First-Time Map Maker Lost In City Mapping

[bagobats]

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?

[Wingshaw]

Howdy bagobats, and welcome to the Guild.

Getting started on a city map can be a bit daunting. They're known to be particularly difficult maps to make, but--in my opinion--very worthwhile and fun, too.

In terms of scale, looking at historic city maps is a good guide. 19th century London is always a good choice for steampunk mappers. London had about 1-1.5 million people. That's not a lot by today's standards, but it was huge back then. Of course, in a fantasy world you can make it as big or as small as you want, but remember, the inhabitants of your city will still need sufficient food, water, building materials, etc.

Physically, London may have been about 6-7 miles wide (~9.5-11km) and about 3.5 miles high (~5.5km). These are **extremely** approximate figures based on historic maps, but give an approximate sense of size, nonetheless... I'm glad to see you want to keep your buildings quite densely packed. It makes for a much more realistic city map, I think.

In terms of planning your streets, I think the first thing you should do is work out your topography, and draw a simple map (which can be for your own reference only) showing major features like rivers, hills, swamps, farmland etc. It can also be a good idea, I think, to decide at that point whereabouts your city first began to develop, as that will most likely still be the centre of the city today.

Next, try placing some major landmarks: the palace, markets, docks, castle, cathedral etc. Once you have these, you can start drawing lines connecting them, which will become your first major roads. Adding more roads that lead off the map to towns/cities near and far is also a good way to put down some major roads. Giving the lines a gentle curving look will help make them realistic: major roads aren't likely to be weaving all over the place, but nor are they going to be dead straight.

With major roads and topography started (and you can do that in 1-3 hours, usually), you're well on your way to making a city map. One piece of advice I can't recommend highly enough is to post a work in progress here on the guild: the feedback and support you'll get is always excellent.

Hope some of that is helpful.

THW

[Azélor]

Scaling. How big things are in comparison to other things and all that.

You try to make things harder than it should be. Things have the same ratio on the map than in the real world. The exact size of the map elements in not important as long as the relative size compared to other elements is consistent. If you want to know how big things are, you just need a bit of research or use the ''measure a distance'' of Google map. That function is quite useful, that's how I found that a narrow medieval house is about 5m large...

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.

By town I assume you mean a place with a somewhat low population ? (Sorry I'm a francophone and I don't know how big a town is since the word is the same as city in french)
Medieval cities (population over a few thousands) were very compact and more densely populated than most modern cities. I don't think industrialization has a big impact on the population density of a city.
About the layout, the best tip I could give you would be to look at real historical examples. Also, this is a Guild city project where you can find inspiration : https://www.cartographersguild.com/f...play.php?f=102
Or you can check it the city map section of the forum even if many are not realistic https://www.cartographersguild.com/f...splay.php?f=39

[Josiah VE]

Take a look at the tutorials on Fantastic Maps! They're a great resource and what I started out with.

He has a few for cities, take a look at these:

http://www.fantasticmaps.com/2013/03...design-a-town/
http://www.fantasticmaps.com/2013/01...n-walkthrough/
http://www.fantasticmaps.com/2013/03...o-draw-houses/
http://www.fantasticmaps.com/2013/03...namic-brushes/
http://www.fantasticmaps.com/2015/02/how-to-draw-a-map/


Don't be too hard on yourself!! No one gets it perfect (or often not even very good) on their first try. But that's no reason to give up! Just practice! Do it some more. And a bit more. And once more. You'll notice improvement very quickly.
Good luck! Post a thread with it, I'd love to see what you've got.

[bagobats]

I really appreciate everyone's encouragement and advice! I did what you guys advised and I posted a thread about my progress.