So a big project I want to tackle is the SLA Industries tabletop RPG map of Mort City. It's the main setting for the game and the city is freakin' huge. Originally it was said to cover the planet of the same name (Mort) but has been revised over the years so that now it's the equivalent size of a large US state.

There are various inspirations for how GMs and players envisage the world created (And rather awesomely illustrated) by Dave Allsop and Nightfall Games; among them Blade Runner, The Crow and a good number of other dark, oppressive, crampt and vile hell-holes.

The city itself is made of several districts (HQ, Central, Uptown, Suburbia, Downtown and then the Cannibal Sectors outside the city walls) and is many, many layers down - in fact a lot of GMs hand-wave things like sector names/numbers, districts and the like.

tl:dr - It's HUGE. It's dirty. It rains all the time (Quite literally) and it's amazing.

My questions are thus;

  1. Due to the vertical nature of the city (Many, many layers and floors all on top of one another) is there a "best practice" in mapping something such as this?
  2. In Photoshop is there a nice way of giving everything a wet-look - it rains all the time in Mort City.
  3. Has anyone done any huge sci-fi city maps already? I'm wanting details so a randomised brush/process of dropping in building types around roads would be excellent - any ideas?