Iskra, the latest entry in the Atlas of my world

[nAUTILUS]

Background

The Strand is a tidally locked planet, meaning the same side always faces the sun and is baked in constant heat while the opposite side is a frozen wasteland. In-between is a habitable band of where life can flourish.
The planet was colonised by humans on a generation ship thousands of years ago. Shortly after settling all over the surface of the planet, calamity struck and devastated this young colony, throwing it back into the stone age. The ship they came on left the planet’s orbit, and the structures they built on the surface soon became uninhabitable. At the time the story takes place, the people have all but forgotten that they once sailed the stars to get to the Strand.
The tidal locking presents some unique problems: Illumination is perpetual, no days and nights. Due to the temperature difference between the lit side (Lux) and the dark (Nox) constant strong winds blow sunward. The tidal locking is not complete, however. There remains some axial tilt, so some regions of the planet experience changing illumination, sometimes even with a period of complete darkness.
The people of the Strand live at a technological level somewhere between the age of discovery and very early industrialisation.

How it was made

The backbone of this is a small program called VP Planet generator (toolslib.net/downloads/viewdownload/73-vpplanetgenerator/) which is used to make the base terrain. The all-powerful Wilbur (fracterra.com/wilbur.html) is then used to erode this terrain. Some basic image manipulation with the GIMP (gimp.org/) is necessary in some intermediate steps before everything is vectorised, labelled and finished up in Inkscape (inkscape.org/). The final step is layout and publishing in Scribus (scribus.net/). As you can see all of these applications are free of charge.


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[snodsy]

Beautiful color pallete and nicely done. The type is really clean and well delineated

[Tom Solo]

This is a cool map are you using it for a campaign