After spending most of an evening drawing a map only to ink in a couple of features that look terrible, out of scale, or otherwise not pretty. Sigh. And then apply liquid paper to it, only to find out that your liquid paper is a bit old and clumpy rather than smooth, not to mention blueish and discolored compared to the paper that it's sitting on. I was ~85% or so finished with this map, and now I'm wondering if I should just go ahead knowing that I can fix it in post (i.e. digitally) but I'll always hate the paper version, or start over (what's a few hours?) knowing that I've learned my lesson about sketching in pencil first?
The map in question was a re-doing of the Baal Hamazi region of my map; i.e., about a third in the northwest of the main map. I was pretty happy with it, although to be honest with you, the Gorgelands wasn't turning out ideal either. I'm just not good at those canyons yet. Maybe I should bust out some scratch paper and practice more, and do the whole thing over again. Sigh.
That said, I was quite happy with the forests. I'd returned to a less belabored version of them, more like how I drew them years ago on the big posterboard Dark•Heritage Mk. IV map. But a few minor tweaks to the process were added, mostly because with the varied width tips of the Pixma Micron pen set, I could. In fact, I need to really remember to only use the Pixma pens; I had used my gel pen for some of it, gotten an icon that I'd drawn transferred to the side of my little finger because the gel pens bleed, and then retransferred that same icon back on the map at a place I didn't want it! That was easily enough fixed; I guess I'm just adding another ruins site or something. But again, I think I want to just start over. Kind of a shame; I spend a good three-four hours on this, and the only reason that I didn't spend more was because I already knew the layout of the map, mostly. Sigh again.
The map was capable of standing in for either a regional focus on the Baal Hamazi (+ Boneyard + the edge of Kurushat up there at the far north) or for the MIND-WIZARDS OF THE DAEMON WASTELAND campaign either one. The replacement will as well, I presume. I'd also added a few new features to the Boneyard specifically. While I said earlier that the majority of it would be represented by a rough pinyon-juniper woodland biome—a relatively high altitude semi-desert semi-forest eocsystem with loads of red rock formations—that's pretty difficult to represent in this kind of map, so I'm mostly just putting in my "rolling terrain" hash marks with a few Monument Valley style rock formations. I did, however, have the forest actually turn into a legitimate, thick forest for part of the map. This forest was going to be filled with bandits and cannibals. In my mind it was Cannibal Forest, although that's just the first thought that came to me, not exactly what I expected to end up with. Maneater Forest? Long Pork Forest? I dunno. Do I really need to make this forest so unfriendly? The DH5 setting doesn't have any lack of forests that are seriously bad news. The Bitterwood further south in Timischburg is famous for xenophobic woses and even werewolves, the Thursewood further east is obviously full of maneating thurses. The Haunted Forest has angry Skraelings, Lovecraftian horrors and necromancers and other undead. The Wolfwood further north is the closest thing to a friendly forest; it "only" has bandits and loads of natural predators like wolves, bears, sabertooths and giant red-furred lions. Yeah, well. Land of adventure, right? I'm also thinking of putting a society of intelligent apes and baboons in this forest. It'll be a little cooler than their habitat normally is, but they'll manage. After all, they're intelligent; they can wear additional furs in the winter months or something.
I had also added a thin, snaky mountain range I was going to call the Dragon's Spine or maybe the Serpent's Spine (after I checked to see if that totally obvious name had already been used somewhere or not first.) It is meant to be less like a normal mountain range and more like an enormous and curiously curving dike that stretches for many leagues. And I thought a big solo mountain somewhere in that region, like a Mount Shasta or Mount Hood or something like that (or a Lonely Mountain, for that matter)
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