My first "City" attempt - WIP

Sorry for bombarding the boards with all my works, but i've been off from work with an injury and have been spending the last 5 days leading a life of luxury and writing new material, creating new maps, and working on maps i've been working on for the last few months. So, other than my villages, of which i have several, the only large town/small city map my players have needed is one i high-jacked from the Jon Roberts Style Annual....I just tweaked the .fcw file to my needs, labeled it, and Amarfelle was born. Easy Peasy. I've been working off and on for a few months on my first city using the City Designer. Eeesh it has been a learning process to say the least. Anyway, here is my first city....Dusk, a small city of about 1800 including mining hamlets a few miles outside the city at the mountains base to the south of the River Miner. Im still working on adding a few minor details in case i need to print out a zoom of a district. The pic is kind of light and the colors are not accurate....this is the "print" version, i need to lighten my maps up considerably in Photoshop to print them up clear and crisp for my players.

Comments

  • I love this! The city is beautiful! Most of the cities I've seen in a lot of the Dungeons and Dragons supplements over the years don't look this good. Great job on this. I don't recognize that compass. Is it something you came up with or is it a part of the John Roberts style?
  • edited April 2016
    Thank you tonnichiwa! The style is a mishmosh of all the styles i've got on my computer. I don't care much if the styles are mixed, and i like a lot of variety in my maps, it reminds my players there are MANY mapmakers in Realm :) The compass is something i did on my own...just found a really neat free image of a bronze compass and created the transparent png from it. It's not "great" if you zoom in you can see i had a hard time eliminating all the shadows around the image, but for me, this map is intended solely for personal use in my homebrew, its just fine. My players love that i make them maps, and i REALLY do enjoy it in my free time so, its a win=win XD.
  • This is really nice! I like the color coding, makes things easier to find. And since I get a lot of inspiration from your maps...don't ever apologize for posting them! I mean... Isn't that partly what this forum is for?
  • Great job! I hope my first attempt and making city comes out this well! :-)
  • Thank you all for the nice comments! But hey, let's be honest, this is my FIRST COMPLETED city, not my first city! There were months worth of deleting maps altogether, and about 3 other cities im trying to improve before deciding to "scrap" XD
    But again, many thanks!
  • I found that I use symbols from different sets for certain countries or city styles.

    So what I do then is load an overland map I like, as an example, and save those symbols as a set. That way when I want to duplicate a nation map style, all the symbols are in one set instead of scattered around in different sets.
  • I do something similar in my overland maps... I use different symbols to represent the different kingdoms or regions. That way, my political borders are a little more subtle...there were no border guards back in medieval times! Were there?
  • Jay_NOLAJay_NOLA Traveler
    Looks great.

    I like your use of color for several reasons:

    1.) The color makes it easy to find what buildings are for what area of the city.
    2.) The colors you used for the buildings complement each other and the colors don't clash with the building colors next to it nor the colors of map features.

    Where did you get the hanging sign from? It and the compass add a lot to the map's beauty.
  • Posted By: Jay_NOLA

    Where did you get the hanging sign from? It and the compass add a lot to the map's beauty.
    Thank you! I got both images somewhere on the internet, and manipulated both, and made a transparent png.
  • Not border guards per se, but there are likely patrols on horseback looking for people from another kingdom. Or making sure there is no invasion coming in to attack them.
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