[WIP] Fray - Village In A Shattered World

[Frenchie the DM]

Howdy again everyone, back with another map to make. The campaign has transitioned into a West Marches style one, centered around the ramshackle village of Fray, a quaint home for a group of misfits from all of time and space.

The premise is simple: the world is gone, and the only thing remaining is the Mists and the village of Fray. The Mists are a dense fog that hampers movement, vision, and occasionally sanity. The Mists surround Fray wholly. The village of Fray sits on a cliff-side, which descends deep into a foggy mass, with a small stream emerging from nowhere cutting it into halves. On the right half is the Threadwood, where adventurers pop into existence at random, often in groups. On the left is the village-proper. There's quite a few interesting locals. The major features, however, are a crashed airship embedded in the cliffside, a timber wall with no gate, and the stream whose source is a streaming trickle from the overcast sky. The ground is patchy and barren, a kind of lifeless gray dirt (except in the fields of the druid and cow-wrangler, who supply the food for the village.)

In terms of scale, I'm thinking it would be comparable to J.Edward's Bourmout map, with the line work done by hand and colored in Photoshop. I saw the isometric / Sketchup approach done here by Larb and was astounded. It seems far too outside of both my ability, and practicality (no digital pen, sadly) though. There's a few things I need to approach first though, which is:

How to implement the dense and foggy Mists, the crashed airship, and the timber wall (I do like both the lining and wall style of Melvin's Pinefort)

Have some flavor, if you want:

 

They say reality is a fabric, a weave. Well, was. 'Cause what happens everytime the world changes? You've got Gods dying, Heroes becoming immortal, and Dragons razing the world. We lost all of that. Too many heroes to fit in too-tight britches. Dragons in the coup - that kind of thing. A fabric? I wish, buddy. Normal world's done up and gone. Just a memory of fire.

I don't how we got here, or when - just that we're here now. Only useful damn place in all of this fog. Yeah, the damn fog. Fog's everywhere. Thicker than molasses... whatever the hell that is. A few dumb asses went first of course - they were out for a good two minutes before running back to town. Crazy talk, then they went out again. Never came back. Now we're waiting for some more dumbasses.

So what'd we do, the dozen or so of us? Well, we built. Cut down a few trees, made a few lodging's - bar went up first o'course. What do you call a town with such a plain messed up group of misfits? People from all of time and space. A minotaur, a mushroom, an' a damn elf too.
****, I wish reality was in a weave. A weave of something that made sense - but hell, we're just stuck with this shanty damn town. A fray in our ****ed-up fabric. That's our name too. Fray. A town that shouldn't exist, but hell, that didn't stop us. And it won't.

- Bonejaw, the Animate Skeleton of a Dwarf, in one of his Backcountry Sermons in Fray's town center.

[tilt]

sounds very interesting, I'm looking forward to see how it progresses

[thegreentick]

I can practically see it already. If you're trying to think of ways to incorperate the mists, walls and airship, throw up some quick sketches. Even if you don't like them, I'm sure it'll establish enough of a baseline for the rest of us to sling some ideas your way.

[Frenchie the DM]

Did a few experiments with how to draw the houses. Pretty sure the scale in this is off a lot (the individual logs, stream size, etc.) Did a few sketches of where I wanted what.

Attempted to do dead trees... yeah...

 

Attachment 73487

[arsheesh]

Looks good. Keep it up.

Cheers,
-Arsheesh

[Frenchie the DM]

Two scans to update: did a raw line/scale workup, then tried out some more roofing on another sheet. In the workup there is a small circle in one corner, that's a ~4' diameter circle, the average basis for the series of logs that will surround the village.

Definitely getting frustrated with the differences between how it comes out on paper and the quality of the scan. Minutiae and such.

 

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