[WIP] Deadfellows, frontier mining town
I've been working on my first city map, and I would welcome any suggestions or feedback. This is a map of Deadfellows, a frontier mining town in the Lost Lands campaign setting from Frog God Games. It's located at the base of a mountain range at the highest navigable point on a river. It's rough-and-tumble and filled with prospectors and trappers making and spending fortunes in gold and furs.
I've been experimenting with textured backgrounds with mixed results. I wanted to emphasize that the center of town is mostly mud and that the river is very treacherous this close to the mountains. For the area outside the town, I'm thinking about adding some fields and possibly a forest north of town. Perhaps some scattered trees as the mountains climb to the west.
I've been experimenting with textured backgrounds with mixed results. I wanted to emphasize that the center of town is mostly mud and that the river is very treacherous this close to the mountains. For the area outside the town, I'm thinking about adding some fields and possibly a forest north of town. Perhaps some scattered trees as the mountains climb to the west.
Comments
I agree with qwalker on the palisade though. The effort to make a perfect curve like that would be quite difficult with the simple tools available to a frontier town. It is easier to string a straight line for laying out a wall than to get a perfect curve. Of course, it's your town and can look however you want it to, so only change it if it makes sense to you.
Most towns through western history were square due to simplicity in construction.
If you do plan to have a lumber mill, you'll need a water wheel which means either one on the banks or a river diversion through town.
Also a frontier town would have lots of stock pens and stables within the town itself to protect the stock.
These are just a few observations by all means not neded for your town at all.
I'm going to try to add more texturing. It looks weird having textures on part of it and not on the rest. I tried to add separate textures for each tier, but the patterns didn't match well. I tried to add one single background texture, but the contours didn't stand out. I think I'm going to use a single background texture with transparency to make it more subtle.
It's hard to see with such a zoomed out view, but the two buildings just upriver from the docks are a mill and a sawmill. Eventually I will do a detail map of the center of town where that will be more apparent. Thanks for the idea about the stock pens.
However, something looks strange to me. I would expect either houses very close to each other blocked inside a the palisade (but then, no space between the palisade and the houses), or if there is enough space inside the palisade, more gardens, orchards, pens... very close to the houses.
It also looks like some houses don't have access to the road.
Your river looks very wide, which is a little bit surprising since you say it's close to the source. Maybe you could draw a kind of swamp to the other side? Or some island?
I like your ground texture. It makes the whole town nitty-gritty.
A round wall encompasses the maximum area in sqaure footage in relation to materials used for construction.
Round walls are much more difficult to construct with walkways. Each log or timber has to be tapered.
Square walls make it easy for walkways and other attached structures like guard posts. Especially useful in defense.
A little Cliff Claven useless knowledge for you.
- Structure are far away from the wall
- The wall does not seem to have any walkway
- The wall is large, compared to the town size, meaning that materials must be of importance
I really think that drflounder can keep the wall the way he wants! (of course, he can always do that, my comment are just here to try to give another point of view, not to coerce anyone in doing something they don't want)
Are you going to add any hinterland details? I mean things like mine head's dotted around in an area that I presume would be largely forested apart from a bit of necessary agriculture immediately around the city?
I originally wanted there to be some space between the city and the wall as I envisioned the city as springing up quickly. I reasoned the builders would want there to be room to expand. It does look strange having all that open space inside the wall, though. I may try adding some fields, as well as more orchards and livestock pens. I'm open to bringing the wall in tighter though.
Looking good though. Maybe needs a bit more detailing on the landscape beyond the wall, or maybe reduce the area outside the wall on the map if there aren't going to be features of great interest there. Is there a burial ground within the wall? Civilizations often like to set up dedicated areas with markers of some sort for that, but others go with cremation, which leaves far fewer remains to be stored alternatively.
As cobra mustang suggests, burial grounds would be better outside the city. The dead are not in need of protection as much as the livestock and grain stores.
I'm glad to see that you have opted for straight lines. Curved walls are a lot more difficult to build, and in a defensive situation are not a very good idea as they tend to obstruct the line of view. Its easier to see if the enemy are scaling the wall at a glance, if you can see all the way down a nice long straight section. As has been pointed out several times before now in other threads defensive walls tend to be built in straight lines linking towers - the towers themselves marking the ends of segments of the city, so that if one segment is breached, the breach can (with any luck) be contained in that segment and the spread controlled. The presence of each tower forms a barrier against the enemy simply running all around the wall and dropping down anywhere they please.
The trees could be much larger, they look like shrubs right now. A tree's canopy could easily be bigger than a house in a western setting. Old growth trees could be even more massive.
In my opinion if those two changes are made you have a winner.
A small stream from North down along the farm steads would make irrigation and plausibility of the farm locations pretty awesome.
These are just my opinions. Do what is best for your setting.
You could also have a place inside of a densely planted area with organic shapes that is totally devoid of trees. This place would have a very regular shape with sharp frontier, and a road leading to it, and would represent where they cut the trees to create the wall.
I also think the trees are a little bit too small, compared to the houses.
Maybe you could also have some trees inside of the town, mostly next the the official buildings?
However, I'm not convinced the woods would still be all that dense near the settlement anyway. The wall and houses would have used up a lot of timber, as well as river boats, which would maybe leave only a few trees and bushes that weren't suitable, or needed, for construction work. Fruit trees might be left preferentially, for example. If you do go for denser woods though, it would be likely there'd be significant clearings where the best timber had been taken for building the town, and maybe just starting to regrow (if not used for more fields).
The fields should definitely be regular in shape, as Cobra Mustang said. The ridge and furrow ploughing lines should also follow one of the straight edges (not so easy to persuade fill patterns of the need to do this, however, so you may need to look around for some suitable symbols, if you want to stick with this idea, or just draw the patterning yourself).
In terms of field sizes, the old English definition of "acre", as being the area a man with a team of oxen could plough in a day, is perhaps a useful size to aim for in a pre-industrial context. That would be roughly an area 200 feet by 200 feet, if square. Wikipedia acre page link, should you need it, for other size and definition options (including metric values).
Maybe some fencing for stock pens too, or hedging, as well as crop field fences (just can't rely on animals not to eat your crops or wander off elsewhere...).
1. Draw your field in your chosen texture (making sure you have it the right shape)
2. Right click the polygon tool on the right
3. Pick 'Shaded Polygon (Angle by Edge)'
4. click the field along the edge that best describes the direction you want your furrows to go in.
You should now see that the furrows align themselves to that edge, but the polygon itself has probably also been shaded lighter or darker overall as a result of being automatically tilted like a roof. You can remedy this by right clicking the polygon tool again and choosing 'Change Shade Pitch'. Select the field and right click then 'do it'. Type in 0 (zero) on your keyboard.
Hope that helps with the furrows and the fields.
All the ploughed fields in my Bloodrock map were done this way with a single fill. Here is a zoomed in picture (you can't really see the lines on the lower res map I have uploaded here)
The bottom edge of the fill style will align to the side of the field (polygon) you click in step 4 of Loopysue's instructions above.
Cheers,
~Dogtag
I had that itchy feeling I'd got something slightly wrong. Its why I don't write too many tutorials
Also, a pitch of zero (0) will likely make the fill lighter than the original brightness of the fill bitmap. In my experience — and I admit it's limited, so this may not always hold true — a pitch of 25 - 30 is usually closer to the brightness of the original fill pattern. A pitch of zero is brighter, and a pitch greater than 25 - 30 is darker.
I see now
I probably didn't notice it because I was also using an RGB Process Matrix to colour each field differently.