[WIP] Britannia 480 AD

[Luca0312]

Hi everyone,

this is my first post in the forum, my name is Luca and I'm an italian fim & TV composer with a passion for cartography... (and RPGs, and roman britain). I'd like to share with you a map I've been working on, and I'd really appreciate any comment, advice or suggestion to improve it and/or finish it. It depicts the british isles in 480 AD, about 60 years after the roman empire left the region.

It's still quite a WIP, let's say 75% done. It was created completely in Photoshop CS5. The original file is HUGE, 10800x19200 pixels with about 50 layers (excluding the text layers, or the total goes up to 150). The PSD file (actually it's PSB) is 4.5 Gb and when I open the map 15 Gb of RAM gets filled up. It's probably too big to be printed on anything smaller than 60x100 cm. but actually I'm not thinking about printing it at all... my idea is to create a small "interactive map navigation" software to browse the map, select what info to display and what not, access additional information when clicking on important locations, and maybe even open smaller-scale area submaps (and, in my dreams, even high quality artist's impressions of places, towns, landscapes, people, etc.).

Anyway, that's for the future. Right now I've got this.

Britannia480Lowest.jpg

This is a heavily resized version, basically too small to even read town names. I wasn't sure about the max size of attachments. If you're interested you can download larger versions from here:

25% (2700x4800) - 9 Mb
50% (5400x9600) - 38 Mb - Minimum for good readability
100% (10800x19200) - 120 Mb

Updated version Feb 15th:

50% (5400x9600) - 38 Mb
100% (10800x19200) - 120 Mb

Ireland and France are generally less detailed than Britain and still need a lot of work (for example no rivers yet in Ireland, and I turned Lough Neagh, one of the largest lakes in Europe, into a marshland...! That should be corrected). Ireland also needs more research about accurate towns/kingdoms data in 5th century. Many things are missing from Britain too, and I plan to add some of them: Antonine's Wall, more roman roads (the Fosse Way should go from Isca to Lindum so both ends are missing right now), more custom icons... and I know some islands are missing too!

Map colors and fonts are the two things that I'm least satisfied with. There's much room for improvement there. Fonts seriously need some variety. The difference between regional names (Gallia, Armorica, Hibernia, Caledonia), tribes/people names (Franks, Picts, Eblani, etc.), kingdom names (Dumnonia, Powys, Dalriada, etc.) and other stuff should be immediately clear, right now it's not. At the moment the same font is used everywhere except for river names and for the written info in the upper-right corner (which is not meant to stay, BTW). About colors... well, I desperately need some advice on that!

Also, PLEASE, if any of you live in the depicted areas, could you check for big "mistakes"? Of course landscape does change in 1500 years, even coastlines do, but I'm sure there are things around the map that a person living in the area could spot as definitely misplaced (see the lake turned into a marsh for example, but at least I'm aware of that one).

A note about historical accuracy: very little is known about the post-roman years in britain. I've studied all the maps of this area/time I could find (ancient and modern) and in everyone of them some of the names are different, some of the places are different, spellings are different. I've read tons of material about those years, the people, the places... some things are historically certain, but not many (even the idea of the Anglo-Saxon invasion is debated). Anyway, historical accuracy is desired but it is NOT my final intent. Roleplaying is. To fill in some the missing details, I've used "The Warlord Chronicles" by Bernard Cornwell as a reference (my all-time favorite arthurian saga, I warmly recommend it). Every non-historical information you'll find on the map is taken from these novels (I'd say 75% of the data is historical, 25% is Cornwell imagination).

I've written more than enough... let me know what you think! And many thanks in advance for any comment or idea or suggestion!

Luca A.