Next map projects

Quick aside before I talk about maps—one of the things that I ordered were three new dice sets. I got two of them already; the last one, for some reason, was shipping separately and will arrive in a few days. I have at least 12 full dice sets, but a number of extraneous dice. And I'm not actively playing. Sigh. I'd really like to get some gaming action going again, somehow, though. Not quite sure where to find a group that I want to play with. I do still have some pretty good friends, although I don't see them as often as I'd like, who are into gaming, but I don't know that they want the same thing from gaming that I do. In fact, I suspect that they may not. That's part of the reason why I'd like to start writing. It's at least a creative outlet, and if it's maybe more work than gaming, and lacks the social aspect, at least it gives a less ephemeral product at the end of the day too.

Although my original plan was to draw a DH5 map once my big sketch pad arrives next week, I got into Inkarnate on a whim, and I'm happy enough with the map that I've made that I pretty much consider it the definitive version already. I doubt anything that I could draw would look better. I might be able to get something a bit better on a specific area here and there (my Leng was thrown together kind of last minute, and I'd actually prefer something much more distinctive, for instance), but other than a few tweaks here and there, I doubt I'll make major updates to what I've got. The hand drawn map now seems superfluous. I may not even do it at all. Which... I'm a little sad about, but I do reallly enjoy Inkarnate so far. Great app. Still hate the subscription business model, but once I have the maps I need made, I'll probably cancel and walk away. It's not like I make maps day in and day out. Once every couple of years seems to be more my speed these days.

That said, I have a subscripton now, and maybe I'll want to take advantage of that now. What other maps could I make? I actually think it'd be fun to make some zoomed regional maps, where I add more detail; more little towns, villages, hamlets and steadings. More little creeks and rivers and forested areas. More specific mountains and hills and buttes and mesas. More little paths and trails in addition to the already marked major roads, etc.

In fact, maybe that's exactly how I can undergo some more worldbuilding; by making these more detailed maps, I'll be forced to develop the more detail to put on the maps. Sure, it won't be an exact match to the bigger map, because I doubt I can replicate the exact shape and placement of the coastlines, the lakes, the rivers, the mountain ranges, etc. But I can have something pretty close. And in the Medieval period maps weren't necessarily super exact, and that's what I'm kinda trying to replicate (as does the majority of the fantasy genre, for that matter. These aren't supposed to be satelite image fidelity maps here. If they were, they wouldn't have weird little icons representing cities and mountains, for one thing.)

I think this means three new maps, one corresponding to each of the three main regions that I stitched together to make the new DH5: Baal Hamazi slash Daemon Wastes, Timischburg, and the Hill Country. The Boneyard essentially gets migrated into the Baal Hamazi region. And by "Baal Hamazi" I actually mean Baal Hamazi and some of what used to be Kurushat back in the day. They are both now merged into what was kinda sorta the Daemon Wastes, but is now more specifically hearkening back to my earlier work in the Modular-DND-Setting project and those regions in the Dark•Heritage Mk. IV. The good news is that I have deeper wells of previously developed material to dip in to in order to fill out these details, at least. This is less true for the Hill Country, but with all four regions, there will be new development needed to be able to actually do this.

UPDATE: I started it and worked on it for about an hour or so, but I wasn't really happy with how it was taking shape, so I deleted the map and I'm now rethinking doing these regionals this way. Instead, I took the basic "parchment" shapes and added them to a blank map, just so I can have them as unobscured reference points to see if I can learn anything about my own drawing from looking at them. I think the answer is... yes and no. 

1. With the mountains in particular, they have spent more time on making individual mountains look better than I usually do, where I have more suggestive mountains where the entire range gives the effect rather than any one mountain. Trying to draw them with more detail, like they do here, tends to make them considerably larger than I draw them. Even if I'm trying to make them small, I can't get that type of detail at the scale I draw them usually, they subconsciously grow to a scale where I feel comfortable adding that much detail. These mountains are a good 2-3 times larger than I usually draw them. Not sure if that's a sustainable change or improvement that I can implement, unless I draw smaller, more regional maps at a different scale. Or draw my maps on gigantic posters at a much larger scale.
2. I exported the map and then flipped it horizontally. I've noticed that most map artists have their light source from the northwest corner of the map, while I greatly prefer northeast. They go with the "most artists" look, and if there's an option to flip all elements, I haven't found it yet.
3. My style has always been about ink lines. Shading has to be hatching or full-on fill, in that case. Although these are not the colored maps, I do find when they are taken out and shown in isolation, that they have graduated shading on them, which I can't do with an ink pen. I'd either need to get a pencil specifically for shading and have a pen and pencil hybrid map, or use some gray brush pens or something to get the same effect. I experimented a bit with using hatching to replicate the shading here, and while it's an OK look, I'm not 100% sure that I love it. Which is... another strike against me adopting much in the way of anything from these mountains, sadly, other than maybe to try and spend just a bit more time on having pleasant basic shapes. I've got to give them that at least, and that's something that I can easily do even if I don't adapt anything else from their style.
4. Some of the forms not only have shading, but they have white highlights too. Given that the basic background color is a parchment tan, the white highlights stand out. Of course, since I draw on white paper, that's a bit of a moot point, but also one that I couldn't possibly attempt to replicate.
5. My favorite hatching experiment was on a volcano that I drew, attempting to mimic the styles here a bit. I actually changed direction of the hatching on different "humps" of the mountain, and as long as I was careful not to make the hatch marks look sloppily applied, the effect was pretty good, actually. I also think the ash plume needs a bit of scattered stippling to look right, which the models here didn't have.

All in all, I'm not actually sure that I can pick up much from this exercise, at least with regards to regular mountains, and not much with hills either. I did think that the cliffs and the buttes and other craggy, pointy rock formations might be a more productive avenue for me to explore, since I tend to like southwestern "Monument Valley" style deserts rather than Sahara "drifting dunes" style that most mapmakers tend to draw. I experimented with a few dunes, even though I literally never use them. It was interesting. I had a harder time getting the shape right, but I don't tend to use them, and I was probably overthinking and trying a little too hard to get the shape as it was pictured here. That's what practice is all about, I guess, right?

Speaking of which, the weird slanted, jagged rocks is a newer technique to me, and I'm not sure how much I love it. I've seen other people hand draw similar styles in "wastelands" where I interpret them to be saying "rocky deserts" as opposed to "sandy deserts" which is what they mean when they say "desert." I've spent a fair bit of time actually tromping around in the desert, particularly in Colorado, West Texas, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, etc., so I guess I have a different idea about what a desert is than most fantasy fans, who seem to just imagine the Sahara from the movies, or something. This slanted, jagged rock is probably loosely based on real formations, especially around southern California's Vasquez Rocks near LA, but it's a really particular and unique kind of look. I don't know that I'd often have an entire region filled with that kind of stuff.

Also, I find it curious that they have four crater options, which unless you're attempting to model the Moon or Mars, seems much less likely to feature than other types of formations that they could have done instead.

And the tall rock spires, they call "karsts." I know why they did, of course. They see those images of fantastic Chinese rock formations and look them up, and read that they're karst hills. Karst hills are actually quite common, though, and occur in a wide variety of ecologies. They rarely look all pointy like that. The Chinese and Thai karsts are really quite unusual. To me, they look more like rock spires that I've seen in the mesa and butte red sandstone deserts of Utah, Colorado, Arizona, etc. than they do like the stuff in China anyway. Of course, that's only on the parchment map sets. On some of the others, the karsts are colored green, or have vegetation on them as part of the design.