals are great and compatible with many styles. Asian Town has two beautiful cliff symbols (with and without rubble at the bottom). Forest Trail has great, earthy cliff and riverbank sides that conveniently come in different widths for greater flexibility. One of Mike Schley's recently monthlies had some dungeon-scale slope symbols. Darklands City has rocky outcrops that make for great cliffs.
But these are all cliff sides with a flat top. What I would love would be crags, ridges, and peaks, where those cliffs are part of a mountain. I think it would be helpful for creating mountain villages, or a monastery on a mountain peak, or the entrance to a dwarven mine.
I have experimented with sheet effects. Taking the bevel approach used for hills, for example, but sharpening the effects to create ridge lines. And I have tried drawing polygons and then used the "Shaded Polygon (Angle by Edge)" command. But did the job but do not, in my mind, rival the effect that symbols would have.
Can anyone recommend any top-down overland symbols I could experiment with? Mike Schley's overland combines well for isometric cities, but not top-down cities. I haven't used many top-down overland styles, so I don't know which ones to try. Bird's Eye Overland is the only one that comes to mind but I'm just not sure it would be helpful with dungeon or city-scale maps.
Suggestions welcome, but this may be more of a "wish list" than a successful search.
Comments
Have you tried stacking the cliff symbols?
Have you tried moving a cliff to its own sheet and putting it behind the mountains on adjoining sides?
Mwahahaa Sue. As I was typing.
Have you tried stacking the cliff symbols?
I have done that with City Cliffs, Forest Trail's cliffs, and Asian Town. It's a great approach for showing increased elevation, but I haven't been able do show an actual peak or ridge line with that approach.
Have you tried moving a cliff to its own sheet and putting it behind the mountains on adjoining sides?
I have done that with overland maps, most recently Spectrum Overland, and it works great. But not so sure which top-down symbols to try for a city-scale map.
Here's a super quick, super rough experiment using Darklands City as the base with 13th Age Revisited for mountain peaks. I will keep playing with it, but there's some potential there.
Here's an even rougher experiment with Creepy Crypts. Would need to do more finessing and blending to get it to work.
The quest continues. Meanwhile, if any symbol designers are working on cliffs for a future annual, maybe ponder whether a few ridges or peaks would make sense to include.
So when Sue asked if I had tried stacking cliff symbols, I had...but always in the same direction, which gave me elevation but didn't give me ridges. I just tried flipping the Forest Trail cliff symbols so they're back-t0-back -- and these are exactly the sort of ridge lines I was imagining.
These symbols blend together so beautifully. Truly amazing, Sue! Very excited to start planning a mountain village.
So cool you can always find something new, to either add to a map, or a command to tweak a map.
I'm loving using the extract properties lately. My map has so much going on that I can't remember where everything goes.
And not that we had any reason to think Winter Trail/Winter Village would be different, but just for fun, here's a sliver of an alpine village.