[WIP] Whitestone and the Parchwood

[wdmartin]

I'm prepping an adventure that takes place in the Tal'Dorei campaign setting, in the area just around Whitestone. There is a beautiful world map in the campaign guide created by Andy Law -- he wrote up an interesting blog post about his process -- but I need one on a much smaller scale, showing just Whitestone and its surroundings.

Here's what I've got so far:

Parchwood-wip-01.jpg

I am deeply ambivalent. Ehhhhh, it's okay I guess, but ... the mountains don't feel right, I'm not sure that the trees in the forest work very well, and the edge of the peninsula has no continental shelf.

And of course I haven't stuck any of the city indicators on there just yet. I'm not going to attempt any photorealism there, they'll just be abstract dots on the map with labels.

The only thing I'm really happy about is that the scale of the map corresponds well with the scale of the world map. You could scale this down to match the size of the original world map and it would match up very, very closely, with perhaps a few pixels of difference here or there.

It also feels like I need more stuff. Part of the advantage of zooming in is that you can show features that aren't present in the world map. I've got a bunch more villages to add -- Mooren, Kinesgrove, Ranwick, Hearthrose, Pendale -- but perhaps it also needs some other points of interest as well. And the river probably needs some tributaries.

Any feedback is welcome.

[pixelkitteh]

I think this is a great start! I absolutely love critical role and was impressed when I saw this! You have the shape down nicely. I'd suggest maybe desaturating the colors a bit and making the edges a little more fractalized and faded, but as I said, I think this is lovely. Keep up the great work!

[wdmartin]

Took me a while to get back to it, but here's a revised version.

Parchwood-wip-02.jpg

I've added labels and desaturated it a bit. I also extended the stone texture out to the northwest coast, since those are supposed to be bluffs. Oh, and I added snowcaps on a few of the tallest peaks.

I'm going back and forth on the labels. The ones for the towns are okay, I think, but the landscape feature labels may be a bit too subtle.

I'm not trying for the "distressed paper" look, so I haven't faded the edges, but it does bother me that the edges of the land are so sharp and pristine. I'm not quite sure what to do about that other than painstakingly adding more bits and bobs. Yet I kind of need this to be done ... soon ... and have a half dozen other things to prep as well.

[Kalium]

I was thinking the same way about the coastlines, they look too smooth next to the detailed textures. Do you draw your coasts or generate them? I usually find looking at a real life atlas helps me get a grasp of how coasts should look at a given scale and what sort of shapes to expect. But I don't know much about generating, sorry, maybe someone else can help you if you do?

[Tonquani]

I've got to agree with Kalium about the coastlines. The forests have a nice almost photorealistic look, with good variaton, and that just doesn't match in with the coast lines which are all smooth curved lines. I know you say you are short of time, so it may be worth trying to just blur them very slightly if nothing else.

[wdmartin]

Well, I have generated coastlines before using clouds and such. But in this case I was trying to replicate a small section of a larger published map from the Tal'Dorei campaign setting. I needed a zoomed-in map of one region from the larger continent. So to generate the coastline, I did a bunch of math to figure out the scale of the original so I could make the scale match on the smaller area, then used that to crop the larger map down to the region I wanted.

Then I traced the edges of the coastline, roads, and rivers in the cropped area in Inkscape -- manually placing nodes and adjusting bezier curves and such -- in order to produce vectorized shapes for the coast, river, and roads. That's why it's so smooth. Once I had the vector graphics worked out, I exported them to black-and-white PNGs, cranking up the size to the desired output resolution. Those black and white images became masks in Photoshop.

I'll experiment a bit and see what I can do about the coasts. Maybe I could play with the smudge tool and spatter filters on the mask? Or maybe I should bite the bullet and generate the coastline all over again using generated clouds and the existing mask as a rough guide.

I am going to continue working on this -- it's going to be used several times in an adventure that I'm running at some conventions this year. I've got a beta playthrough of the scenario planned for this Saturday, then I'll be running it three times at NorWesCon at the end of this month, and 3 times at GenCon next August. So I've got a lot to sort out before Saturday, but there'll be some breathing room after that. It doesn't need to be perfect for the beta test, obviously.

[Mapsburgh]

I agree about roughening up the coast. Remember that a map showing a larger area is going to end up generalizing things like coastlines, losing some detail for the sake of simplicity. So it makes sense to add that kind of detail in when creating a more zoomed-in map, the same way you'd add cities and things that didn't appear on the big map.

[wdmartin]

Okay, I spent a bunch more time on it.

Parchwood-wip-03.jpg

Changes:

- Completely re-generated the coast using generated clouds and a hard mix. It's not at least a little bit rougher.
- Added a a few teeny islands out in the ocean.
- Added some brooks and streams -- the river looked a tad unnatural at this scale with just two forks.
- Smudged the water texture under the rivers so it wouldn't look like a continuation of the ocean.
- Stroked in a little whitewater on the largest river using a soft brush on a low flow.
- Moved the town of Pendale slightly north -- it was too close to the bottom edge for my taste before.

That took ... well, long enough that I got through both The Mummy and The Mummy Returns in the background.I think it helped, though.

Sucker's getting big. The full PSB file is almost 4 GB. The versions I'm uploading here are only 33% the size of the original.