Doheag - SS5 Walled City - First Attempt
Arcwynd
🖼️ 49 images Traveler
I was quite excited when SS5 - Cities of Schley came out. This was my first attempt at a large city, using those styles and symbols. Not a lot of terrain here, but the focus was on building the inside of the walled city. As I've learned more about the effects, I began changing those around, which started to give it more depth and color. I realize that the text is small, but this large city was broken into four parts for Roll20 and used there. I separated out the numbers and legend and used them on the GM layer (rendered as a separate map). That way, the GM can add his layers to Roll20 after the map is laid down.
I welcome any critiques or suggestions, and I will likely update the map with those as soon as I can. So far, this is as well as I can do alone. Thank you for all the advice and support on this forum.
Doheag - The sacred inner city of Doheag, and the surrounding town and countryside is one of the oldest continuously inhabited locations in Sycharia and the center of the Doheaga religion.
Doheag City.fcw
High Resolution Image - Doheag City
Comments
My main critique is the layout. Since city walls will always be something that is added to an existing settlement, they will need to follow the city limits, which would never have evolved to be nice and rectangular. There are usually also terrain features that forces the layout of the city wall.
The layout of the buildings do look a tad bit too organized as well.
And since a city wall was always built for defensive purposes, the city wanted everyone to live inside the city walls (and the people wanted to live within the safety of the walls), it typically meant that any space inside the city walls were taken advantage off to the full extent possible, packing things tightly. Some special sections (like your walled of inner area and walled of mansions) might be able to keep their terrain, but the rest of the inside of the walls would generally be filled up.
Of course, you may have in-game reasons for why this city didn't evolve like a typical city, it is your city after all, but if you do, I always recommend giving the reason a second think-over to decide if these really are valid reasons.
By the way, I used to live in Italy and that thought about the organic growth of a city and its walls never occurred to me.
And, by the way, I LOVE your mines. I was told that I had to make a dwarven mine, and then I found your wonderful artwork.
The mines are not mine. I can't draw to save my life. I can put it together to decent maps in CC3+, but I am not capable of making artwork myself.
For cities that grow organically over time around some resource (say, the lowest fordable point on a river), the street pattern is more likely to look like the wandering of cows (minimal energy paths converging on the central resource) and walls are more likely to be generally roundish if present. Organic cities also tend to develop multiple centers over time as the population grows.
I recommend looking at the cores of the some of the old cities around the world. You'll see wide variation in street pattern and walls due largely to geography, history, and technology of the location. We don't build physical walls much anymore because high mobility, flying things, and massive available firepower tend to make them irrelevant. You will still find walls for population control, though.
Jslaton, wonderful historical example. Thank you for that and the advice. Now I'm thinking of a town/city as more of an organic, living thing that I can try to find examples of. I should have paid more attention to my geography teachers.
Walls are quite expensive to build too, so unless there is a good reason for it, leaving it out is the more reasonable alternative. You should probably remove the gatehouses too though, doesn't make sense with a gate everyone can go around.
And the mines would perhaps be Munson's Mines from three years ago in the Cartographer's Annual.