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Royal Scribe

Royal Scribe

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Royal Scribe
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1,739
Birthday
February 5, 1968
Location
San Francisco, California
Real Name
Kevin
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Mapmaker
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12

Latest Images

  • Parchment Worlds - Duke Island

    This is beautiful.

    Ricko Hasche
  • Best ways to use stairs (Mike Schley Dungeon style)

    I am in the process of designing an inn using the Mike Schley Dungeon style. I have a pair of stairs, one (the one that's farthest north) going up to the second story where the guest rooms are located, and the other descending down to the cellar.

    I've always struggled with how to make stairs inside buildings look right.

    1. Should both stairs be on the Symbols Flat sheet? Or are there special sheet effects that you would apply to stairs up and/or stairs down?
    2. Am I correct in assuming that the straight edge is for the side you would enter on this level, and the ragged edge is where it disappears above (for stairs up) or below (for stairs down)?
    3. It seems weird to have the stairs dead-end at the wall -- wouldn't it be better to leave room for a landing at the top of the stairs? But when I pulled them away from the wall, the space looks weird. Is there an effect you'd recommend for that space? Or what about walling it off like in the third image? Are there other effects you'd do for the bottom of the cellar stairs or the top of the stairs going up?


    Any thoughts or insights are appreciated -- and if you have examples in your own galleries to point me to, I would love to check them out.

    Octorilla
  • [WIP] Greco-Roman Inspired Temple

    Yes, I do, although I just realized that I didn't finish installing them. Initially it looked like the plants and flowers were potted plants, but I just looked again and there are some that would be suitable. For now, I think I will keep my botanical garden as it is (unless I find a carnivorous plant), and keep these assets in mind when I do a full botanical garden.

    Thank you, all!

    JimP
  • [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.


    LoopysueJimPMonsenRalf
  • [WIP] Greco-Roman Inspired Temple

    I've been experimenting with different grass fills at different scales

    Here are three different fills at three different scales (10x10, 50x50, and 100x100), with the full-sized version on top and a zoomed-in portion below. It's hard to find a fill/scale combo that looks good at both the full 500x400 screen as well as when zoomed in. I suppose I could use one scale for creating a full-sized JPG export, and then change the scale when doing zoomed-in exports.

    Does anyone have a favorite among these nine options, or a recommendation of another fill to try?

    Per @Monsen's recommendation, I am also going to break up the larger portions of the lawn a bit by adding more symbols, though I don't want it to be too cluttered and distract from the temple itself. I am going to replace the trees here (which come from the Jon Roberts Dungeon symbols) with trees from the Jon Roberts City symbols, because his city trees have more variety. I may add a gazebo, and maybe a portion of a municipal botanical garden or rose garden.


    JimP