DH5: Hill Country, Timischburg and... the Daemon Wastes?

It's funny, although maybe not unexpected, how much my work cross-pollinates other projects. I mentioned yesterday that I was getting re-involved with my Eberron Remixed. Of course, the whole point of Eberron Remixed as it grew and I actually got much more interested in it, was remixing it to play on the Dark•Heritage engine. Previous to that, Eberron Remixed had been little more than a handful of notes about tone and theme and a few minor changes to a few minor details. The "biggest" it got was a few notes on how to use Fantasy Hack, which was of course an alternative D&D system, to run the remixed setting. The much more radical and more recent Remixing project ended up with all kinds of substituted races, for instance, which had a cascade effect on at least some of the regions that simply didn't work in the new paradigm. But because I'm using DH5 as the game engine for Eberron Remixed, stuff that I do in Eberron Remixed bounces back and makes me think of interesting things to do with the DH5 setting.

Now, I have to equivocate just a bit here. I've earlier said that the Hill Country was the only region of the DH5 setting that I intended to use or develop, and everything else would merely be a brief mention. Then, of course, I decided to add Timischburg, since it was developed enough that I could just stick it on as is. Now, I'm thinking of adding a third region, my pretty heavily remixed version of the Daemon Wastes (originally Demon Wastes) from my Eberron Remixed. It's already remixed enough that it's not very similar, and I'd remix it even a bit more to make it fit; in fact, I'd probably borrow a ton from my old DH4 Baal Hamazi region to give it more detail than presented in the book anyway (I had already kind of handwavishly made some of that in my original remixing of the Eberron Demon Wastes to the Eberron Remixed Daemon Wastes.) Therefore, I'm not so much borrowing an Eberron element, as I'm being inspired by Eberron to borrow and remaster an element of my earlier version of the setting, and tack it on to the DH5 map.

Now, I still don't intend to make this a major element with lots of work and time put into it. I expect to make a somewhat sketchy map of the region, and cut and paste earlier elements, mostly into it the way that I'd already developed them in DH4. The Shadow Marches stuff might even end up being my Gunaakt and getting stuck on there too... maybe. I want to have them available for a handful of elements that I might use them for lightly... while still focusing mostly on the Hill Country and to a lesser extent Timischburg. 

But both of those maps need to be redrawn. Now, to fit together with these new additions and each other better, but they honestly have needed to be redrawn for some time anyway, especially Timischburg, which is being rotated 90º. The maps that I do have were always only intended to be drafts anyway, and I like drawing maps. I haven't done any in a long time. As an aside, I spent some time a few months ago watching a bunch of youtube tutorials on fantasy map drawing, which got me excited about it. I don't actually need tutorials; I've been drawing fantasy maps since middle school in the mid-80s that I think are fairly attractive, if I spend the time and effort to make them neat and not sloppy. But it's always nice to see what someone else is doing and see if they have any cool ideas I want to borrow myself. My own style is heavily influenced by the famous Christopher Tolkien Middle-earth maps included with The Lord of the Rings, but there have been a few sutble other ideas for a few elements that I've seen that I quite like too. After all, maps of this sort have been in print with fantasy novels for a long time. I long ago updated how I did water and forests from the Christopher Tolkien style to one that was less labor intensive, for instance.

The original Middle-earth map that was in my original copy of the books

A video that shows a variety of techniques all rolled up into a bite-sized video. I use some of the alternates rather than the Christopher Tolkien style per se, although it's still very similar in most respects. Basically I've changed the water and coastlines, and I prefer a much less labor intensive forest method. He's a bit too expressive, which occasionally distracts from what he's trying to do, but this video has pretty good information if you're new to this particular endeavor. I'm not, but I still found a few pointers here and there and newer techniques that I liked better than a handful of things that I was doing before. What he calls a decorative rather than functional map, I'll point out, is basically the style used in every single fantasy series I've ever read, though.

And here's the subsequent one he mentioned.