Ostwyc, the Lion City
Oh hey all!
So while I'm waiting for my next commission to materialize (heh!), I decided to map another important city in my own fantasy universe. This one is called Ostwyc, the Lion City.
Ostwyc is a really old city, one of the first there ever were actually. Villages were still a new and exciting concept in most of the world when the first stone was laid for Ostwyc's first citadel. This seed of the city was planted in a narrow valley overlooking the East Cilydd plains, an easily defensible position. The city gradually overgrew its walls and spread out along both sides of a long, narrow lake. The entrance to the valley is guarded by a large hill, more like a granite fist pushing up from the valley floor. A fortress was built on top and two walls were strung between either side of the valley and the walls of the fortress, with massive fortifications ensuring the safety of the city. Over the centuries, Ostwyc has built and maintained a whole network of guard towers in the surrounding country side, both in the plains and the mountains that surround it. Each is fitted with a very well equipped garrison, excellently trained and always at the ready (although in the lasting peace of the past century they might have slackened off a bit... Oooh, do I sense a plot device?). Because of all these precautions, Cilydd has never had its walls broken during all the centuries of its existence, and it is probably the only city of a certain age that can claim so.
Despite its forbidding appearance from the outside, Ostwyc is actually a very pleasant city to live in. Most houses are pastel coloured and have real glass windows, the streets are clean, beggars are few and most seem actually pretty well-fed. There are parks strewn throughout the city, statues of old heroes, libraries, museums and temples, and entertainment for all layers of society. Small ferries move across the lake continuously, and at night, the thousands of lights from the city and the bobbing lanterns of the ferries create a starscape with no equal on the glittering surface of the lake.
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Alright, so much for the sales pitch. Describing the city is the easy part (mainly because I've madly fallen in love with it). The hard part will be turning it into a map that actually reflects what I just wrote - and more importantly, what I have in mind. The idea is to create the map in a style similar to what I did for another important city in the same universe: Ganador. I really like how that one turned out, but I'm afraid I have mostly forgotten how I got there, so it'll take quite some testing (and peeking at the old PSD-file) to get it right. If I ever do!
The hard part with this map, and something I didn't have to tackle with the coastal city of Ganador, is the terrain. Ganador is entirely level, built as it is on mud flats in the mouth of a river. Ostwyc on the other hand is surrounded by mountainous cliffs on two sides, and sports a huge block of a hill with a monumental fortress on top. It's sort of a mix of the Lauterbrunnen Valley in Switzerland and the fortress hill of Hochosterwitz in Austria. Yes, I've raised the bar impossibly high. Even if you forget all the other challenges for a moment, just getting across the terrain means I'll need to use a ton of shading. So... very gingerly I have started playing with Wilbur again, although the beast has taken the best of me several times before. If it doesn't work out how I want it, I'm gonna do it all by hand - probably the faster solution too knowing how much time I spend on Wilburring!
Okay! Let me show you guys what I got at the moment:
1. a sketch of what goes where:
Ostwyc_1.jpg
2. a stepped terrain model, which is currently (and probably for some hours) undergoing a substantial Wilbur treatment:
Ostwyc_BUMP1.png
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Originally Posted by Falconius
But man I enjoy every geeky minute of it. Glad to have arrived at the actual city-ing though!
