Naserian

[wdmartin]

I'm working on a city for a campaign I'm running. This is a WIP.

Naserian-01.jpg

Just in case any of my players stumble across this -- Darla, Lily, Vegum! Shoo! Read no further! You'll get here eventually.

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Are they gone? Okay.

Naserian was once a flying city of the ancient Shory (from Paizo's world of Golarion). They were, in fact, the last flying city of the Shory empire. And, unlike the rest of their peers, they did not crash. Nor did they explode midair, or anything like that. No: they deliberately landed the city in order make some modifications to the apparatus that kept the city in flight. Things went ... badly. And the inhabitants were forced to flee, even though the city itself was intact and fully operational.

I've tried to indicate the rough outline of the original flying island in the terrain. But I'm still planning to add a river, possibly a lake, and I may reshape the southern reaches. The land shouldn't reach up that high -- that's where the skyships docked. There should be some cliffs down there. And I also have some points of interest to add.

The general shape of the city (and particularly all those houses) came from the Medieval Fantasy City Generator on watabou.itch.io. I played with the settings and generated cities until I found one I liked. Here's the SVG I began with:

goany_cliff.svg

After downloading that I spent ages in Inkscape, disassembling it into its component pieces. Then I used those to create layer masks for use in Photoshop, where I proceeded to abuse the heck out of layer styles for much of the heavy lifting. I'm tolerably pleased with the outcome so far.

One thing I'm struggling with is that the place looks too intact. It's been abandoned for 5,000+ years. Even assuming protective magics, it should be more ruinous. I scattered trees all over the place, growing through roads and buildings, but that's not enough by itself. I need to figure out how to make some of the buildings partially destroyed. Also, this is a jungle area. I'd really like to have vines covering a bunch of the city, but I've been struggling to come up with a way to do that which doesn't involve manually drawing thousands of one-pixel-wide vines with my mouse.

[wminish]

A city abandoned for 5000+ years in a jungle would most likely be completely buried underground except for maybe the most prominent buildings and then only if there were made of stone, there are cities in south America that have been abandoned for less than 1/5 this length of time and have become completely buried. Nature takes over surprisingly quickly so the city as pictured now would maybe have only been abandoned for 10 years at the most.

I'm not sure what you're planning to do with this location so these ideas might not be fesable but one thing you could do is have the city mostly burried with a visible mound for the wall with the odd tower still poking through and covered in vines and have a section thats been magically protected in a gully where the buildings are only slightly overgrown. You could also have the city burried and make the players dig down to get to the locations that they are after. Just having the paths not visible and completely covered by grass and trees and sections of wall and buildigns destroyed with more overgrowth would make it look significantly older though.

[wdmartin]

The time scales in Golarion are ludicrously long. I have myself complained about it in public on a couple of occasions. There was a lich in Book 5 of Ruins of Azlant who had 10,000 years to accomplish his clearly defined goals. He had daily access to high level wizard magic and reliable prophecy, and yet somehow in that time he managed to accomplish approximately nothing. He conquered the twenty miles of terrain surrounding his tower. Woo. Ten thousand years, and he got about as much done as one mundane tribe of barbarians could do in a summer.

So believe me, yes, I'm well aware that logically this city should be nothing but a large mound. But certain aspects of the overall plan for the campaign mean that I have to retain compatibility with the established canon lore. I'm stuck with the stupidly long timeline. And the plot demands a more or less intact city. I am therefore ignoring the fact that this place should be a nice big hill. In the event that a player wonders about it, I shall wibble gloriously about ancient protective magics that have warded off wind and weather and time to an astonishing degree. Truly, the ancient wizards of the Shory were astounding, blah blah blah blah.

Ultimately, I'd like the PCs to have the option of reactivating the aeromantic infandibulum and flying the city home in triumph. So making them excavate the entire place wouldn't really work, I'm afraid.

I'm definitely going to add damage and overgrowth. I just need to figure out how to do that. Preferably without having manually adjust all 2,495 buildings. I'll keep fiddling with it.

[wminish]

Good luck, a few large stamps could be a good way to make a quick start and then break up the regular shapes with some smaller ones but unfortunately I don't think there are many quick solutions for a complex map like this. I look forward to seeing what you come up with.

[wdmartin]

Some progress.

Naserian-02.jpg

I roughed up the roads, flattened a bunch of buildings, and added some cliffs and a waterfall at the south end of the city. The water comes from a ancient apparatus that formerly supplied water to the city from the Elemental Plane of Water. Eventually it ruptured and carved a path out. I'll probably add a stream exiting from the lake.

After some experimentation, I see no good way of doing vines other than manually. So it'll just take a while.

[wdmartin]

And here's two attempts at vines:

Naserian-vines-01.jpg

Naserian-vines-02.jpg

This is basically a layer of green with a bunch of layer effects (bevel and emboss, drop shadow) and a layer mask. Then I drew in a bunch of squiggles with a one-pixel brush on the layer mask. I can't decide which blend mode I like best -- normal or color. The latter feels like a more natural part of the scene, but it's also considerably more subtle.

Either way, doing the whole city is going to take aaaaages.

[wminish]

Hey, this is looking good. The changes you've done already make it look significantly older.

I'd probably go with the normal blend mode personally as the details are small and that option is more readable from a distance, I am somewhat red/green colourblind though so take that with a grain of salt.

[wdmartin]

Some progress. I decided to go start putting in points of interest.

Naserian-03.jpg

So far I've added the Sky Hall, four infandibulum vents, and the Well of Abundance. Oh, and I've decided that waterfall leads to the city reservoir. I cleared out some houses along the north east wall -- there's going to be a university campus there. On my todo list are the aforementioned university, the Observatory Arcane, a cathedral or shrine of some sort, an amphitheater and possibly some barracks of some sort. I'd really love to put in some electrothaumaturgical batteries, but those are zappy things on the bottom of the city where you can't really see them while it's landed.

For the moment the points of interest are bright and shiny and new looking. I'll go back and dirty them up later.

[Wingshaw]

It might be too late to mention, but one way you could do the vines is to simply make a brush for it. If you don't know how to do that: make a 300 x 300 px canvas, draw a whole bunch of squiggly black 1px lines on it, define it as a brush preset, and then use that to cover a large area of your map quickly. Your players won't notice something as subtle as a repeated brush pattern, especially not when the detail is so subtle.

EDIT to add: if this terrain is jungle, I think you need a lot more trees. Many many many more trees. In a typical jungle, you wouldn't be able to see the grass at all. In fact, I'm pretty sure jungles don't even have grass, because there isn't enough sunlight making it to the ground level. Of course, to make it even more like a jungle, having some variations in tree canopy shape would also help: eg palm trees. And there's no reason the vines you're drawing would only be on the buildings; technically they should be all over the jungle, too.

Wingshaw

[wdmartin]

Yes, I've always planned to add a whole lot more trees, but I wanted to focus on the city first.

Here's some progress:

Naserian-04.jpg

The major change was adding the amphitheatre. That took a few hours, but I'm pleased with the outcome. I'm not sure whether I'll keep it in the park or move it someplace else in the city. The park makes a certain amount of sense, though, and I'd like to avoid wiping out any more houses.

I also added more trees. There still aren't enough, but I'll keep working on it. The trees do have a significant problem, in that they're too uniform in color. Currently I've got eight layers of trees, and I'll probably have to double that before I'm done, so I'm hoping I can get some more color variation going with some hue/saturation adjustment layers. Possibly using some kind of irregular greyscale image as a mask on those -- rendered clouds, maybe? Or desaturated repeating textures pasted into the layer mask. Eh. I'll experiment.