Quarry Port - a town in a river valley

[torstan]

Here's the final for a town map I've been working on - titled Quarry Port:
Town_with_labels_web.jpg

This arose from this sketch:
TownSketch.jpg

The WIP thread was a great resource, with loads of great ideas for locations to add to the town.

I wanted to take a shot at a non-traditional defence structure for the town - placing it at the bottom of the cliffs rather than the top, and allowing the cliffs to do most of the work of defending the city. The water-powered stone elevator at the north was a fun addition.

The full-res version is 3300px by 2550px - but I'm selling it as a map pack, so this is a lower res version. Here's the cover of the map pack (which also includes 33 building .png icons for personal use):

Cover_web_smaller.jpg

A few more details over on my site: http://www.fantasticmaps.com/2013/04...e-iconic-town/

[Cunning Cartographer]

As usual really great work Torstan.

I'm actually planning on buying some of your maps soon, unlikely I'll use them in my own D&D campaign as for me the fun is making the setting and maps myself (similarly to how I don't use published adventures), however, I do want to start converting my own maps I'm making for my sessions and making them of a publishable quality and I can't think of a better artist to turn to for a "this is how you do it right" in regards to laying them out and what content to include. Any in particular you'd recommend I take a look at?

I'm also curious as given you have a large range of maps that you make which type of maps you get the most success with; smaller encounter maps, larger encounter maps or regional/setting maps? Have you attempted any publishable adventures (I'm debating on whether to put the time in on making system neutral adventures that give maps and setting but no stats, figures, and setting specific lore, etc.)

Anyway, sorry for the derail, but you're work has been a big inspiration.

[arsheesh]

Fantastic as usual Torstan!

Cheers,
-Arsheesh

[- Max -]

What Arsheesh said!

[torstan]

Hey Yospeck - absolutely! I'd recommend checking out the Square Rigger. It's a mutli-level map in lots of formats so it's a good example of a more complicated map pack: Fantastic Maps: Square Rigger - Rite Publishing | Fantastic Maps | Tabletop Essentials | RPGNow.com The other end of the spectrum is the Iconic Island - a regional scale map with some flexibility for the users: Fantastic Maps - Iconic Island - Rite Publishing | Fantastic Maps | Tabletop Essentials | RPGNow.com

I'd focused on battlemaps up until now because those seemed the most useful to GMs, but the Iconic Island sold really well. It seems there's a need out there for flexible regional and world scale maps!

I've avoided dealing with adventures. By adding an adventure you limit your audience to the genre and ruleset you're writing for. And I'm a better illustrator than adventure writer

[Cunning Cartographer]

Bought em And best of all I'm going to make them tax deductable for "research" muhahahaha!!!

Really helpful to see how these go from final image to pdf layout, so will help immensely. Out of curiosity, the maps in the ship pack are only 100dpi? You don't design at 300dpi for your printed files (though for your region map you did it at 300dpi).

I'm on the fence with the adventurers, I GM so I have stuff written already, I'm thinking going along the route of giving descriptions of what you might find in a room, trap types, monsters, etc. but without the stat blocks and leave the mechanics to the GMs to tailor to their chosen system and party level. We'll see Anyway, once again sorry for the hijack!

[Clercon]

As I've said on G+ a really great map. I love the terrain!

[torstan]

Yep, I work at 100dpi for the 1 inch=1 square maps. This is down to a couple of factors - many of these started life as print maps - so you have a 300dpi single page map inside a product, and a 'full zoom' map for home printing at 3x the size at 100dpi. That balance works pretty well for a lot of battlemap maps. The second reason is that I started down this road using vtts and for them, 100 pixels per inch is a good standard. At full zoom that image will be 1 inch on most screens.

Finally it's a matter of cost - for the money these make, there's a limit to the amount of time they can take. 300dpi at full zoom takes longer than 100, so I stick to 100 for the sake of my own sanity!

[foremost]

Excellent map!

I liked the sketch a lot too. Interesting to see the first idea and then the drastically improved version. They may include much of the same thing, but it appears you added quite a bit to the final map. It looks like that town might have to worry about flooding though, since it's right at the waterside!

I quite enjoyed the grass in the background - nice dusty look going on.

-fm

[mthomas768]

I noticed there's no scale or compass rose on this map. Intentional, oversight, or perhaps preview vs. final product?