[WIP] Community Atlas: Temple of Nidag, Stormwatch, Emerald Crown Forest, Alarius
Wyvern
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For the next map in my ongoing Atlas project, I thought it might be interesting to try another work-in-progress topic, to show some of the developments as they happened along the way. It's been a while since I last tried this, and I do tend to forget to record progress while mapping, but we'll see how it goes! The initial posts below, over the coming days, will outline what's happened to get this map underway during the last couple of months, and only the subsequent notes will start to become rather more immediate.
Said map was intended for somewhere in the Emerald Crown Forest region of northeastern Alarius, here:
Zooming-in to the next map already in the Atlas, there were a couple of additional places already mapped (highlighted in pink), along with some equally intriguing unmapped spots:
As usual, the development of each new map in this project is an organic process, in that while thinking about where the map's to go, I'm also looking at the dungeon design, and identifying ideas for what its contents and purpose might be. In this case, the design was from two Inkwell Ideas Dungeonmorph Dice in the Trailblazer set:
These translated into my hand-scrawled version, with the unconnected/extraneous passages and areas either removed or adapted, thus:
Looking through the Inkwell book that accompanies the dice for this pair of designs, the 6i one is from the Incantations/Magic Areas die, whose main-idea notes suggested this to be a temple masquerading as for a good/neutral deity, but which was actually for another less pleasant one - so that altar above the circular room drops victims down into it, for use in summoning an avatar of the deity, for instance.
The 6r die's main notes (for Rooms/General Areas), proposed it as part of the private quarters for some royalty, with a kitchen, dining room, and guards, while one of the alternative suggestions was for it to be an inn, possibly one with several vertical levels. In combination, these suggested a temple complex (replacing royalty with priests and inner-cabal followers), partly above ground, partly below. That suggested a larger population would be needed to both support and conceal such a place, as well as to provide victims for use in the summoning chamber.
Turning then to a couple of further books for inspiration, the "Tome of Adventure Design", and the very recently-released "Nomicon", both published by Mythmere Games, provided Maleng, Herald of the Seasons as the beneficent nature deity for the temple, with the congregation ostensibly calling themselves The Fellowship of Maleng, although they're really The Fellowship of Nidag, The Blind Slayer (the deity who's not so pleasant).
Looking at settlements in the Emerald Crown Forest area after this naturally pushed my thoughts towards the larger towns, and likely towards those on the coast, as probably having sizeable itinerant populations, where people chosen as victims would be less missed. Which eventually brought me to the pre-mapped town of Stormwatch:
It's probably not hard to see what drew me here - there are lots of anonymous groups of houses of the right size and rough orientation to fit the dungeon dice designs quite well. Finally, I picked a spot on the eastern edge of the map, outside the town walls, here:
At which point we discover I was missing a few small symbols (probably from the free, non-ProFantasy, sets usable in the Atlas) - for the inn signs, chimneys and waterwheels - hence the red Xs in places (the previous shot of Stormwatch was taken from the hi-res Atlas version).
Choosing that area wasn't straightforward, however, because a swift test-trial of my hand-drawn dice design showed the fit wasn't going to be exact, either from the placement and sizes of the various buildings, or the angle between the two main parts of the design. This wasn't unexpected, and after checking several potential alternatives, the orange rectangle on the image just above was picked as the closer fit. Even then, that area wasn't properly defined at this point.
I narrowed the spot down by setting-up a basic line drawing in CC3+, where I could compare the exact shapes, sizes and orientations of the Stormwatch buildings with the dice design draft map. This began by extracting those forms from the Stormwatch map thus:
The building outlines were generated more or less automatically, by simply copying the buildings to a new sheet and layer, and changing their properties (possible only because they were originally created using the CD3 house-drawing tool), while the tree circles and road lines were all hand-drawn. The two colours are because the original test-fitting was done just with the green-outlined buildings, and took several attempts. The red outlining was to make sure all the features in the final rectangular map area would be covered too, once the final "green" selection was made. Next time, pinning-down that rectangle.
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With testing completed, the next stage could begin. My original thought was to use the Pär Lindström Horror House Annual mapping style to fit the overall unsettling theme, and because I thought a simpler drawing style would be interesting to use here. Ultimately, this was changed, but this was where I began. First, the hand-drawn dice design was imported:
Then a copied version of the outlinings plus the town wall segment was pasted onto a second BITMAP Sheet, whose placement was adjusted until it approximated to a fit over the dice design:
This view shows the extent of the mapped zone, and how far beyond it other items had been picked to ensure full coverage of the key area. It also indicates that the dice design barely fits the edges of any of the structures from Stormwatch. However, it also finally allowed the choice of area to be shown on the full Stormwatch map, by copying and pasting an amended version of the map border rectangle over to the Stormwatch map (as in the penultimate image from my first post here).
With this complete, I then drew an outline version of the dungeon design's layout, amended to fit the buildings better (at least as far as the nearer- and above-surface parts of the maps were concerned):
That was about the point I realised the surface map (or maybe maps) needed to be drawn in a different style, because the Horror House one doesn't have any vegetation symbols. While some could have been re-used from others, I thought it preferable to stick with a single style, if possible. Which turned out to be the Naomi Van Doren Fantasy Floorplans one. While not monochrome, it is a nice, fairly clean-drawn style, with a limited colour palette, which seemed appropriate for this high-northern (Stormwatch is at about 58°N latitude), somewhat creepy, setting. As we'll see next time.
[Had it been available when I started drawing this map last month, I might have been tempted to make use of Ralf's new Hand-drawn Dungeon Annual style. Actually, it might match quite well with Naomi's style, so you never know...😊]
With the style selected, it was time to copy over the linear elements to a new map, after a few further minor changes (mostly to avoid copying the symbols for the town wall again):
The building walls have already been changed closer to the new map style, although without any sheet effects on at this point. The dungeon design lines have been changed to blue as well. Several copies of this CC3+ drawing were saved, in case of later problems, and so the above and below ground map designs would match.
Next, the roads, town wall and main vegetation were all added for the surface map:
The background bitmap fill has been changed too, as the roads were getting a little lost in the earlier dirt brown default fill. Effects have been tweaked here to outline the pathways better, although the trees and bushes still need a bit more work.
Now, the building outlines have been switched to the WALLS sheet, and the first pine floors added (using angle-by-edge on the flooring polygons, and adjusting the shading's pitch and angle to tone-down the wood-plank colouring, although this felt too dark and similar to the surface cover, which meant further experimentation with several aspects of that pine plank fill to reach this stage:
Still not 100% sure about the floor colouring, but I can see what's happening in the buildings now at least (particularly with the BITMAP sheet outlines all hidden). The vegetation has been adjusted by adding a further TREES sheet, and moving some of the taller trees onto it. All still subject to further tweaking, of course, though the tree cover looks less 2D now, at least.
Next began a trickier stage (given virtually none of the mapped wall lines work with the "Ortho" setting), the process of showing what the buildings contain, and how they link to the subterranean features. New floor textures (and a tweaked pine floor one too), wall-lines, doors, windows, stairs, etc., were added, in a limited section only at this stage, which gets us up to date with progress on this map:
The BITMAP lines are back, so I don't start fitting the stairs and entryways to the wrong properties, (in theory). The two buildings done so far are the main public access points to the underground temple, and as you can see, I've already taken slight liberties with the original Stormwatch map, by connecting two of the surface buildings to better work as such. Lots more to do, however, not least the fact I'd forgotten to copy over where the chimneys are before starting these interiors, so there may be even more tweaking by next time!
Returning to the Stormwatch map, I copied the positions of the rooftop chimneys to a new BITMAP sheet in the Nidag Temple Surface map, so they'd appear above the wall lines, using simple purple squares:
Since these only illustrate the rooftop flue outlets, the actual locations of the internal fireplaces can be a little different to this, and of course two fireplaces might even use the same flue, so allowing for some flexibility. Zooming-in to just the two buildings with the internal walls shows how I opted to set-up the fireplaces in these, based on where the purple squares were:
This also provides a clearer view of exactly how the interiors were being set-up. All very basic still, with just the essential main structural elements.
My initial aim with the interiors was to lay out just the access-points for the lower level dungeon design, as the next two snapshots illustrate:
It's possible other properties may yet link with the subterranean places, because, as commonly, more ideas were forming regarding the general layout, beyond the vaguer ones I'd already had - such as the angled section containing parts of an inn-like structure, with separate rooming-houses, loosely mirroring the higher-class rooms of the underground directly beneath them. Surface houses too for some of the priests, to help keep up the pretence, as well as other houses for the ostensible religion's followers above the various underground areas, who wouldn't be reporting unusual sounds from below to the authorities, of course!
Today's final shot shows that part of the area linking several properties has been dirt-paved, where there was once just a track, given that vegetation would be unlikely to long survive repeated foot-passage by priests and worshipful members of the Fellowship, aside from the relatively brief spring and summer at these northerly latitudes. Plus one more property has been "developed" with its initial internal fitments:
And yes, this does mean another surface map level will be needed for the new upper storey to this property (and others to follow!).
The thinking at present, incidentally, is that there'll be two priestly residences "above" the temple entrance ones (that's actually west, remembering north now lies to the right in this map view), and the new two-level building north of them will be a follower's house. In the angled segment, the only building with an interior thus far is a kitchen for both the surface inn and the subterranean kitchen, to disguise regular food deliveries below, and so forth. The long property below-right of the kitchen will be the dining hall/bar, and the rest of the properties along both sides of the track there will be other parts of the inn. These are not intended to be all connected, although some may be. Ideas are still developing...
Not sure I shall get much more done next week, but I'll report back on progress at some point soon(ish), with luck.
As expected last time, progress has been slow over the past week, much of it only over the weekend. Things have moved on a little though!
First was filling-in more of the internal structural elements in the properties alongside those done so far (including the two partial houses on the left map edge). While doing that, it seemed obvious to fill-in the narrow alleyways between the buildings with a dirt-path fill, given they're likely to see little to no sunlight, and it followed it would be natural to continue those to the closest trackway as well:
Probably hard to tell at this resolution, but the alleys between the eastern properties have been similarly filled, including that blind alleyway at the conjoined temple buildings. Plus a somewhat broader pathway has been added to the front door of one house on the extreme left map edge.
The divisions created by the new alley paths to the main track were starting to look like garden plots, so that's what they became:
It would be natural for areas of land to be used for growing small-scale crops by each property, given the brief summers at such a latitude as this (58°N), much as crofters do in parts of northern Scotland still today, for example, with small amounts of livestock, and land used to grow crops for the family. As I've opted for a summer view of this area, it was always going to be necessary to add extra ground-surface details that the long winter snows would conceal at other times. Thus it followed there'd be more small bushes elsewhere as well:
While I wanted to add some further garden plots east of the central houses too, the proximity of the forest there meant the land would likely be poorer-quality, and so the plots were made deliberately patchier and less filled with greenery:
All of which was starting to make that new "square" between the southern properties look a little sparse, so a well was added, and then the interiors for the peripheral properties further west:
Along the way, I'd also started adding loose "pathways" immediately around the western houses, as marking naturally cleared spaces adjacent to the properties, created through use and for general maintenance, and although I went on to add more, and alleyway-fills, around the western-fringe buildings too, together with more shrubs, and a second well, I haven't got round to adding them yet to those houses with the first gardens, as this last shot for now illustrates:
I did though remember to add more of the bundles of sticks available in this mapping style to the scrubby eastern gardens, to make them a little more unkempt. As mentioned previously, these maps have a tendency to grow organically, as forgotten things get added at random intervals later!
Hopefully, somewhat faster and further progress to follow.