The Green Belt
I've been running Paizo's "Kingmaker" adventure path for my friends since September and it's been a lot of fun. Since we're scattered all over the place, we use MapTool as our virtual tabletop. Anyway, exploration plays a huge role in the first part of the Kingmaker adventure path and I wanted to re-make the map from the book. Firstly because I thought it'd be good map making practice, secondly because I didn't want to have all of the 'secrets' on the map revealed to the players right away and lastly, I wanted an excuse to try out the 13th Age overland style.
The map is primarily the 13th Age style with some of the symbols from John Roberts Overland (I wanted to use more than just dots to represent the settlements and such) and I feel, aside from the bridges (I'm not super happy with them) that they worked alright. I still need to flesh out the southern part of the map and I still need to fix the border of the map. I'd love to hear any feedback and suggestions on how I could improve the map
The map is primarily the 13th Age style with some of the symbols from John Roberts Overland (I wanted to use more than just dots to represent the settlements and such) and I feel, aside from the bridges (I'm not super happy with them) that they worked alright. I still need to flesh out the southern part of the map and I still need to fix the border of the map. I'd love to hear any feedback and suggestions on how I could improve the map
Comments
I would perhaps experiment with the river colors a bit, I find the blue you've used clashes somewhat with the rest of the map. Perhaps use the same fill style as for the lakes?
If you'd do me a service and suggest a color by number, I'd gratefully change the rivers to that color.
Just put the Thorn river on a seperate sheet and reduce the fade a bit
One thing I've been noticing about the 13th Age style, though — and this has nothing to do with your mapping skills — is that there seems to be a lot of very visible tiling. Does anyone know if there is a technique (or a technical trick) we can use to reduce tiling by fill styles?
Good work, NLP!
Cheers,
~Dogtag
Thanks Dogtag - I really noticed it in the trees myself. I tried to break up the larger patches by doing them in smaller clumps but that didn't seem to help that much.
Otherwise, you could always take the existing bitmap file and throw it in photoshop or some other image editor, cut it into a bunch of square pieces, save each piece as a separate .png...and then individually place them in some random order as symbols.
BTW...imho...I think your trees look good as is
I actually don't see the tiling so much in the forests of your map, NLP. Maybe it's because, from a distance, I expect trees to look similar? Hm.
~Dogtag
Ans I wouldn't change the Thorn River. I like it that it looks a bit different.