So my current project is taking a Watabou City Generator map of a port city metropolis, and adapting it to the Ferraris annual style. The challenge here's two-fold. First, I want to make a tiered city, with the sea-facing docks in the basin, the urban settlement mid-tier, and the farmsteads and suburbs at the highest level. Second, it needs to be a large, abstract city which can believably hold 35-40,000 people - so detailed-building city styles like the MS (which is my general go-to) are just too detailed.

This is the Watabou-generated 35,000-population port city I opted to use as a basis (14,000ft by 7,400ft):

And here's what I've got so far as a WIP:

You'll notice a little splash of green in the middle - that was just proof-of-concept for using Colorize effects and layers for buildings to differentiate between the city's various districts - deep green for the riverside docks, light green for the farmsteads, red for the military district, etc.

All input gratefully received!

So, here's the finished set of maps. I couldn't really think of a better way to include the nation names than the transparent text, but I've tried to make it less intrusive - though it's still slightly 'busy' on the Stansterian League map. And the fractalisation definitely helped the overall look! Thanks so much for the advice, and feedback gratefully received

So I took Sue’s advice and revisited the huge Continent-sized map with an eye for not including all detail, just enough detail for players, and breaking it down into regions. That also got me thinking about the notion of maps as unreliable narrators - if players are made aware that maps might not be GPS-accurate in their fantasy world, the act of discovering something which wasn’t on their map can be a feature, not a bug, etc.

Anyway, here’s a portion of the map (and a little south of it) with reduced detail, and making use of the 13th Age Revisited style.

I’d love to see a Steampunk Overland and Steampunk/Gnomish City in next year’s annual.

That’s exactly what I was trying to convey - thanks! I’ll give that a try :)