Land of the Eleven Tribes

[LonewandererD]

Okay, I pretty much have the terrain done and got the rough tribal borders drawn in. Now moving on to refining the town texture to work at a smaller size. Currently drawing out my civilisation plan, town locations, rough road plan, etc.

-D-

[Ascension]

So far so good. If I haven't said it yet I will now, that's a great lookin forest.

[rdanhenry]

Nifty. Are those islands populated by the Eleven Tribes? If so, you ought to make sure their tribal affiliation is clear.

[LonewandererD]

Yeah those islands belong to the Truiet tribe and serves as the first line of defense against southern raiders. There affiliation with the tribes will be established later when i actually do the borders for real.

-D-

[LonewandererD]

(insert expletives here)

Due to an unfortunate error on my behalf I have lost the photoshop file for this map and so will have to start it over again . While I struggle to reclaim what i have lost, here is the practice map I made for towns and civilisations and stuff. Included is one town, one city, 2 keeps, 1 castle, farmland and several small villages, no roads as of yet. Still needs refining but my larger map comes first.

-D-

[Ramah]

Ouch. That's gotta hurt. At least you're getting straight back into it though, I'd probably mope around kicking things for days. Hehe.

[LonewandererD]

Yeah, the problem is that I won't be able to get back to it for a few days, I have work and my mouse has finally died. Might try a less strenuous map before returning to this one actually.

-D-

[Ascension]

I've done that a few times myself, flattened the image and saved the flattened version as the psd instead of jpg and thus lost all of the layers...hate when I do that - lots of moping and kicking here as well.

Your farm pattern is still a bit off but I have a trick that you can use that I use myself. The pattern itself is called Metal Landscape and is 128 x 128 pixels. Make a new document that is that same size with 100 ppi. Duplicate the background layer. Add the pattern overlay. Create a new layer and put it under this layer. Link the two layers then merge the top one down onto the empty layer = no more layer style. Now you can take this pattern and alter it into differing versions: the original black lines/white chunks, white lines/black chunks (just hit ctrl + i to do this and don't forget to click on Edit - define pattern), white chunks/clear lines, and black lines/clear chunks.

The reason for doing this is to get more usability out of the pattern...sometimes you will want fields to be a certain color or have a pattern of their own with no interference from the lines. Other times you will want the lines to act as roads or cracks for stone and have their own color separate from the fields. Four patterns for the price of one and therefore far more usable than just one pattern with black lines all over it. If you go and invert the colors on the transparent images then you can actually get six patterns for the price of one (white lines/clear chunks and black chunks/clear lines).

For the sake of ease I did the first three to show you (the first is the original).

[Juggernaut1981]

Yeah those islands belong to the Truiet tribe and serves as the first line of defense against southern raiders. There affiliation with the tribes will be established later when i actually do the borders for real.

-D-

Okay, here comes a big pile of Geopolitics.

If the Truiet control the mouth of the river (via the islands) they will be able to charge whatever level of exorbitant taxes they please (without it being enough to cause any of the other tribes to outright attack them). It will also mean they should have a very strong navy compared to any of the other tribes (or at worst very impressive anti-ship tech) so they can control the river-mouth and shipping channels.

Based on geography, the Truiet should potentially be the most dominant tribe, politically. Even if they do not hold the "throne" they will be the strongest influencers of who does. Truiets should probably be viewed as the King-Maker tribe.

[LonewandererD]

While the Truiet are indeed one of the four strongest tribes they hold no major sway over the throne and neither they nor any other tribe may have claim over the Kaiga Throne. First, while the Truiet may have control over the sea trade lanes the three other great tribes have monopolised the control of Evelakaia's main resources notabely rice, iron, salt and Magice. Second, the Truiets control over the sea trade lanes are constantly being challenged by the other tribes (this form of challenge is political although it has rumoured that the D'Shin of Belphradunn may be conversing with casteless pirates), the Southern Raiders of Odalaia and the overwhelming power of the Zephyrn who are pushing their control over the trade lanes further north. Thirdly, there are certain merchant that are immune to taxation such as the leader of the Wandering Caste.

-D-