Dragon’s lair

Quite recently I made two maps for a Swedish RPG called Fantasy! It is an old school game that goes back to the roots of the RPG hobby. This means maps in black and white. I found it very enjoyable to make those maps. It is something special to just use black and white while making maps. You just have those two colours nothing else. No grey areas just those two opposite colours, it is a bit like working with negative and positive spaces and try to make it look as good as possible.

After finishing the maps, which I had to do in a very short space of time due to a deadline coming up, and I came in rather late in the project, I felt that I wanted to push this style a bit further. I felt that I could make much more of it, that there were a lot more boundaries to explore here.

The map in this post is a very early version of the more developed style I’m now working on. It is of a dragon that has moved in to the entrance of a Dwarven underground kingdom. A perfect place for a short evening scenario where the players have to rid the entrance of the dragon, so that the Dwarves can start using it again.

For the style I’ve also decided that I will make some more monsters, not just having a dragon. This is a way for me to try to develop my drawing skills as I’m not very used of doing monsters or creatures. I used to do a lot of drawing while in school so many years ago. But since then I’ve nearly only done map art, like mountains and trees. So you can say I’m a bit rusty.

I thought it was time to try to push my skills a bit forward and challenge myself with something else then mountains. So at the moment I’m trying to make a list of creatures that might come in handy, except dragons, while making old school maps. I’m trying to focus on larger monsters here not the ordinary orc soldier.  The picture below is of a great spider, spiders are always fun to throw at your players. Any suggestions of other large monsters or creatures that like to reside in dark dungeons or catacombs?

Making a new symbol set

When I grew up one of the first maps I really remember, if you don’t count maps of the real world, is the maps in Tolkien’s books. I can still recall when I first laid my eyes on the map of middle earth in the Lord of the rings. I was on vacation in England with my parents and I was eight years old. We went to a flea market and there they were, all three books. I remember looking in them and I was lost forever. Just seeing those maps made me understand that these has to be the greatest books ever written, so I bought them for my own money. The funny thing is that I didn’t know how to read or speak English, but that didn’t matter I could just look at those lovely maps and fill them with life from my own imagination.

Since then I’ve always been very fond of black and white maps, and then I mean black and white maps, not the ones that are black, white and grey. So when I was commissioned to do a map for a fantasy world that will be printed in a book I decided to try to do a map that really looked like those old maps from Tolkien’s books. But just making a map wasn’t all I wanted to do.

As this project might expand to more maps than the first one I decided to make a new symbol set that I could use for this map and future ones. Earlier I’ve made two style sets for Profantasy and from that experience I’ve learned a lot, especially how much quicker you can make the maps once the symbols are done.

First of all when you make symbols for a map style it is good to try to write down what you need. What different type of terrain will there be? Mountains, hills, cliffs, trees, cities, villages, volcanos etc. Write them all down on paper, or in a document on your computer. Now you have a plan on what you need, next step is to start drawing them. When you’re done and satisfied with a symbol, tick it off from the list and continue with the next. Some symbols like mountains will need more than one symbol, so in this case you just make as many as you think is necessary before you tick it off in the document.

Another important step is to test the symbols. I usually have a test map where I copy and paste the symbols into, to see that they will fit together, the map in this post is a document like that. Here I’ve tested that the mountains and trees will look good together. In my first try I realized that the trees outer lines weren’t thick enough, so I went back to the originals and made the lines thicker. In this way you will be sure that when the symbol set is done everything will work together.

Making a symbol set will take some time, but after that you’re done making maps using the symbols will be so much easier.

Making a fairy tale book

When I show my city/town maps to people I often get the comment that the style make them look like something from a fairy tale book. With this in mind I thought it would be fun to play around a bit with my latest map, and put it in a book. The question was just how should I do it?

Some time ago I backed a project called the Lamp Post Guild over at kickstarter. As a thank you for doing this I received some really nice goodies the other week, brushes for Photoshop, nice wallpapers and some really good textures. One of these textures was of a old looking book page. So I thought I could use that for my little project.

The first thing I had to do was to make the single page into a double page, which was quite easy in Photoshop. I also removed some of the stains from the copy and added some new. It would look strange if both sides were identical. After that I just added the map and removed a small part of the border to make it look like the map was painted on the page.

Next problem was to decide what to write on the remaining pages. One of the best campaign/adventures I’ve ever played for a RPG, be it English or Swedish, is the one named “Konfluxsviten” by Erik Granström. When he published the campaign rules for his island world Trakorien he did it as a story of a monk travelling around the islands.

So I thought I do the same here. Why not describe the town through the eyes of a traveller that is passing by. I thought of this traveller as if he came from the more densely populated coastline of Armadien and now he was documenting his trip through the large forest that the Vadsbro province consists of. In this way I could get a more fun way of presenting the town, and it would feel more like something you actually would find in a book.

Old school dungeon

There is something special with simple maps. Making a simple map can be much harder than making a complicated one. I love making maps that show a lot of details, where you can see the furniture in the rooms, what’s on the tables, blood on the floor etc. But sometimes you just want to do something old school, something simple and elegant.

Making it simple means that you have to leave a lot of the details out, you can’t hide behind a lot of good looking graphics. At the same time a simple map can be just as good looking as a complicated one. You let the user populate the map in his mind instead of feeding him all the details.

This particular old school map is from an old adventure I once started on but that I never finished. The adventurers had to find the lost grave of a necromancer and retrieve an artifact for their employer. Everything else in the grave they could keep to themselves. To find the location of the grave they had to travel to different islands for clues.

A quite standard old school scenario that needed some old school maps.

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.

Zooming in

This is an older map made in Photoshop picturing the area around Ankh-Bathor. The map was made after I’d finished the first digital map of the Etrakien world and I decided that I wanted to develop the style to a more local view.

The original Etrakien style, that actually was made into a style for Campaign Cartographer 3 in the April 2009 Annual from Profantasy, was primarily made for making worldmaps depicting continents. In the Ankh-Bathor map I needed to change the focus of the style to more depict only a small area of the world.

Whenever I decide to zoom in to make a more local map of my world I usually find it hard to limit the amount of detail I want in the map. And this first experiment with the style suffers a bit from that. In future maps I’ve tried to be a bit harder on myself when it comes to details. Make sure that the important details are there but try to sort out the unnecessary ones. Otherwise your important ones will drown in a forest of details.

I’m still pleased with the map and I learned a lot that from it that I could use in future maps. In the end this style developed into what you see in my current maps I make in Photoshop, like the one of the Truscian peninsula.

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.

City of Lost Souls

There are places in the world where the souls of the dead and lost still roam. Those places are rare to find and if you find one the chances are that you never leave. This is the City of Lost Souls situated in a river delta between the countries Truscia and krug in the Etrakien world. The town is surrounded by ancient ruins from a since long forgotten past. Mostly there aren’t more left of the ruins then the foundation on which they once stood. But some larger buildings are rather well preserved and beneath the ground there are vast catacombs and even areas where whole blocks of the old city have been covered with earth. These parts are now excavated during the days to uncover artifacts hidden by the soil.

But among the ruins the souls of the dead still walk and guard their hidden treasures, or at least that is what people say. But strange things do happen, it is as if the world isn’t as solid everywhere in the old city as it should be. As if alternative realities shine through the fabric of this world, and if you don’t watch your step you might find it very hard to get back to from where you started.

To find your way through the labyrinth that the river delta form you have to follow one of the guiding boats. It is said that only the one that knows the true name of the city can find its way here. And the secret is well protected by the selected few who knows it.

The city itself prospers from the diversity of old artifacts that are found in the ruins that surrounds it. It also harbors some of the world’s most famous pirates that pay well for the protection that the city gives. More than once enemy fleets have tried to find its way up through the delta, still none have succeeded.

The map is done in City designer 3 (CD3) from Profantasy combining the included styles A and B with the latest annual city style by Jon Roberts.The end result from CD3 has then been quite heavily edited in Photoshop, where the labeling also has been done.

In the next post I will go through the process of creating the city. Until then you can have a guess on which two real world cities that inspired me while making the City of Lost Souls.

Deserted Dwarven city

As I wrote in my earlier post I’ve always been fond of underground constructions by dwarves even though I’m not that fond of dwarves, so I like to inhabit their deserted cities with more fun creatures.

This map is an old one I made in Photoshop. It is quite simple and retro in its style but I kind of like the black and white look and feeling of it. Originally it was made for an adventure I was making where the players had to get into the old burial place in the city to retrieve an artifact. The burial site is the oval location on the left side of the map only reachable by water.

The players could take different paths into the city. They could either go from the outside top entrance on the map, or the bottom entrance that is situated in a great cave system. The easiest way though would be to go by the underground river.

The city itself was abandoned by the dwarves a long time ago and now a small clan of goblins and mountain trolls lives there. So the task wouldn’t be very easy for the brave heroes to complete.

Unfortunately the adventure never happened, as many times before it stayed with a map and a synopsis of an adventure. So I can’t tell you if the brave heroes succeeded with their quest or not .

The Truscian peninsula

This is as far as the Etrakien Empire would stretch when it was at its height of its power. In the mountain passes between the Grey peaks and Karpanien the Empire finally clashed with the growing power in the east, Arnoria. In the following war that lasted for one hundred years and brought the people in the area nothing but blood, sweat, death and tears, both Empires would crumble and nearly cease to exist.

Today, two hundred years after the end of the last battles in the great war the area is divided into many countries. In the west on the map you have Krug, an elitist country with a society that is very focused on warfare. To the north lies Illyrien, a very decentralized country with strong city states that cooperate to survive against aggressive neighbors in both the north and west. South of Illyrien lies Truscia a more archaic country that still believes in the lost world of the Etrakien Empire. They still have very good relations with whats left of the Etrakien Empire, in contrast to all the other countries in the region. In the east you have Karpanien, a kingdom ruled by a despotic king that dreams of better glorious times but has to struggle with a population that want nothing else but throwing him of the throne.

Between Krug and Truscia you also have the City of the Lost, or the City of lost souls as it sometimes is referred as. It is a city in the middle of the river delta, that mostly consist of marsh land, built on top of old ruins from the forgotten past. Here mainly people that don’t belong anywhere, outcasts or outlaws lives. The path to the city is a dangerous one to walk, if you don’t know the secrete paths, and from the sea only a selected few knows how to sail.

The map is made in Photoshop, mostly by hand. I like to do my maps by hand, not using that many brushes. I tried to use brushes for the mountains but I never got the result that I was after. When you draw the mountains by hand you can get them exactly as you want and there is no risk of any repetitive patterns. Lucky for me I’ve developed a way to do them rather quick. In my first maps the mountains took forever to do, now it takes me around two days (16 hours) to do a map like the one in this post. And that includes everything.

The city icons are however brushes, or not real brushes, I just copy the icons and place them in a new spot, but they are all the same (yes I do have three different versions in the map, one for large cities, one for cities and one for small cities).

I’ve also used a paper texture and compass from Coyotemax over at the Cartographers guild for this map. It is really good to use his paper texture as the basis for your maps. It brings more life to the colours, and makes them look more hand painted.