Royal Scribe
Royal Scribe
About
- Username
- Royal Scribe
- Joined
- Visits
- 4,287
- Last Active
- Roles
- Member
- Points
- 1,560
- Birthday
- February 5, 1968
- Location
- San Francisco, California
- Real Name
- Kevin
- Rank
- Mapmaker
- Badges
- 11
Reactions
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[WIP] Community Atlas - Gold Coast, Doriant
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[WIP] Inside the Temple of Fah
Basement 1
This level contains catacombs with 64 crypts for wealthy individuals who were not entombed with their pharaohs. There are 16 vacant spots.
This level also contains two chambers with the temple’s treasures, which connect to a circular chamber inscribed with eight hieroglyphics. The original purpose of this chamber has been forgotten. (The truth is, this was towards the end of my designing and I realized I hadn't used the hieroglyphs yet, so here are some.)
A secret passage leads to a chamber with a teleportation portal. Another circular chamber has both of its doors destroyed. The chamber beyond has a 15x15 pit. The heat, stench, and red glow suggest that it drops into a bed of lava.
A locked door provides access to a set of stairs that descend 30 feet to Basement 2.
Basement 2
The 30-foot descent brings us to an octagonal chamber that appears to be used for secret religious rites, perhaps by priests who are part of a forbidden sect? This connects to a large meeting room. A secret door provides access to two more chambers.
A secret door on the northeast wall of the octagonal chamber provides access to a wide passageway that descends 30 more feet down a series of staircases to a narrow chamber. There on the west wall, more stairs descend another 10 feet into caverns carved into the bedrock.
Here the pit from Basement 1 does indeed drop into a bed of magma, encircled by a platform of cooled lava rock. A raised bridge provides access to a platform with glowing runes inscribed in a circle.
I’m really pleased with how the lava turned out here. I used two different fills that I think came from Monsen’s Mines. The darker one is on a sheet above the lighter one, and then I used the color key effect to allow brighter parts of the magma show through in spots.
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[WIP] Community Atlas Competition - Artemisia - Verinress Arl - Fon'Anar
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[WIP] Kingdom of Gongodûr
Here's a "work-in-progress" area map for the Kingdom of Gongodûr, a dwarven kingdom in the southeast corner of the Gold Coast area I've been working on (to provide a home for a dwarven mining village I'm working on). I used the Mike Schley Overland style because it has the best dwarven community symbols.
I shaded the countries outside of the borders of my dwarven kingdom, but not sure if that's the right approach. I could do proper borders for those neighboring kingdoms if that would be better.
I still need to name the places that are new to this local map but the names from the parent map have been added. I was going to do them all in Copperplate font since the font has a sort of "chiseled in stone" look, but it's such a wide font that it made place names challenging. Colors, sizes, and effects on labels remains one of my weaknesses.
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[WIP] Greco-Roman Inspired Temple
I was worried that my temple wasn't looking as cohesive because I was drawing fills and symbols from so many places that didn't quite mesh. In particular, I wasn't happy with how the trees looked. (I also added a gazebo at the top and a botanical garden at the bottom.)
In the end, I decided to try the grass fills and trees from Forest Trail. Here they are without contour patches of other grass shades, at 50 and 100 scale.
And then I tried adding patches of grass of the same fill style, but with a shade higher and lower. I really don't have an eye for this sort of thing. Should I have bigger patches? More numerous small ones. Should they blend in more?
For the botanical garden, I couldn't find flowers among my symbols except for potted plants. It was supposed to be simple so as to not distract from the temple, but I got carried away.
- I made rose bushes by taking bushes from one style and then placing small varicolored bushes from another style on top as roses.
- I made flowers by using weeds from Forest Trail as the stems and then adding varicolored shrubs from another style as the flowers.
- I added a fungi garden using varicolored mushrooms of different sizes (plus a few varicolored fairy ring mushrooms from Forest Trail)
- I was going to use the anemones from Marine Dungeons as a plant, and then thought...why not use them as anemones? So I made a man-made pond for them, plus coral and a few other marine symbols.
- And I added a carnivorous plant. The only one I could find was from the Mike Schley Overland, which is in a very different style. If anyone has recommendations for other carnivorous plants, please let me know.
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[WIP] Swamp Witch
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[WIP] Playing around with Sinister Sewers
I made a few tweaks. Changed most of the effluent to brown except for the portions from the vents (aka storm drains) that's meant to be rainwater. Added a few bunches of leaves from Forest Trail to those ones. Added some bridges for maintenance workers to use to cross canals. Left a bit of green coming from one of the canals -- a mystery for adventurers to solve? I should probably add some slime....
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[WIP] Haunted Mansion
Here's level 4 of the mansion. There were only supposed to be three floors of the main mansion plus the tower, but when I was halfway through the third floor, I noticed that the main mansion has a central section that rises above the others. I decided to make that more of a rough attic storage space with a few rough servants' rooms. The tower doesn't connect here, but you can see it has been turned into a wizard's workshop. It extends up one more flight.
And I just noticed that I never posted the third floor.
Third Floor
Fourth Floor
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[WIP] Greenwood Falls (CA211 Watabou City Revisted)
I was a little intimidated to attempt this without seeing a Live demonstration first, but since I have the day off, I decided to dive in.
My first attempt was just a small village (152 buildings, population of 920), but I can see how a lot of the conversion goes quickly regardless whether you have a population of 500 or 5,000.
Here's what Watabou generated for me (converted from PNG to JPEG for size considerations):
And here's what I was able to create in a few hours:
I didn't export the fields or the trees, just added them myself. Didn't do much in the way of adding furrows, etc., to spruce it up -- I can see why, even though it speeds up the process, I could still spend many hours adding lots of flourishes.
(One oddity from Watabou: The exported heraldic symbol that was exported ended up being different that what was shown, one deer instead of three, but no big deal.)
@Quenten and @Ralf, you did a magnificent job with this! What a tremendously helpful service you have done for Game Masters!
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[WIP] City of Wolfwell Falls (CA211 Watabou City Revisited)
Following my test runs with the village of Greenwood Falls (population 920) and Redway Hill Township (population ~3,500), here's my attempt at a major city: Wolfwell Falls (population ~55,000).
This is what Watabou gave me to work with:
And this is what I came up with:
Here's a close-up of the Castle District, which I figure is a bit more upscale.
(I kind of messed up the river there. I when I did the "Change like drawing tool" command, I accidentally wasn't on the River/Water sheet, and I think when I fixed it I messed up the top layer or something.)
The nicer neighborhoods have a lot more greenery. Most neighborhoods have more dirt than greenery, and the area by the docks is muddier.
As predicted in the Redway Hill Towship thread, the longest part was redrawing the secondary roads. According to the Info: Count tool, there are 59 paved roads and 948 unpaved roads! I hope I successfully converted and/or deleted-and-redrew all of the roads. I had to do all of that, and also create a handful of special buildings, before being able to convert everything left to be the regular buildings. If you see any really weird buildings, it might be something I didn't properly convert to whatever it was supposed to be before turning it into a building.
I should draw a lot more fields -- the ones on the north side of the city won't be enough to sustain a city of 55,000 people! (Also, I just noticed that I call it "Wolfwell Hall" on the map instead of Wolfwell Falls. Gotta fix that.)