Presenting DH5's geography

Well, of course no sooner do I make a post talking about how I'm struggling to just sit down and draw out my drafty, sketchy new map, then I feel immediately motivated to sit down and... draw out my drafty, sketchy new map.

I'm quite happy with how it turned out. It is a little busy from squeezing so much content into a single sheet of regular typing paper with a ballpoint pen, but it works, and more importantly; it gives me a reference for when I sit down, hopefully later this week or at worst early next week, with my newly arrived art pens which I ordered to make a much better looking map.

Now, my scanner here at home was a bit on the fritz. Luckily, I live really close to the public library. Unluckily, it scanned my document to a pdf. (Maybe it'll scan to jpg and I just didn't take the time to figure it out. They were trying to hurry up and close when I was there, so I felt kinda rushed.) I was able to convert it to jpg, of course, but that's not the best on the quality, and it isn't good news for my high quality scan of my high quality map when it's done. I may need to either buy a better scanner, or go somewhere and pay a couple of bucks to get it done right. Anyway, that's part of what the draft process was about; not just drafting the map, but also drafting the process, right? I think so.

Anyway, before I get too rambly, let's talk a bit about the map itself. Blogger doesn't show these kinds of things super great, but you should be able to open in another tab and save it, or zoom it to full size, or whatever.

I played around just a bit with some of the techniques I'll be using in the main map, just to get a little bit more used to them, and also to see what they'd look like (sorta) in context. Part of that you'll see is my grassland hashes, which helps with the dead space. The two west corners have a tiny bit of dead space, and then the southeast corner didn't have too much going on, but that's where I'll insert my compass rose and scale on the main map. Mostly there isn't much because there was a lot I needed to fit in, but some of this stuff can't be too small; if a forest is supposed to be vast and forboding, I can't draw it as a handful of trees about half an inch square.

I was worried about fitting everything, and while I did cut some names and features from my Baal Hamazi and Timischburg sections, I actually had to dig up a few new names for the Hill Country section, just because I needed a few more smaller towns than I had.

You'll see most of my old Baal Hamazi material (I've actually resurrected that old tag from the DH4 version of the setting, since I'm going to be reusing a bunch of that material, once I finish out exactly how) has been stuck on a hammerhead shaped peninsula that is reminiscent of the Demon Wastes section of Khorvaire from Eberron. This is deliberate; I at first started by making it my Eberron Remixed version of the Daemon Wastes, but it ended up settling down quite a bit more towards reusing my old Baal Hamazi material, with some borrowings from the Daemon Wastes. I'll probably retire the Daemon Wastes tag after this post because of that evolution. This is the section where I had more names than I could use, and it was a bit of a shame to have to cut some, but I really didn't need all of that material anymore. And a few names were repurposed; I know at least one city name became a river, one river became a lake, one county became a small town, etc. Whatever. A name is a name is a name, right?

This territory also spills out along the northern edge of the map, north of the Boneyard to the Wolfwood. I still need to figure out exactly what old Baal Hamazi material I'm going to use, and what names I'm now going to match it with, because that may change a bit as I develop this stuff over the next little bit, but I tried to sketch in a few unusual features, like an active volcano down in the southern lobe of the peninsula, and extremely unique looking Shatur Rock (the old  version was just a solitary mountain, inspired in part by Ayers Rock). I'm not terribly happy with my sketchy version of the Hamazin Gorgelands. I'll need to practice making forked gorges in this style until I'm happy with how they turn out before I make my "real" map. I also spent a little bit more time than a sketch would normally warrant working on the Rudmont Escarpment, and I'm not completely thrilled with that either. Will warrant more practice and experimentation with the gel pen in the meantime until I get something that I'm happy with.

I tried out using some of that grassy hatching to fill up space, mostly in what would, of course, be grassland, but I'm not 100% sure that I like that better than my uplands stuff that I showed in my last post. I'll need to think about and decide which of the two I like better before I get to my real map, again.

I know it was just sketchy, but I'm not super happy with my desert either, especially in the Boneyard, where I have the biggest area of it. I'm not finding a lot of examples of things I can import as ideas, so I think I mostly need to just keep working on improving this basic concept. I like the idea (and I have one over by the volcano I mentioned earlier too) of putting in one of the Monument Valley style rock formations. Those are extremely unique, but they're also extremely iconic, and if you see one, you know exactly what it's trying to represent. I tried drawing a few saguaro cactuses, which I've seen other people do as well, and both mine and most others that I've seen tend to look more like crosses than cactuses. I know the Boneyard sounds like a graveyard, and in a lot of ways it is, but I want it represented as a desert, not as a gigantic cemetery. My attempts to suggest creosote bushes or sagebrush needs maybe just a bit more work to be convincing.

Anyway, even though I had to do some cutting and plenty of rearranging, I'm happy with how everything turned out. Frankly, a lot of the stuff that I cut was just a cool name with nothing behind it; just Potemkin setting, as it were, so it doesn't hurt much to have a little less of it. I think the Timischburg section works well as the southern edge spilling out into and just beyond the Knifetop Mountains, and I like the Hill Country locations reimagined as a kind of top-heavy trapezoid that's a little bit more tightly sutured to the Timischburg and Baal Hamazi material (except for the Boneyard, which is mostly removed from the Hill Country section and is now kind of its own little region that acts as a buffer in the center of the area between them; you have to kind of go around it to get from one to the other.) Some of the stuff that I had previously thought would be flush up against the Plateau of Leng (another alternate name for what is now Baal Hamazi) are actually on opposite sides of the map from each other now, like the Rudmont Escarpment and the Darkling Sea. 

Anyway, I'm excited enough about drawing the map, that I kind of almost want to start now, even though I have material literally on order from Amazon that will improve the outcome. I probably won't, because I can use the draft itself to start thinking about how the setting all fits together, and do whatever new development is needed to get it into workable form again. So, I'll practice and experiment with some of the stuff that I'll end up wanting to put on the map to make sure it really is going to look like something that I'll be happy with for a long time, and meanwhile, I'll use this draft to start making an annotated list of what these place names actually correspond to and a quick summary of what they mean over the next few days or so.

Although I might redraw it as a slightly less sketchy version, because on looking longer at it, I do get the impression that most of the physical features are all too close to the same size... A little bit of more slight rearrangement might help with that.