Asking for suggestions / improvements

[Scot Harvest]

This is a map I will give to the players of my RPG game.

I designed it to show areas in town that are owned my the rich (white buildings) and by the poor (dark buildings)

the original was full color but I wanted the map to give the feel of medieval so I went with sepia.

Comments and suggestions on how to improve it are MORE than welcome!

[Skaald]

Hi Scot !

Is it an image you found somewhere and label yourself or is it a personnal work ? no judgment here but if you want to make it look like medieval, the base image is not so good for that I think. The picture is both too blurry (it looks like a satellite picture with a bad definition) and too "precise" (there's a lot of informations : colors of buildings, especially sharp layers of streets, some buildings or targets in the water...)

If you have some time before your game, you may redraw the city with just the data you need for your game. As medieval maps are, for obvious reasons, hand-drawn, you can only upgrade the feel of oldness ! A plungeon in dark coffee to finish the job and here you are with an old parchment !

And if you are, like me, a bad illustrator, here is my tip : when I want to make a map of something already existing, I put the image in a illustrator software (gimp, photoshop or even paint), display it exactly the size i want it IRL, reverse it horizontally, catch some transfer paper, and a few moments later, you have the basics silhouette of your city/country on a sheet of paper, ready to be inked or almost.

So basically my advice is: scrap it and do it again, witch is not really cheering but that's the best thing I can think of to match with your needs ! If you want to "medievalise" this very picture, I will be of no help, because I don't know a thing about digital art. Maybe a fellow cartographer will be of greater help !

Regards,
Skaald

[Falconius]

I think the biggest enemy you have going against you in this map is the blurriness. Other than the the scale seems off. It takes two days to walk across the city for instance? That is really really huge, the internet says the average walking speed for a person is about 3 miles an hour, or 24 miles for an 8 hour day even for modern cities, with cars and such that's big, for a medieval city it's extremely unrealistic. For instance I can walk through the entirety of the Old City of Jerusalem in -I don't know- maybe 20 minutes to 40 minutes. And that with alleys going every which way and up and down a mountain. Medieval cities are all based around walking so it's usually a good place to start. I'm not sure what the dark lines in the lower right corner of the city represent? Docks? It looks like a cool idea, but I feel that if you made a legend for the map it could help organize your own thoughts at the same time as clearing things up for viewers. Actually I'm not really sure what's water and what isn't, colour may have been more distinct in that area. I guess that's actually farmland and such?