Prynh: Remastered

[Brian Chapman]

I had a sudden wave of inspiration and motivation a few weeks ago to redo the map I did a while back of my homebrew D&D world called Prynh. The original was my first serious attempt at a map/cartography design and I was really proud of it. It managed to spawn a meager bit of work for other people. I wanted to up my cartography game so I decided that my main focus would be going from sepia/parchment/aged style to something in full-color. While I ended up going with my classic style for mountains/trees, with a plan for working on my hand-painted mountains/trees skills later, I did manage to do a lot more with this version of the map...

The map was done entirely in Photoshop with heavy utilization of pen tablet for hand-drawn icons and so forth. I ended up adding a few new locations that had been discovered in D&D games (player shoutouts) and moved a few things around from the original version. I added a few rivers, a few forests and there we had it, the new version of Prynh. I took heavy inspiration from a work I am a really big fan of by our very own Max Plasse for the border and learned a lot of things just putting it together. With each map I'm trying to incorporate more and more "by hand" elements. It's easy to use the photoshop tools to make things easier, but as you probably know it takes away from the authentic feel of a map if you do it too much. I hope that this is just another stepping stone in that direction as it really taught me a lot about certain things, even though I didn't incorporate many of the things I learned in this particular version.

I've been working in graphic design for the better part of a decade now, but working on maps has been a whole different animal. Onto my next challenge, working on a city map.