The Xorian Mountains

[wdmartin]

Here's a WIP on a map of the Xorian Mountains, from Paizo's Golarion campaign setting. These are in the Abyss, part of Lamashtu's realm, and there's not much world lore beyond that. I've decided they're extremely arid and barren.

Progress so far: I poked around on Terrain.party until I found a neat area and exported a height map of the area. Here it is.

Xorian Mtns Height Map.png

This is an area in western Colorado about 20x20 kilometers.

Then I followed a lengthy but good tutorial on YouTube rendering shaded relief in Blender. It came in six parts: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 plus a followup tutorial on how to use the resulting shaded relief image in Photoshop. For the most part it was pretty straightforward and easy to follow, though there have been some changes to Blender since that tutorial was produced that I had to work around. The main one was that the subdivide tool has a cap on how many subdivisions you can add at a time now. I left a comment explaining my workaround for that on the video which discusses subdivision.

After a couple hours working through those tutorials and getting familiar with Blender, I came up with this shaded relief image:

Xorain Mtns shaded relief 02.png

The tutorial creator assumed that you'd have access to some other source of data for providing color in the image. He used a hypsometric tint, and referred to adding satellite imagery. I have no idea how to get those things, and anyway this is for fantasy cartography. So I used his techniques for setting up the Photoshop layers and started basically painting my own colors in. Here's what I've got so far.

Xorian-Mtns-rev-2.jpg

I think it's off to a decent start, but I'm not sure what to do with it from here. I want the place to be a barren trackless waste. But at the moment it's just too empty. I may go spend some time just looking at satellite images of barren desert mountains -- perhaps something on the border of the Gobi -- for some ideas as to what to add to it. Any suggestions or feedback would be welcome.

[w.gofry]

What a fantastic job you've done so far! Especially in improvising height data. I'm sure others here would have better ideas, but I'd suggest that since this is a fantasy world, I'd add so kind of distinguishing feature of Lamashtu. That could include corrupted scrubland, a city for her beasts, or a major mark on the geography that directly shows her power or the power of someone else who came to her realm.

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[wdmartin]

Thanks!

Scrubland is an excellent idea, and I'll think about what I can do to show Lamashtu's dominance over the area. A city doesn't fit the area -- her capitol city is the size of a planet and sits on a plateau at the center of Kurnugia. The Xorian Mountains are out at the very edge of the plane, the hinterlands as it were. If there are any settlements, they'd be small ones at best. This specific area is the home of Daclau-Sar, the nascent demon lord of carrion, who was formed from the body of the dead god Curchanus. I definitely need to work that in, since it's Daclau-Sar the PC will be going here to deal with.

[wdmartin]

Some progress.

Xorian-Mtns-rev-3.jpg

Changes:

- Put some water in some of the deeper riverbeds.
- Made an attempt at adding some scrub brush in the some of the lower areas.

The scrub brush is a bit purplish -- that's intentional. It's the Abyss, so there's no particular reason the plant life needs to follow the usual color scheme. I'm divided as to the effect. Part of me thinks it works fine, the other part thinks it doesn't look enough like vegetation on top of the terrain, instead of just more terrain.

Doing the rivers took a while. It's underneath the shaded relief layer, so it took a while to paint some lines in that followed the terrain believably. I also drew some squiggly white lines on top of it in places to show turbulence in the water, and made an attempt at a waterfall above the small lake in the middle near the left edge.

Still thinking about settlements and signs of demonic presence.

[wdmartin]

More progress.

Xorian-Mtns-rev-4.jpg

Changes:

Added the skeleton of the dead god Curchanus, whom Lamashtu lured to the Abyss and slew many ages past. I figure that's a pretty good sign of her power -- she killed a god and left him to rot. At this scale that skeleton is almost a kilometer tall.

Added a small town next to the waterfall. It's almost invisible, though. The sort of slate blue roofs don't stand out well. I think I might need to increase the contrast.

Added lakes and rifts of lava billowing out viscous clouds of black smoke. Because hey, it's the Abyss. I'm generally pleased with these.

Todo:

- Some more points of interest, especially in the bottom right quarter of the map. Not sure what to put there yet.
- Fix the town.
- Needs a scale.
- Needs a compass rose.
- Needs a border.
- Needs some labels.
- Still not entirely happy with the scrub brush, but not sure what to do with it.

[wdmartin]

More progress.

Xorian-Mtns-rev-5.jpg

Changes:

Added a gaping mouth-pit full of jagged teeth in the east. It's almost two kilometers across, so I figure this is actually a rift down to the next lower level of the Abyss rather than an actual creature attempting to feed.

Tweaked the coloring of the town's roofs. It didn't help much. They're still hard to see. Hrrrrm. Taps fingers on table in contemplative displeasure.

Added a border, which is some simple alternating black/white lines. Each one is a kilometer in length, allowing you to judge distances tolerably well. However, I don't think it actually looks very good.

I made an attempt at a map legend, finished it, and instantly hated it. So I tore it out again. I'm not sure what to do about that. The ultra-realistic style of the map means that any decorative stuff tends to look out of place.

[FranCobasGC]

Looks nice!
great job with Blender

[wdmartin]

Thanks!

Progress. Best viewed at full size, I might add -- on the preview thumbnails there's just not enough detail to see the points of interest. Heck, you can't even see the labels in the preview.

Xorian-Mtns-rev-6.jpg

Changes:

Added labels to the points of interest:

• The remains of Curchanus
• The Burning Lakes
• The Maw
• The River Bile
• The town of Godfall

Added a map legend (overall area label, abbreviated compass rose, distance markers along the border/scale).

Tweaked Godfall's roof colors a bit more. They're a sort of sickly green now. It's still pretty hard to make them out.

This is usable at this point; it's conceivable I might add more to it, but I have until the 24th to get everything ready and there's a whole lot of other things that also need prepping (plot notes, stat blocks, NPC names, etc).