Ah Hajar, pearl of the desert (City panoramas style)

Hello everybody,

Since I saw the City panorama style, I wanted to use it to show one of the capital cities of my Arabian Nights campaign. I already showed you an overview map for this campaign in http://forum.profantasy.com/comments.php?DiscussionID=4976.

I finally got around to doing it, even if the result is not exactly what I expected. I had two main issues with this style:
- All buildings are all rather tall. I would have liked small roofless buildings that I could cram along some hills, but instead, I just put those tall buildings on a flat surface
- The wall seem to be designed to be at the front of the city, not at its back. This can be seen because the scale of low angle walls is slightly larger than the scale of high angle walls. I adjusted some scales when I discovered it, but was too lazy to redraw my whole wall.

For the title, I used the ArabDances font from DaFont. The djinns that hold the sultan's palace come from Rudyard Kipling's Just So Stories (I think the picture is public domain now, you can for instance find it here). The boats come from random internet searches.

I'm eagerly awaiting your comments...

---
Loïc

Comments

  • Thats very atmospheric. Well done.
  • This is a great map I think. The colors I think do look like some of the pictures of old Arabian art. It 'feels' right. Just one question though: On the right hand side on the top of the mountains is a fortress\keep. Is that where the evil assassin king lives? Perhaps the thieves hideout? Either way I want to head up there and see what's happening. :)
  • Hello warhound,

    Thank you for the kind comment,

    You know what, when I showed the map to my players, one of them had exactly the same reaction as you did. He really wants to travel there, and now I have to decide what he will find, because at first I just put something there because otherwise, it seemed too empty, and it felt like a good spot to place a fortress.

    One option would be the training ground of the Hashishin, but who knows. In fact, they discovered this map of a city they already know in some ruins 2000 years old, and it is labelled as the blueprint of a future city. So maybe this keep no longer exists, or has never existed. The map is not the territory...

    I'll have to make up my mind very soon.
  • This is a beautiful map: it hints at the magical of the Arabian Nights quite nicely. Speaking as someone who plays mostly thieves in FRPGs, that floating palace is just begging to be burgled. ;-)

    I can understand your complaint about the walls and buildings, but I don't think they're so out of place, if one thinks of this map as more stylized than representational. The coloration of the roofs makes me wonder if these don't reference neighborhoods controlled by noble families in a complex web of rivalry and alliance.

    Well done. :)
  • 1 month later
  • Lovely, I like the way you set the palace.
  • Lovely map, congratulations!
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