Hi there! I'm building a D&D campaign, and thanks to tutorials on this wonderful site and a close friend of mine who has Photoshop, I've finished the world map. Now I'm onto mapping the city (and sooner or later the rest of the continent) that the first adventure takes place in. This city is an industrialized Steampunk capital of its continent, aaaand... This is where I've become stuck.

I've tried to sketch out the basics of the city a couple times, but every time I get bogged down by various obstacles I reach, such as the following:

  • Scaling. How big things are in comparison to other things and all that.
  • Laying out roads and buildings. Just... how? This is made more difficult by the fact that some parts of the city are fairly dense due to the industrialization, as opposed to typical medieval towns in most RPG maps.
  • Actually making it look good. Most 3D models and tutorials that yield similar results aren't really compatible with the steampunk architecture of this city...


Since the map-making is only a small part of the campaign-building process, I don't want to spend too much time doing this, but it's proving such a challenge that I'm feeling like giving up altogether. Part of me is considering commissioning someone else to make this map for me, but I'm not sure if it would cost me too much money, being a broke college student and all of that.

Help?