The Village of Sham

Saurbaum

Many years ago there was a live action role playing club in the Midlands of England, by the name of The Portly Pixie. The adventures from that club have been published now that it has closed and I'm using the adventures for table top games with friends who never had a chance to go.



And the map to the indoor section of the first adventure most people did, Mandrake is Missing (Or Basic as it was known to those of us who helped out many times)



More to follow as I start working my way through them all. Any suggestions on what I can add to improve them greatly appreciated.

Dogtag

Thanks for sharing!

~Dogtag

Shessar

Cool idea to transfer LARP scenarios to tabletop maps. Nice!

jaerdaph

Very nice - I like how you did the wooded areas/trees.

Saurbaum

Thanks for the comments.

I'm not satisfied with the village map at the moment. The trees need a bit more variation to their textures. I've seen some good examples of what I think are bitmap symbols but it's a complaint I have with CC3 is that it can be a real pain to figure out which set or annual it came from.

In the mean time here's the overland map of the surrounding areas.



I added some alternate contours to break the background up a little with a fade effect, would be nice if there were a way to take what I drew and make it extend out and fade away but edge fade didn't appear to do anything. So I had to get a little creative with extra contour layers in the top left to stop it fading out from the edge of the map.

On a similar line, can anyone vouch for the contents of the fantasy floor plans symbol set 2? I'd love to know what kind of symbols are in it. All I can find is a reference to 150 monsters.

Saurbaum

I've had a bit more of a play with the village and this is what I've come up with.



I am far far happier with the general look though not completely satisfied with my trees.

I have to say I wouldn't have got anywhere near this far through my plans if not for the videos of Joe Sweeney. He does a wonderful job of explaining where all the simple tools are for me.

anomiecoalition

I think your village looks great. For the trees - you might want to try adding a stronger wall shadow effect to make them stand out a bit more. I've found that sometimes mixing 2 or 3 styles/colors/textures of tree shapes can also help to thicken things up a bit.

Saurbaum

Is it possible to add a wall shadow to things that aren't walls? When I tried before I didn't seem to get any effect.

anomiecoalition

You should be able to - thats pretty much my go-to setting for shadows on all sorts of objects. I think it gives a better effect than the regular drop shadow option and more realism than simply adding a black glow.

best way to test it is to set the parameters at some ridiculous setting just to see if its working (i.e. shadow at 100 and opacity at 0).

try tooling around with the different parameters. I normally try to keep my blur radius at around half of the shadow length and opacity at around 50.

Saurbaum

So it does. I think that much of why they wern't working for me was to do with layers and sheets and at the time not really understanding them.

Great software but it does have a learning curve like the north facer of the Eiger

anomiecoalition

yeah - i made so many mistakes and start-overs because of not being careful about my sheets. Layers I don't tend to worry about as much...but sheets - I've learned to just create a million of them and be very specific about naming them.

Saurbaum

I hear you the sheets are absolutely key. And not realising you clicked on a tool that changed it for you can be a real swine.