Mar/Apr 2015 Lite Challenge: Shilfah - The Floating Village

[Abu Lafia]

So, i decided to participate in this months LiteChallenge. It's my first challenge and maybe it will motivate some of you to participate too (like: "i can beat this!"... ).
I stumbled upon the floating villages of the Ma’dan in Iraq and thought that might be an interesting concept for a village to map.
Reed, reed everywhere is reed...
The buildings are made entirely of reed from the marshlands and are build upon artificial islands made of reed and mud. The people there are fishing and herding water-buffalos.

I started with a povisional layout of the "islands" and made one "test-building" so far. The "lore-part" and other detailed information on the village will propably be one of the last things to include in the map. Not sure about the schedule for the next updates, but now i'm in and there is now way back...

### LATEST WIP ###
Shilfah_the_floating_village.jpg

[Bogie]

Cool Idea, can't wait to see what you do with this.

[ChickPea]

This is a fantastic concept! I'd never heard of these villages until now and that article you linked to is really interesting. The houses look amazing!

I'm looking forward to seeing your work on this.

[Abu Lafia]

Thanks Bogie, thanks ChickPea.
Yeah, iwas really stunned by these villages. Its a pretty interesting tradition, although they got in a terrible situation due to the repressive actions of saddam hussein. Well i'm not particularly a fan of the heavily ideology-laden "nation-building" discourse after the US-invasion, they now are a part of, but it's good to see, that they are looking to reestablish their lives in the marshes...
Ok, enough politics...
I did the texture for the houses...now i only have to find the right cookie-cutter

### LATEST WIP ###
Shilfah_the_floating_village_WIP1.jpg

[ChickPea]

Agree it's a tragedy to lose a skill like those house-builders had. Another victim of war. In a similar vein, it broke my heart to read about ISIS destroying an ancient monastery recently. But, yes, let's not get into politics!

I love the roof you've created. It looks fantastic.

[Abu Lafia]

So, i found a cookie-cutter and made some nice houses out of the messy reed-heaps.

- i had to enlarge the islands, because it came to my mind, that the villagers need more space around the entrances to their houses.

- "bumpmapped" the reed on the islands and found that it looks nice...

- added some smaller houses

- added some details to the houses (crossbeams???)

### LATEST WIP ###
Shilfah_the_floating_village_WIP2.jpg

Next came my attempt to "round" the houses:

- filled the houses in another layer above the houses with b/w - gradients

### LATEST WIP ###
Shilfah_the_floating_village_WIP3.jpg

- set the layermode to "overlay"

- bumpmapped the reedtexture of the houses

- adapted the colours a bit

- aaaand voilà:


---->>>> See next post for the latest WIP^^

Comments, critique, suggestions etc. are very welcome.

[Abu Lafia]

Sorry for the doublepost, the thumbnail scraper picked the first of the attached images, not the last one...

### LATEST WIP ###
Shilfah_the_floating_village_WIP4.jpg

[ChickPea]

This is coming together well!

[Abu Lafia]

Thanks Chick Pea!
After adding some details on the village, i switched over to questions of general layout.
As the proposal says, there should be a sidebar/legend that contains information about the village and i came up with the following:
Beside some introduction of the village and the everyday life and culture of the people in general i want to give some information about some (potentially) interesting citizens and where/how they live. So i'll depict the single houses (downscaled) next to the information.
Its only a rough idea at the moment and the text-pieces aren't finished yet. The map itself is still in progress ofc.

As before, comments, critique, suggestions etc. are very welcome.

### LATEST WIP ###
Shilfah_the_floating_village_WIP5.jpg

[Abu Lafia]

Hello everyone!
I added more "fluff" about the villagers and some ideas for scenarios. Although i'm thinking of adding an extra section for the latter. I'm not a native english-speaker/writer and the map is supposed to be used by GM's in general. I guess a map with german text for a challenge wouldn't make much sense. So besides the critique and comments on the map, i'd really appreciate some hints on the sentence-structure or the vocabulary (especially regarding the map ), because im always unsure about that and rely in many cases on dictionaries...

### LATEST WIP ###
Shilfah_the_floating_village_WIP6.jpg