Wyvern
Wyvern
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Seeking advice re world map and civilization placement
The topographic advice here is good if you're aiming for a more-or-less duplicate Earth, as far as range and extent of terrains is concerned.
However, the nature of your initial map suggests that may not be what you'd prefer, so it might be interesting to consider the example of the planet Mars here too, as an alternative. The maximum range between the highest and lowest points on Earth (Everest to deepest ocean trenches) is almost 20 km. For Mars, a much smaller planet than Earth, it's 30 km. On Earth, as mentioned already, there are relatively scarcely any mountains, and no substantial clusters of them, when looked at on a global scale. On Mars, more or less the entire southern hemisphere is rugged to mountainous:
The image above is from Wikimedia Commons, though should you wish, you can find a little more on the topic, with referencing pointers, via the Geography of Mars Wikipedia page as a starting point.
As Sue said, it's less easy finding a decent comparison map for Earth, but this one's a reasonable rough comparison for the Mars one here at least, again via Wikimedia Commons, as found on the Wikipedia Global Relief Model page:
You pays your money and takes your choice!
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City locations
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Several maps for (random forest) encounters
The default sun position in CC3 is from the north west... even though the sun is only ever in that direction for real if you live in the southern hemisphere.
Not quite true, Sue, as from the northern hemisphere in summer, around June-July, the Sun sets in the northwest too. From much of Britain, that's around or indeed north of, true azimuth 315°. ๐
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Dhakos, The City of Spires - Watabou Cities Annual
Well this is weird, as I've just dropped-by the Forum here following a lengthy discussion on one of my Discords with someone about the old Chaosium versions of the "Stormbringer" RPG, a few minutes ago!
Not sure if it'll help with your spires query, but I had to draw my own shadows of not dissimilar form for one of my Atlas maps a while back, the Thalassan Castle Ruins. The FCW might give you a further pointer or two, perhaps. Or perhaps not! Good luck, regardless ๐
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Cosmographer and Moon Orbits
This is a pretty complex set of tasks you're hoping to accomplish here, but as long as you're happy to put in the work yourself, it should be perfectly possible. That may depend on how comfortable you are working with the mathematics of orbital mechanics, however, and exactly what degree of precision you're hoping to achieve.
I'm not aware of any tools that will allow you to do all of this in one, but you may find some of the tools linked from the Worldbuilding Links and Software page of the Orion's Arm Universe Project website helpful. Note that some of these are only available via the Wayback Machine archival website now, and may use older software types to function. I've not really done much with this in a long time, so can only hope some of it may assist!
Unfortunately, the few folks I know, or knew, who did this kind of thing tended to write their own programs to do it, and while that may be an option for you too, that's not something I've had any experience with, sadly.
Good luck anyway!
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Commercial use of maps
Yep, I think many of us have learnt far more than we wanted to about the murkiness of copyright and IP laws in different parts of the world in recent months, thanks to events elsewhere in the RPG world.
Bottom line is it's probably safer to create your own new maps from scratch, than try copying anything someone else has done, however varied, especially when you're intending to make money from doing so.
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Expansion to Ellis Prybylski Watercolor Style
Yes please to the Elf, Dwarf, Halfling and Orc structures, plus ruins, ships, icy elements, a volcano-mountain, variant settlement features (including for different cultures)! And after those, also perhaps:
- Magical site markers
- Battlefield marker, and a more general flag-style marker, to highlight important sites that don't fit to specific structure types.
- Oasis symbols for the deserts.
- Two more bridges at different angles to the current one - one running straight down the page, the other angled down from top left to lower right.
- I really like the Henge and Tomb hill markers, as they look good on any terrain. Another such marker with a cave mouth would be very useful.
- Some Mountain Peak symbols without the snowy tops (so grey mountains, just no white caps).
- Seeing the animal and creature comments, just the actual creature without any associated terrain would be better, as usable anywhere. Snag is, going down this route is liable to lead to requests for a lot more "resources" style markers - domesticated creatures and crops, minerals, etc.
- Some jungle-style trees, perhaps including mangroves, as well as the fruit trees Monsen mentioned.
I'll probably think of others later, but these are what're coming to mind right away. It's a wonderful style, and it would be excellent to see it expanded as far as possible in future, I think.
And thank you very much for creating it!
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Ancient maps
That 22-foot Roman Empire map is the Peutinger Table, aka Tabula Peutingeriana, and the Wikipedia page includes a high-res complete image of the whole - may take a while to load, however, as the full-size JPG is about 15 MB. This is the direct link to that Wikimedia image.
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Free Late Victorian PDF Maps From Chaosium
We've mentioned before on the Forum that Chaosium provides a lot of free PDF resources that you can download from their website for the various RPGs and supplements they produce. Today, I picked-up a physical copy of their latest Call of Cthulhu book at my FLGS, "Cthulhu By Gaslight - Investigators' Guide", the updated version of an earlier work for the line in which our own ScottA had a hand back in the day!
With the book comes a beautiful fold-out map of late Victorian London drawn by Alyssa Faden, a name doubtless familiar to some here, especially those who have her style pack from the 2014 Annual. You can download a free PDF version of that London map (and a set of the players' maps from the book, which share a similar look) via the links on the Cthulhu By Gaslight webpage here.
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Panzer sample thread
Looking good!
I agree on the ground tracks point, particularly for the six and eight-wheelers as they had variations on independent steering per wheel group (and the four-wheelers had independent wheel drives too), so could give much broader overall track spreads.
It might be helpful to have an additional group of aerials to fit to the command vehicles variants (e.g. both the 231 variants, the 232s (6- and 8-rad) and the 222 variant 223), as these are such obvious fixed features in an overhead view, and they have to pass above the turrets, so would need to be drawn that way to allow for the turret pieces to rotate properly.
If you're including the 247, you might want to have the Kfz 13, and the variant Kfz 14 command vehicle - again, it has an overhead aerial, if no turret problem this time!
There are also the SdKfz 221, 260 and 261 (radio car variant of the 260), which you might be able to draw as simply variant top structures/turrets, as being similar to the 222 overall. The 231 (8-rad) headquarters variant, the 263 might be another possibility, along with the 263 (6-rad).
I'll go away now ๐








