Wyvern
Wyvern
About
- Username
- Wyvern
- Joined
- Visits
- 3,151
- Last Active
- Roles
- Member
- Points
- 5,378
- Rank
- Cartographer
- Badges
- 24
-
Experimenting with wooden stairs
Have you tried CA209 Stairs and Steps? That has some wooden steps and some more generic "brown" steps that will work as wood or stone. If you need some plank lines in places, just draw some on afterwards. Even some of the worn, brown stone steps will work as wood - again add a few plank lines if you wish to fool the eye a little more. Old wooden steps will wear away just as the stone ones do, after all, and might be patched with different colour wood scraps. You could also "carpet" them to hide that middle worn section.
Symbol Set 2, Bitmap A, has some complete wooden stairs, darker though not reddened wood, some of which come without arrows.
With DD3, you might try mixing things up with other wooden furniture - the bench, pew, the sideboard, chests, crates (which latter two both have paler wood colours), and the planks in the Debris catalogue (though those would probably only work with difficulty). You may need to hide the edges or sides with some of the furniture and containers, but they could give alternate options for landings, say, apart from steps.
It'd probably be worth hunting around in a few more catalogues as well, as you never know what else wooden might seem suitable!
-
[WIP] Cymril City
I'm not familiar with Talislanta or this city, but the few other maps of Cymril I've found online suggest either following a more detailed view of the various internal city blocks (the official map, I think), or a more abstract view, a little like the Watabou technique for showing city blocks, rather than the loose mix of both you have here. Obviously, I don't know what significance the more detailed areas you've shown may have in your own campaign, but I do wonder if this mix is what's not helping you retain the impression of the vastness of the city. Possibly adding some vegetation within and/or without the city - trees especially - might help give a different impression of scale too?
However, what you have now seems pretty impressive in its own right, and also seems to be doing its job well - identifying what's where clearly within the city.
-
Maps of Anglo-Saxon England
When hunting for maps today to assist a colleague on an ancient history forum, I happened upon this page on Kemble: The Anglo-Saxon Charters Website, which has links to a host of beautiful, sometimes annotated, hand-drawn, black-and white maps of Anglo-Saxon England, all done by the cartographer Reginald Pigott for various books in the early 21st century. They're especially valuable, as some show the established, or best-estimated, extents of features like forests, marshlands, and coastlines, many of which have altered since the 7th to 11th centuries CE. They're free to download for personal use, and are well worth a look.
-
Fireplaces in Interior Colour
Is this from the non-ProFantasy Harn Style of CC3+ mapping developed by Roy Denton? I don't actually have this installed, so can't really help, but if it is, I know a few of our longer-standing Forum contributors do, so can hopefully assist.
-
Live Mapping: Random City
Thinking further about this option since the livestream, it's a powerful tool no matter what kind of settlement you're wanting to map, even if it's to fit in a pre-drawn setting, as anything unwanted the random option generates can be readily moved or removed to fit terrain features (e.g. coastlines, rivers, cliffs).
Different areas of a larger city could be created randomly in different ways (medieval and modern could be mixed, drawn from different random maps, for instance), and then fitted together in a suitable CC3+ master file, simply by copying over the relevant parts of the separate randomly-created settlements.
Naturally, this would need quite a degree of restructuring and amending after the fact to make everything fit together correctly, although a lot of the base work would be done from the random creations.
It would also be possible to "super-detail" parts of a settlement drawn in a quite different style, such as a Watabou-type settlement, leaving the "blank" areas for segments that weren't necessary for such detailing. Again, unwanted parts of the random design would need removing, but this would be something to consider if of interest.



