Baile nam Fonn

Originally Posted by Baile nam Fonn

|| UPDATE: comments, advice, encouragement welcome! I'm new to mapping and this is my first public map project.
||
|| Descending into madness: the attached export map & trace pleased me initially, but now I want better resolution!
|| To achieve this, I'm using 1 x 1 embarks / embark anywhere and exporting local images. It will be a bunch of sea-bed elevation stuff at first.
|| I will then parse the data from these images onto a grid in Inkscape and tweak the resultant paths by hand.
|| This is going to take a while.
|| But I plan to break it up by Region tiles, updating this post with crudely labelled, black & white images (of the Inkscape stuff, I will spare y'all from ASCII ) as I complete each tile.
|| May the power of Epic Music Vn give give me strength.
||
|| I've nicknamed the place Ernie'sTome (alternatively Ernie'sTomb, if my mood darkens).
||
||
|| Belated thanks to ChickPea for the comment.



My plan is to try making a hybrid conventional top down + typographic map using the generated language place names.
Here's an example of the style which is a big part of my inspiration. If mine manages to turn out even fractionally as good as James McDonald's artwork, I'll be thrilled!

My powergoals are all about labelling.
After I get an attractive map in place, next up is a series of themed variations which
will showcase the incredible density of a Dwarf Fortress world ..even a small and short-lived one.

Below, I proudly present the results of the Inkscape-trace of a Legends export detail map (buildings and roads). Patching up the trace to fill in colours was tedious, but I love those bold strokes!
No labels or legend yet, so I'll point out a few things:

• The palette is default from the DF export. It really needs to change.
• Up is north.
• I added the subtle 33 x 33 grid, which divides the map into 1089 Region tiles (each one measuring 1.54 km x 1.54 km). These correspond to the coordinate system which the Legends viewer uses.
• Bright Green are Hill Dwarf settlements (fortresses are not shown yet, but there are three in the mountains)
• Dark Green are Forest retreats, some of which have an eyebrow-raisingly high Grizzly-to-Elf population ratio.
• On the east and south coast are the colourful Human centres. Yeah, I still have some work to do on those.
• The black squares house Goblins. They do a trench-maze thing as part of their Dark Pits / Fortresses, and apparently that accounts for the shape.
• Two of the Western ones are in ruins (one was squashed by a Titan), denoting that is on the long to-do list.
• The larger island in the south boasts a Wicked Man and a Bleak Horror. And a cave called Rirngethac Noguithra, which is home to four hundred fifty-six cave swallows and a family of five giant moles. Sweet.

Thanks to vectors, I'll eventually be able to scale it up with ease once I dump the source image entirely. Yay!