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Wyvern

Wyvern

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Wyvern
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  • Community Atlas: Embra - Enclosed Places

    Many thanks everyone for your kind comments, "Likes", and so forth. Haven't been on here for a couple of days, so apologies if I've seemed to be ignoring anyone.

    I've been working on this group of maps for about six months now, so I've tinkered around with quite a few options, some of which worked better than others, and some of which have ended-up as something of a compromise. I went with the paler mists in the end (and there are some minor variations in the colouring and density in places) as I wanted Embra to be "lighter" in tone generally, although there are a few less welcoming spots too (we'll get to those...).

    Well, once the maps are in the Atlas, it should work a little like this, once you find Embra at least. It might have been nice to be able to swap from map to map without needing the linear Atlas structure, but the set was designed specifically for use that way.

    They're my own interpretations of images from randomly-drawn tarot cards. These are the notes regarding them that I gave in the opening "Embra" Forum topic:

    A few notes were added in the process, but I wanted more, less predictable, aspects too. I turned to two tarot decks, which each coincidentally consist of 78 cards. One card was randomly drawn for each Village, Place and Street from either deck, and extra comments added to the map. The decks were Tarot of the Secret Forest (although this online review page has a lot more images), illustrated by Lucia Mattioli (Lo Scarabeo, 2005), and Shadowscapes Tarot, illustrated by Stephanie Pui-Min Law (Llewellyn Books, 2010). Both are heavily Faerie-inspired in their designs.

    The texts were also designed to fit the available space next to the map, and how much text you can type into a single text-box in CC3+, so some of the descriptions were amended because of those constraints too!

    LoopysueJimP
  • Community Atlas: Embra - Enclosed Places

    The final Enclosed Places map condenses the remaining five Places, all streets, into a single drawing:

    Lots to see here, so let's try a closer view of just the streets:

    All the streets had to be designed in a rather different way to the other Places of course, as there were no Judges Guild products that provided plans for such things in isolation. As I noted previously, instead I reworked a set of tables for randomly generating caves and mines from another old Judges Guild text to decide on their lengths, widths, types and layouts, although that system ultimately was more "me" than "JG". Once the base layouts were designed and drawn into the CC3+ map, the streets were redrawn as proper CC3+ streets of the appropriate width and character, and then the CD3 random street options were used to populate them with a range of houses suitable for their overall names and natures.

    The streets I came up with were often quite curvy, and the CD3 random street tool isn't too keen on curves and turns, and it can't really cope with junctions at all, so some of the random properties had to be moved, or removed, or adjusted, and sometimes redrawn using a combination of the base shapes that had been generated. Occasionally, some were swapped out for symbols, particularly where I wanted specific or important structures to be. I also decided early on that it wasn't going to be practical to provide interior drawings for all the properties involved - there were simply too many, and that ran the further risk of making them too much alike without a lot of care. I did contemplate doing interiors for selected properties, only to finally decide against that too. So if you need interiors, you'll have to come up with your own for these!

    I'll not go into detail here as to what some of the items on these mapped streets are. The PDF and text files in the Atlas should help in that respect. However, it is worth drawing attention to the most significant structure, the Thistle Street Barracks, home to the Knights of the Thistle, Embra's military and police-force, in as much as any Faerie settlement needs such things. These Knights are not entirely my own invention either, as real-world Scottish knights of the realm are known as "Knights of the Thistle" too, though Embra's are naturally of a more magically Faerie kind.

    As with all the other individual Places, the idea is these streets can be linked as loosely and in whatever ways GMs may desire to create fresh interpretations of Embra city.

    And this is only the first collection of Places in Embra. There are six more such sets still to come!

    LoopysueJimPMonsen[Deleted User]Mapjunkiepablo gonzalez
  • Community Atlas: Embra - Enclosed Places

    The fifth Enclosed Place of Interest, and the last to be mapped as an individual in this group, is the Lawn Market, part of the Twilight Market. This is a much smaller map than any of the previous ones, because the base had been randomly decided as coming from the old Judges Guild "Temples Book I". As I mentioned in-passing when describing the development of the whole Embra mapping project for the Atlas earlier, the Temples book used a different scaling to any of the other JG texts I was using to determine the base drawings for all these maps. As perhaps might be anticipated, they were of a size to better suit such individual structures, not the small geographic areas of all the other books. I did though decide to enlarge it from its original size, as that would simply have been too small to fit very much by way of market features into. Thus we arrive at:

    Again, this neatly demonstrates the difficulty in trying to emplace labels to identify specific small areas or items, hence the FCW toggle option to hide said labels for a clearer view:

    There are plenty of oddities here. Aerial walkways supported by themselves and platforms attached to four great trees, which all form a single living structure, with hot air balloons serving as market stalls for those using the walkways. Stone walls that actually aren't - well, they're not solid, but lattice-work frames that support living vegetation. Large numbers of tents and awning-covered stalls. Giant fungi housing more market stalls, and one even containing a three-floor tearoom. And a golden fun house that isn't a building at all, just a typical fairground structure, so there isn't an option to view the interiors of the buildings here, because there aren't any as such! It is though a great place to get a wonderful lawn. Just ask one of the lawn tailors to cut you a piece off whichever style of lawn you fancy of the size you need, and they'll slide it out from under the stalls so you can't even tell it's gone, and fold it up so you can carry it away easily in a pocket. This is Faerie, after all. PDF and text files will explain, as ever.

    LoopysueJimP[Deleted User]Mapjunkie
  • Community Atlas: Embra - Enclosed Places

    The fourth Place of Interest here is Lady's Hollow Floral Meadow:

    Again, the borders are especially subtly-defined here (the paths), and it is a little difficult to pick-out details at the usual Forum resolution, so this is just the map itself, now with the building interiors shown (albeit there's just the one building that has such an interior):

    While there's probably less to explain overall from this map, there are a few features that benefit from some additional detailing - such as the castle-like garden of Lady's Rest and the High Pavilion dome - provided by the accompanying PDF and text files.

    Loopysue[Deleted User]Mapjunkie
  • Community Atlas: Embra - Enclosed Places

    Enclosed Place of Interest 3 is the Floating Dale Park:

    This can be used as a typical real-world park, with opportunities to wander around, or play outdoor games on the central Playing Fields, whose unusual shape may call to mind that Faerie outdoor games and sports may not be quite those familiar from the Mortal Realm.

    There are a handful of surface-level buildings scattered around the map's centre, as one of the map toggles will reveal:

    These include the Pavilion, where equipment for playing sports and games is available, as well as a restaurant in the central octagon beneath the building's dome. And yes, some of the vegetation is actually intended to be of living glass in Glass Tree Forest. And again yes, those ARE bridges made from rainbows over the River Clack. As ever, the text and PDF files will explain a little more about both facets, and others, from this map. In case this seems not very "Enclosed", there ARE boundaries to the Park which are deliberately less obvious than some.

    Loopysue[Deleted User]