Community Atlas - Elen Daelarion - Zognilak Fortress
JimP
🖼️ 280 images Cartographer
This will be two to three levels of a fort in the base of a mountain. Azul Khazamere is the name of the lake.
Here is the basic png of the area.
Comments
Here is the preliminary area map. 33 x 24 miles. I will likely add more trees, hills, over most of the map, and some ruins towards the bottom of the map. The fortress is in the right hand mountain.
Those shadows on the hills look a bit weird. Make them look like they are floating.
I agree with Remy.
As a general rule, overland symbols don't need any effects. It's the textures that do.
They were dark, I lightened them up considerably. I can remove the shadows, no problem.
No shadow effects, but it looks like the hill symbols have a slight shadow built in.
That's a lot better.
The built-in shadows on most overland symbols is why they look bad if you add any more to them.
Spectrum would look even worse. It has much more definite shadows built into the symbols.
I may change the road color, as it does go towards the cave fortress, because its hard for me to see. Or put a gray or white glow on it.
I think this is it for the area map. The black square is the cave/fortress entrance. I'll do one just around the outside of the entrance, then two inside. Not sure yet if I'll go for a lookout, or a level below ground level.
I really like this map, Jim. I don't know exactly what draws me to it - probably something in the layout of the hills and roads. It looks like a place I'd want to set an adventure!
I do think there could be more hilly country, and the mountains bigger.
@Maidhc O Casain, thank you.
I worked for over 30 minutes on deciding the scale of the mountains and hill placements. I have thought about placing some ruins or a henge in various places in those hills. Maybe I'll make the mountains bigger. Think of them as being viewed from far off. This is Dungeon SS2A with some imported bitmap fills from my Elrogol Fort maps.
Anyway, here is the cave entrance area. 800' x 600' map. There are 2 pits in front of the walls, I may remove them.
I'm going to attach the fcw because I cannot get the sand fill area to look like anything but pixelated noise or like it appears here. This is in front of the mountain, and could be debris from various attacks.
The two side areas are sally ports. All doors are heavy iron. The square grid is just there for current scale. It wont be in the final map.
You could maybe add more mountains Jim, or swap some of the current hills for mountains, instead of just making the mountain symbols larger. And maybe think of adding some different sized hills in places as well.
Be nice to have some names for the more dominant landforms too, perhaps.
The roads seem to need some stopping places - such as an inn or so, maybe fortified. Those are some long runs without even a stream to drink from currently, for instance. Not sure if the local population density would be right for occupied settlements on the routes, however, so perhaps just add a few streams or ponds instead?
That sand texture isn't really designed to look good for a large uniform area like this, it should be broken up by symbols and other fills.
But you can generally make it look better by increasing the scaling. I tried setting it to 250 and that makes it less repetitive while the texture is still high enough resolution to support it. However, the automatic resolution system doesn't switch properly when doing this, so you should also edit the fill style resolutions in the display speed settings, dividing all values in here by 2 should help.
Okay. Sounds good. Giving my eyes a break this evening.
I like Wyvern's suggestion of an inn. Probably a henge to.
On my cell.
Some added hills, Chels a walled village, The Blue Henge, Wash a walled town, and a ruined village near the fortress.
And the close up.
That's looking better for the area map Jim. I'm losing the Old Road in places now though, so maybe it needs jazzing up a little?
I used a broken line and I have a white, or light gray, glow on the road.
But it does become hard to see as it approaches the fortress. I'll look at it on Thursday.
Not sure about the towns - it doesn't fit with the Modern political map which has all settlements on it - perhaps a farming settlement of 2-3 farmhouse complexes together, or a self-contained inn (with its own brewery and farrier etc) And the names are very non-elvish, or dwarven. But the more hills are better. I would also make the road/track thicker, and it might show up better.
@Quenten said:
Not sure about the towns - it doesn't fit with the Modern political map which has all settlements on it
Looking at the scale of the modern political map, that can't really be everything in that area, can it? The two nearest settlements to this area according to that map is Ingoloth and Conmaruen, which are 250 miles from each other. I agree there wouldn't be any big places, because those would have shown up, but certainly villages of 20-30 buildings or thereabout would be well within the bounds of being too small for the political map. Villages tends to pop up all over the place with less than a days walk between them.
Fair enough. But please change the names (sob)
Okay. Name them then.
Wash means it is washed up or they take in laundry from the dwarves. I can't come up with reasons for the other names.
On my cell.
Elven names: Githenoth, Infindel, Ethildorost, Congolar, Ciranund, Elofinnost, Elosoranfel, Lothfinuen, Conlorin, Brimsortor, Congolanfel, Forfinor, Ethilsoranwe, Fordiadel, Lothmar, Githloranwe.
Dwarven Names: Dwolgund, Gonkaliz, Durdum, Glandukur, Ovagurnak, Thoralin, Askulkilluk, Dworagrim, Dunadol, Darjak, Kulagrim.
How about choosing names from this list, or making other ones that would seem to fit. I hope this helps. ?
Okay, I wont name anything Sue, as in the Johnny Cash song 'A Boy Named Sue' either.
I copied your list to a text file.
Darjak is a small trade town the dwarves set up, but after several attacks it is now in ruins. I checged the outer glow on the roads.
Lothmar is an elf town along with Congolar.
Updated fortress map. Bone filled area upper right.
Narrow passage on the left of the center entrance is a sally port into the room. I had the wall shadow at 4, but that turned the 5' wide corridor into one large shadow, so I changed it to 3. The square grid is now 25 feet. It wont be in the final map, I'm using it as construction lines.
Sink hole upper left, large bones deposit area incased in rock upper right. Wall shadows changed to 2.5.
The large corridor on the right is for the Ready Attack Force to leave their barracks and armory to support the guards.
Need to add more doors and some pit traps to hurt attackers. Some of the rooms in the center are dining, cooking areas, and food storage. I just haven't decided which is which yet.
What do you think of a level below this ? Or a lookout level above this one ?
Thanks.
An updated map.
Lookouts. Which way are the nearest enemies, and how far away are they? Best to have lookouts as high as possible with as good a clear view all-round as possible, but those questions cover the key aspects here before making any decisions.
I'm with Wyvern, plus a level below - an active fortress like this would be likely to have a lower level, I think. But whatever you think.
I don't want to go bonkers on the number of maps, but one upper and one lower level sounds okay. Cross-section of connections to.