The Etrakien Calendar

If you look back in history we have always had systems for how we count time. Days turn to weeks, weeks to months and month to years. When it comes to my Etrakien world I started to think about how they divide the year. An easy way, that many use, is to just convert our calendar to your fantasy setting. Twelve months made up of approximately four weeks.

But I felt I wanted something else, I wanted a system that kind of felt unique for the world, a system that also had some logical connection with the metaphysical universe of the Etrakien world. After some thinking I decided on the following.

The Etrakien universe consists of seven worlds, once created by seven gods called Archonts. These worlds where just bleak copies of the original world, created by the original God. So the numbers seven and eight are very magical for the Etrakien world. Because of this I decided that an Etrakien year consists of seven months that all have seven weeks. Every week has seven days which makes the total number of days per year to 343.

But every seventh year there is an extra week of seven days called the eighth year. Those eight years will together build up what is called a cycle. So when you ask a person in Etrakien what exact day it is he will answer something like this, – It is the fourth day of the third week in the fifth year of the 28^th cycle.

When I was thinking of the calendar I also thought about the moon.  The moon has always been important and we generally have had a good knowledge of the moons cycle. How many days it is between the full moons and so on. In the Etrakien world there are actually two moons. One moon has a cycle of 28 days between its full moons, the second one can only be seen during the eighth year, and is regarded as a very strong foreteller of how the next cycle of eight years will turn out.

The very few times that the two moons will be full together during the eighth year are regarded as times of great change to come. How often that happens however I still have to count on

Writing a world Bible

When you make maps for a made up world you reach a point where you actually have to start to think about the world beyond the maps. What kind of world is it that you’re creating?

I’ve worked on my Etrakien world for about ten years, it’s been through a lot of different phases, things have been added and things have been thrown out. In the beginning it was more of a classic fantasy world with forests full of Trolls and Dwarves hiding under the mountains. But through the years the world has slowly changed in to what it is today. The problem however is that I’m not really sure of what exactly the world is like today.

A lot of my ideas and thoughts has been written done in different forms over the years. Some things I have on paper, some in different threads on forums where I’ve put up my maps for display, a couple of documents are on Google drive, still some on my hard drive. Some I’ve actually lost due to a hard drive crash some years ago.

So I felt that all this information had to be collected into one document, a world document for the Etrakien world where all the up to date information could be found. But how do you do this in the best way? What do you have to think of to make your world as believable as possible? Because I want my world to feel real, that if you read about it or play a game in it, it should feel plausible, like it could exist.

For a long time I’ve looked all over the Internet for information about world building, how do others do this? So far the best thing I’ve found has actually been the Kobold Guide to Worldbuilding, a brilliant little document where different authors from the RPG gaming industry gives their view on how you create your own world.

This little gem gave me some great ideas on what to think of while writing about my Etrakien world. It covers some good essays on world design, creating religion, magic, technology etc. Everything you need to be set up for a great start. Of course I also have some ideas of my own, but this guide has really helped me to put my ideas together.

So I decided to start with a blank document titled “The Etrakien world”, or to be more precise “Den Etrakiska världen”, because I’m writing it in Swedish, and in that document collect all the information I have that I want to keep together with new things I come up with.

First of all I tried to think of what is different with the Etrakien world compared with our world. A lot of things are alike, after all the world is based on my knowledge of the classic Rome and Greece, mixed up with some influences from the Hansa and medieval Europe. It includes mainly humans, like us and they like to wage war, make love, be rich and just survive for another day. So what is different and how would that affect the world?

First of all there are two other known humanoid races, one that mostly is seen as a slave by the others and the other is more equal to the humans, or in their own eyes superior. How will a world that has enslaved nearly everyone of a humanoid race develop ideologically? Will it become like Germany during Second World War that divided people in “Untermenschen” and “Übermenschen”? Does everyone in the world think that is ok?

There is also magic in the Etrakien world, or mostly there is magic that is wielded by the priests and clerics of the different religions. How will a world where the priests actually can perform miracles through powers they have been given by their gods look? In medieval times the church had the European population in a tight grip without being able to perform any real miracles. What will happen if some priests really can bring people back from the dead or heal wounds etc. What kind of power will they have in the world? And what happens if someone that’s not a priest learns magic? Will they be persecuted like the witches in our own history, that didn’t even know how to do real magic?

As you can see the questions are many, but I feel I have to get them down on paper. As I’ve said before, if you have a story to your map it will be much easier to get a great result that looks believing, because then your map will tell a story and not just be a flat picture of land, sea and mountains. And by writing my World Bible, as Scott Hungerford calls it in his essay in the Kobold Guide to Worldbuilding, I hope that I can achieve that. Maps that tells a story.

The city Vadsbro

In a post just before Christmas I told you about a campaign/adventure I’m working on for my Etrakien world. Well now when the overland map is done it is time to start concentrating on some city/town maps as the next step.

This is a map of the main city in the area, Vadsbro, a for the area rather large town with around 2.000 citizens. Trade is the main income and a lot of goods are distributed down the river to the rest of the Armadien kingdom. Mainly the trade is in Copper, wood and different goods they get from the Traals in the area. At the moment the whole area is experiencing a peaceful and quiet time, but things are soon going to change.

The map is actually an old map I made of the town while practicing CD3. By then it was called Littlebridge, but when I decided to write a campaign in Swedish I had to come up with a Swedish name for the city. At the same time I also added a border to the map and worked a bit with the light and effects in Photoshop. I decided to go with the same border as in the overland map of the province Vadsbro to make the maps feel connected. I probably continue to use the border for the upcoming maps as well.

Now I just have to remember to do some writing as well.

Vadsbro

In the last post I published a mind map for an adventure, now it is time to start making maps. First of all I need a campaign map of the area where the actual adventure will take place, with that one in place it will be easier to plan the other maps I need to draw.
To make the map I decided to use the style I made for the December issue of the Annuals from Profantasy. The style was made for creating campaign maps for smaller areas, so it will fit very well for this map.

The adventure will take place in the country Armadien, close to a city called Vadsbro (Littlebridge in my Armadien map). Vadsbro is situated close to the Armadien border, next to the Traal infected Skymningsskogen (dusk forest) and the Traal mountains, so there will be a lot of forest in the map.

As soon as I started on the map I realized that I had to improvise a bit with the style. The main feature in the map, except for all the forest, is the river that split up in two rivers closer to the mountains. The rivers in the style aren’t really suited for depicting a main river in this scale, so I decide to use the ocean texture for the rivers. In this way the river will look more like the dominating natural feature in the area.

The river tool however comes in handy to show smaller rivers connecting into the main branches, but I had to change the colour of the rivers to blend in more with the main rivers. When I created the style, which is based on my Truscian map, I wanted the rivers in a darker colour and the ocean in a lighter one. That works very well if you do a more zoomed out map. But if you zoom in closer to an area for a map, and you suddenly want to use the ocean textures as rivers, the colour for the river tools don’t really blend in. So I decided to change them.

It is actually quite funny how a style you’ve created yourself, suddenly needs to be trimmed when you start working with it. But I think you can say that for all styles. At least I always trim the styles so they’ll fit into my way of working.

Now that the map is done it will be easier to decide what more maps I need to do. You can say that I’m making my adventure from the maps, the story I have so far will probably change a bit with every map I make. But that is the fun part of mapping, to weave a story around your maps instead of making maps from your story.

Kizik – the Krugian lock

This is the town of Kizik, also referred to as ”The Krugian lock”. The town is placed in one of the more densely populated areas in the Etrakien world where the three countries Krug, Truscia and Illyrien meet. In this three border area the trade is blooming as well as the tension between the countries rulers. Krug is closely allied with Ankh-Bathor, the city of trade, and Truscia has very close ties to the Etrakien Empire. It might be worth to mention that The Etrakien Empire claims that Ankh-Bathor rightfully belongs to them, a statement that the powerful city state obviously doesn’t agree on.

The third country Illyrien mainly has to deal with the problems and opportunities that the northern border to the eternal forest gives them. As a fourth power in the area you also have the City of the lost that is situated in the middle of a vast river delta where the river illum meets the Etrakien sea.

The area has seen both one and two military campaigns that mainly has brought death and destruction to the farmers and workers in the area while the kings and their lords has fought for control of the land. But lately the income from the trade has become more and more important to the ruling class so the last couple of years the area has been relatively calm, even though the tension is growing and smaller skirmishes has taken place. The growing strength of the Etrakien Empire and its ambitious future plans might however put a stop to this peaceful time.

The name “The Krugian lock” the city got from the fact that it controls the entrance to the river Kaznik, that is the major river in Krug. Because of this the tactical importance of the city is very big. If you look back in our own history you will see that rivers where the highways of the past, roads where in many ways hard and dangerous to travel. A boat on the river could travel in a far greater speed then a traveler by foot or wagon.

Of course there are exceptions if you look at the roman roads that where a marvel of engineering art. Roads that let you travel fast and far, but they are an exception, most of the time if you look historically roads were not more than a trampled path between the villages.

Another difference from today is actually that it generally was easier to travel in the winter. When the rivers froze you had great even roads where you easily could travel. This of course applies only to places where you have a river. Travelling on roads in the winter time was not a good idea.

The map is made in City Designer 3 and Photoshop CS5.

Mountains galore

This is another old map made in Photoshop depicting an area of the Etrakien world that ceased to exist in the latest version of the map. In my earlier world map there was a chain of mountains that effectively created a barrier between the civilized world and the wild north. The only way for a traveler to easily pass the mountains was to use the valley in the northern part of Krugland.

When I remade the Etrakien map the mountain chain disappeared because the story of the world needed an easier path for the barbarians to get to the civilized world. They kind of gave a helping hand to the demise of the two great empires that had struggled for a century.

The reason for me to do the map was that I after having finished the Ankh-Bathor map wanted to do a map with mountains. You can say that the map was a way for me to try a new style for my mountains. And secondly the area was an interesting place to map, valleys are always exciting.

As usual when you look back at old maps there are things that you are pleased with and things you would have done differently today. This map suffers a bit from the same problem as the one in the last post, too many details, or more specifically too much of the wrong thing. For example the hills in the valley are killing all the other details, they are too small in comparison with their surroundings.

Getting objects in your map correspond with each other in a way that gives the map the right feeling isn’t always so easy. The only way to get better at it is to practice, and that means making more maps. Sometimes it also means remaking things that you might have struggled with for a long time, but in the end doesn’t look right. Don’t be afraid to challenge yourself, the worst thing that can happen is that you worked on something that you have to throw in the bin. But at least you’ve learned something from it.

Making a City part 5

Now it is time to leave CC3 behind and start to do some Colour correction in Photoshop. CC3 has a lot of advantages when it comes to making city maps. It is easy to use and you can quickly come up with a very good looking city map. One of the drawbacks however, in my opinion, is that the colour palette used in the included styles are a bit too bright. That is something I usually change by opening up the finished map in Photoshop and applying some filters and effects.

This guide is not meant to be cut in stone, it’s more a way to show you how it can be done. You can pick bits and pieces from here and add to your maps. You might feel that some steps are unnecessary or that some are missing. See it more as an inspirational guide.

As you can see in the picture above I’ve added eleven layers to the map to get the look and feeling I’m after. First of all I add the layers I’ve marked as 1 and 2. They are for a start purely copies of the background image.

1. On the first layer I apply the Pixel bender filter’s oil paint effect. Pixel bender is a free addon from Adobe that let you apply different effects by using the GPU on your graphics card. This makes it possible to do some really great stuff. With the oil filter the best way of working is just testing your way through the different settings. Don’t worry if the effect comes out a bit strong. You can reduce it later by lowering the opacity of the layer.

2. The oil paint filter has a tendency to blur the image a bit, and we want our map to be clear and sharp. To achieve this I apply the Other/High Pass filter in Photoshop to the second layer. This will make the layer grey and the details light up a bit. You’re looking for a bit of a neon feeling in the picture here. When you have applied the filter change the layer setting from Normal to Overlay. This will sharpen the details in the image that got blurred in the earlier step. Again if you feel that the effect is a bit too strong just lower the opacity of the layer.

3. Now we have a nice and sharp map with a oil paint feeling but we do need some texture to make it look more genuine. For this I’m adding a texture that I’ve downloaded from the Cartographers Guild’s forum. Set the layer of the texture to Multiply. This will darken the image a lot, but don’t worry we fix this in the next step.

4-5. Time to fix the lighting in the map. At the moment the map is way too dark. To change this I add two adjustment layers/Curves. The first one (the fifth layer in the picture just to complicate things) I use to lighten up the whole map. The second one (the fourth layer) is used to darken the waters. Here I’m using the layer mask to apply the effect only to the water areas.

6. Now it is time to reduce the colours of the map to avoid the cartoonish feeling it has at the moment. For this I’m adding a new Adjustment layer/Gradient map that will turn the image into a black and white. I change the opacity setting to 50%. This will let the colours bleed through the layer but the colours will be reduced. You have to try how much you want to reduce the opacity. It depends a bit on what end result you’re after.

7. Next layer is also an Adjustment layer, levels. As you can see I’m very fond of adjustment layers. The big reason for this is that you can easily go back and change the settings or even remove the layer completely if you’re not satisfied with the result.

As you can see in the picture above what I do is that I move the white and black arrow into the middle on the graph. This will clear up the picture a bit. Be a bit careful with the settings here or you will over expose the picture which means that you will lose details.

8. Next step is to add some shadows to the forest and land. Add a new layer and fill it with 50% grey. Change the layer settings to Overlay. This will make the grey colour to disappear. Now you select the Burn tool and change the exposure to 15% and start to draw. As you will see youre now creating shadows in the map. I’m using this to make the forest a bit more interesting and alive and to add hills.

9-10. Now we’re nearly done, but the map is at the moment a bit blue (or at least mine is) and I want to change this. To fix this I’m adding yet another adjustment layer, Colour balance. In here you can increase or decrease the colours of the picture, or more correctly if you increase Red you’re decreasing Cyan and so on. When I’m done with the layer I’m still not fully satisfied so I’m adding the adjustment layer/Hue and saturation to the map to decrease the colour a bit more.

11. This layer just includes the black frame around the map.

Well that’s about it. The map is done, except labeling, and we now have a map that in my opinion has a much more appealing atmosphear than the one that comes straight from CD3. Below you can see the differense in the map before and after I’ve edited it in Photoshop.

Making a City part 4

In this post we will create the outskirts of the city, farmlands and the ruins. First of all you have to decide what parts of the city that will be farmland and what part will be ruins. In this map I wanted to create the feeling that the city is situated in the middle of an old ruined city. The two closest islands to the east and west of the city will consist of farmland. Those areas are close to the city and will be easy to protect as well. On the north part of the western island you can also see that a part of the old city wall has been taken into use again, to protect the city from whatever hides outside.

When I create farmland I always start by putting in all the roads and houses. Usually you will have a cluster of houses just outside the city gates, the further away you get from the gates the more space you will have between houses. I then select the city hedge drawing tools and start to mark out the area where the fields will be. I’m actually using the same technique here as I do when I’m making smaller towns. For a more thorough explanation on how I draw the fields see my Mapping a small town part 4 post from January this year.

When I’m done with all the fields the map looks like the picture below, so still some ruins to put in.

To complete the fields in the map I also export a map from CD3 where all the land is yellow. In this way I can combine them in Photoshop and paint in some yellow fields among the green ones. This will give you a more natural look than if the fields are just green. See my Mapping a small town part 6 post for more info on how to do this. The yellow version of the map looks like the picture below.

You can of course add in all the yellow fields in CD3, but I’ve found that to be a lot more time consuming then doing it by combining the two pictures above in a third party program. This program doesn’t need to be Photoshop, use the program that you feel comfortable with.

The next step would be to add in some ruins in the picture. Here I must say that CD3 doesn’t really have any good styles to work with, so I had to make something up myself. Creating a completely new style wasn’t something I felt I had the time or knowledge to do, but I think a good ruined city style would be a great future annual style add on (are you listening Profantasy?). Sure you have some ruins in the program that you can use, but for me a ruined city mainly consists of the foundations of the houses and maybe some larger, more intact, buildings.

So I decided to draw in some random roads and houses using the CD3 B Ruins Grey buildings. They’re not perfect, but they are a good base symbol to continue working from.

When I’ve put in all the roads and larger buildings in the map I’d export it again from CD3. This means that I now have three different versions of the map, which I’m going to put together in Photoshop, the two different ones with yellow and green fields and this one with a green background and ruins in the outskirts of the city.

At this stage I had to work on the ruins a bit in Photoshop to make them look more like ruins. If you put the map with ruins in one layer and put it on top of a layer consisting of the map with green fields. You can start to erase bits and pieces from the top layer, when you do this the layer below will be visible instead of the top one. In this way I erased all the inner parts of the buildings, which left something that looked more like the foundation of a house. I also erased parts of the larger buildings to make them look more like ruins with broken roofs and missing walls.

In the picture above you can see a part of the map where you have the ruins as they look in CD3 on the left side, and how they turned out after some editing in Photoshop on the right side. In my opinion the right side looks more like ruins then the left side. Or at least more like the ruins I wanted in this particular map.

Making a City part 3

We now have the basic layout of the city. Next step is to put in more roads and try to decide where the majority of buildings will be placed. Sometimes when you create a large city the process of placing all the houses can be overwhelming. To make this easier I try to divide the city into smaller areas. I then place the houses one area at the time, in this way you divide the work into smaller goals that you can reach quite quick. It will make the whole process much easier. In the picture below you can see how I’ve divided the city of lost souls into seven areas to fill in with houses. A good idea can also be to try to make every area intresting by adding a major house, villa or temple in it. It will add some details to your city and will make the end product more fun to look at.

At this stage I also try to locate where the major squares will be, naturally they will be situated where the large roads meet up. I also like to add some smaller squares in front of the gates, usually this is where people have to wait to get in and out of the city. You also have to decide what density your city will have. Nearly all cities have some sort of park or green area, older cities could actually have quite a lot of farmland inside the walls. In this case how ever the farmlands are outside the city walls.

When I start to place the houses I zoom in and out to quite a lot to check the progress of the area I’m doing to make sure that the network of roads and houses looks natural. A good thing to think about is if the area you’re making is planned or if it has grown over time. To understand the difference in how a planned city looks compared to one that has grown over time you can look at some modern cities in USA (for example New York) and compare it to some older ones in Europe (for example Venice). The planned ones tend to have straight roads in squares and the grown ones usually have roads and city blocks in all kind of versions. At first you can’t really see any logic in the city construction, but after a while you will start to see that roads lead between squares and larger empty areas usually consist of an important building and its surroundings.

When I start to map an area I always start with the roads. First I add in some larger main roads, I then switch to a smaller road to make intersections between the larger roads. In the picture below you can see a nearly finished inner part of the city. I’m working on the last area and have put in the roads and squares. The squares I try to place in areas that feel natural. Also try to have some space between squares, a square is a place to meet and trade, so they will be evenly spread out in the city.

When I add houses to a city or town I always start by using the Random street tool. The ability to quickly add all houses on a street is one of City Designer 3′s best advantages. When you’ve added a lot of streets it isn’t always possible to use the Random street tool everywhere, in those cases I add the houses one by one. Sometimes you also have to go back after adding houses with the Random street tool and delete houses that don’t fit in for one reason or another.

When I use the Ramdom street tool I try to make the houses come as close to each other as possible. To do that you have to change the settings a bit. Right click on the Random street tool icon and in the street option window you click the Street settings button. The settings I used for the map you can see in the picture below.

The most important setting is the Distance between houses that I always set to 1, both as Min and Max value. In this way you will get the houses as close as possible togehther. The other values depend on the scale of the map that you’re doing. You have to try some different settings here and see what works out.

When you’ve added houses to all your areas in the town you are done with the central parts of your city. Don’t forget to zoom out once in a while and check that the streets look good. I often have to go back and add some more roads to make the city more crowded. In the next post we will start on the outskirts of the city, farmlands and ruins.

Making a City part 2

Ok so far we have the landscape where the city will be situated. When creating the City of the Lost I combined graphics from three different styles in City designer 3. First of all the actual landscape, which is what we have at the moment, is made in City style A, later on when I add in houses I mainly use the graphics from City style B. The reason for this is that those houses looks more painted then the one in style A that looks more 3d generated. Which one to prefer is up to you, but in the maps I do the style B graphics are better suited. In this map I’m also using some graphics from the Profantasy March annual, Jon Roberts city style. In that style I’m especially fond of the city walls and towers. However the walls in this style are a bit harder to place due to being built from a static graphic file. So you have to watch the corners because they tend to create some gaps there. A good way to hide this is to place a tower on the “bad” spot.

When I start a new town I usually always start by building the town wall and deciding where the gates will be. In this way you will get a clear view and idea on where the majority of houses will be placed, so you can plan ahead and get a good balance in the map. In this particular map we also have three different docks, one larger and two smaller ones. In older cities the docks where often situated outside the city walls. In this way you could both tax the goods efficiently when they were entering the actual city and you also didn’t need to compromise the security of the town. So I’m placing the two docks on the central island outside the walls. The small third dock however is situated in an area where you have no walls. This dock is probably used for more local trading, not taking in ships from abroad. The idea with the docks is also that they are remnants from an earlier city that has been reused. So naturally it is around the docks that the “new” city is built.

Now when we have the walls and gates of the city I put in the main roads. The logic here is that all main roads in a city usually will take you from gate A to gate B. Somewhere in between you will have some main areas like a square or a city hall etc. In this way you will also create some natural boundaries for different districts in your city. It will make it easier for you to plan the next step, adding more roads and start adding houses.