On maps and tools

I'm not super thrilled with my efforts to redo "zoomed" versions of areas of my setting in Inkarnate. It's just not working as well as I'd hoped. I can, it turns out, "crop" portions of a map, but then the work involved in changing the scale and other things is a bit prohibitive; it's not as fun as just making a map from scratch. And doing the latter tends to not look enough like the original. I find myself quickly getting drawn back into my old hand-drawn roots again. Especially since all of the art supplies that I ordered have arrived. Even all of the extraneous dice and fantasy coins I've ordered have arrived. I've got it all.

And while the Inkarnate stuff was fun—it kinda reminded me of making maps with the old Heroes of Might and Magic III editor, to be honest with you, which I spent many hours doing many years ago—I've been drawing maps by hand too long to stop doing so now. It was a fun different way of doing things, and I like the results a lot, but from a psychological standpoint, it could never replace my hand drawn style, only supplement it. Maybe I'd do digital maps, if I had an expensive tablet and software to use it. But even then, probably not. I've been doing the hand drawn thing since I was a kid, and it still looks more like the kinds of maps that I grew up with. While the Inkarnate maps undoubtably look better; they're in full color, high resolution, the art stamps are great, etc. it somehow just feels a little bit sterile to me. And while I'm pleased with the things Inkarnate allows me to do that hand-drawing does not (color, consistent fonts, some features that I wouldn't have ever thought to draw, more detail on the features I do draw sometimes, etc.) I'm equally frustrated by the things that I can't do. Why can't I have a straight cliff? Because the system only includes curved ones. Etc. It's a little bit like the difference between playing a table top RPG with a live GM vs playing a computer RPG with pre-programed stories and just a handful of customization options, relatively speaking.

Anyway, when I was a kid, my maps were by default done with school supplies, because that's what I had available. Graph paper, sometimes, or typing paper sometimes, but all too often simply regular lined paper that we wrote on, with cheapo #2 pencils and cheapo ballpoint pens. Although at various times I had various art supplies; colored pencils, pastel chalks, watercolors, acrylic paints, oil paints—even India ink at one point—my experiments with using them on maps never really panned out, and I never really preferred the look of them. Felt-tipped pens I liked better, although they soaked through the paper sometimes, and occasionally smudged. Now, granted—I don't go around drawing a new map every week or anything like that. I did plenty of sketches for Dark•Heritage over the years, but I only ever made a couple of maps that I considered fairly "well done." Dark•Heritage Mk. IV was by far the most ambitious map I'd drawn in years. Maybe even decades. Although I'd had several drafts and sources and whatnot that got me there. But those were only ever drawn as sketches, for me to block out locations; not to use as a game tool or to show to players, etc. My Inkarnate Dark•Heritage Mk. V map I only consider less ambitious because the tool made it really easy and fast compared to what I'm used to doing. I'll probably yet get around to doing a hand-drawn alterate version of the setting, with slightly distorted geography because I won't be able to replicate the shapes and locations exactly, just more or less relatively. And any zoomed-in regional maps will also be hand-drawn. 

For a long time, I actually refused to use art tools. Because I had done it with el cheapo school supplies when I was a kid, and not been happy with my brief experiments into art supplies, I actually thought it a point of foolish pride that I wouldn't use them. And as office supplies because more readily available; i.e., nicer pens like the gel pens that I'd been using recently, as well as everyone having access to printer paper pretty much all of the time, it seemed an obvious way to proceed.

The reality, though, is that better art supplies were hardly difficult or expensive to get either. My Strathmore sketch pads, which I have in two sizes; 9x11 and 11x14, cost maybe ten bucks each? Maybe less, a little. As near as I can tell, the Micron Pigma art pens are a relatively new development; the ink is high quality, doesn't smudge, etc. and the numbered tip thicknesses are a nice touch. But, again, that only cost me ~$10-15 for a set of eight pens? Considering that the points are quite a bit finer and allow for much better detail than my gel pens, it was probably silly that I held out for as long as I did without getting them. And I guess that's ultimately what I'm getting at here; even if you want better tools (and accordingly, better results) than I was getting with the cheapest of cheap school supplies back in the 80s—and you probably do, although I was plenty happy with my results back then—it's hardly difficult or expensive to do so. For about ~$20-25 and a trip to most regular stores that have even a craft section (Walmart probably stocks most of this stuff; an actual arts/crafts store like Michael's would be even better, of course) you're in business.

I did some trials with the Micron pens, just to see how they drew. I think for most purposes, the difference between the various tips is overkill. I could have done with a set of two; the 005 ultra fine or 01 tip, and the 08 "regular" tip. Maybe the brush pen or even just my old gel pens for the thicker lines like coasts and black fills and whatnot. I'll probably use them all because I have them all, but y'know. I even saw sets of three 005s; if I could go back and do it again, instead of getting the set of eight with all of the tips, I'd have just bought that, used the gel pen for most normal line work, and the ultra fine point for more detailed stuff around it.

Oh, and so I'm not just talking about pens and my philosophy towards them, here's another minor detail. I had said earlier when talking about my old DH4 map that I had adopted some kind of hatching to give texture and the vague sense of rolling elevation without being too specific, which I thought worked well, but I couldn't remember where I got the idea or what inspired me to try it. I found it when I re-looked at the Third Edition Eberron map, which used it extensively too. I didn't love much of anything else about the art style of that map. Or rather, it was fine, I suppose, but it had little that I would have tried to use myself. Except that one thing.

Curiously, it's on their legend, marked as "Hills/Lowland." Which is it; hills, or lowland? I think again the idea that it's vaguely representational of rollling topographical relief. It's not flat, but it's not a big enough deal that you'd mark it as actual hills or something, is how I read it and interpret it.

The Anglo-Saxons

I wasn't aware of this recently published abstract and subsequent speech at a (virtual) annual conference last year, but it's kind of a bombshell for those interested in your ethnic make-up, if you're British or the descendent of the British, like True Americans, Australians, Kiwis, etc. tend to be. Of course, my ancestry does include some very specific non-English ancestry, including a fair number of Scottish-Americans, and one great-grandfather who was Portuguese. But still; my culture and personality are very typical of the old northern English Borderers. Although the specific ancestry from here is more related to my dad's side; my Mom's side was a more typical Massachussets to the American "Mormon" West type of Yankee. And although I say that my dad's side is the part of my heritage that is my identity, all of the mixed stuff is on my dad's side too. The part of me that is actually the descendent of a Scottish-English borderer is probably relatively small. Then again, Anglo-Scottish northern borderer and East Anglian Puritan are probably too fine scale of a structure to be easily identified.

Anyway, enough rambling. What am I talking about? There's been a lot of debate over decades if not centuries as to the degree to which the modern English are the descendants of Anglo-Saxons vs. integrated Romano-British and Celtic. I've always assumed that the Celtic remnant was a fairly high level of the autosomal DNA of the modern English. A study published in 2016 which analyzed the DNA from ten Anglo-Saxon graves and compared them to the modern English seemed to corroborate that; it suggested that the Anglo-Saxon component of the modern English was about 38%. Quite a bit, to be sure, but the Norman and Viking invasions of England seem to have left even less of an imprint on the modern English DNA, so presumably a good half, and then a bit more were remnant Romano-Celtic. However, various studies gave very swingy results; anywhere from 10% to 95% had been published. 

This new abstract, which previews a paper which hasn't been published yet, appears to have done a much more thorough study, with many more samples than previously published ones. The result? About 80% genetic replacement of the Romano-Celts with a North Sea Germanic DNA during the Anglo-Saxon period. (I wonder, though—the Danelaw and Viking settlement is also the Anglo-Saxon period, and the Viking DNA might have been extremely difficult to separate from the Anglo-Saxon, given that their place of origin was almost the same; southern Denmark and the northern Low Countries vs. mostly just Denmark. It's possible that that 80% replacment represents both Anglo-Saxon and Viking settlement, not just Anglo-Saxon.) The pre-Anglo-Saxon genetic profile, on the other hand, closely resembles that of modern day Ireland and Scotland. The Brythonic vs Gaelic shift doesn't appear to have brought with it substantially different DNA, at least. In other words, the English (and their diaspora daughter populations like True Americans) are much more Anglo-Saxon than we thought. Although the abstract makes a point of highlighting the continuity of that last 20%, the elephant in the room is that going from ~60% to 20% presents a very different picture of the continuity of British genetics than what we'd previously been told.

In fact, that is one of the key takeaways for what we've learned from ancient DNA research in the last few years. The dogma of continuity is just that; dogma, and it's been thoroughly shattered by evidence from DNA. When a new population comes in, the extent to which they replace the previous population, from a genetic standpoint anyway, is substantial, and we see that over and over and over and over again. The modern English (and, again, their diaspora cousins, like me) have almost no genetic connection to the people who built, for example, Stonehenge. Nobody does. Those people are gone. A tiny strand of their legacy remains in the DNA of the English today, but it's tiny. Those people were not our ancestors. Our ancestors replaced them. Or rather, they were replaced by a people who were then later substantially replaced again by our ancestors. Although the 20% remnant of the old Bell Beaker ~ Celtic DNA is much more subsantial than that of the old Neolithic megalith building farmer DNA in our current genetic profile, the fact remains that neither of them are really deep enough that you can say that they are the ancestors of the modern English—unless you're using English very sloppily to refer to the Cornish, the Welsh, the Scottish, and the border regions that those populations have with the English. 

Although I disagree with him, I think Tolkien can consider himself vindicated in suggesting that the King Arthur cycle of stories had nothing to do with the English. I think that King Arthur has been so closely associated with the English for so many centuries that it should be considered a naturally grafted on story, but if the origin of it was with the Romano-Celtic peoples, and in many ways the propagation of the mythology was due to the Normans picking it up and being enamored of it, Tolkien was right that it has little if anything to do with the Anglo-Saxons, and as we now know, the Ango-Saxons really were the English. The degree to which they picked up DNA from the people that they replaced is much more limited than we thought. The stories of King Arthur really are the stories of another people, and Tolkien really was right in that the Anglo-Saxons didn't have much in the way of stories to call their own. 

And I have mixed feelings about that. Do we need them? Does having false stories, or someone else's stories impact us? I think it does, but how much? I grew up hearing the false narratives about the Civil War that the north wrote to recast themselves as the heroes of their own story rather than the unjustified and corrupt aggressors that they were in real life. And even as a little kid, although I hadn't yet learned to question The Establishment like I do now, I had cognitive dissonance about that narrative. Something about it didn't quite add up, although I wasn't sure what. On the other hand, two of the three legs of Western civilization have nothing to do with my people. And yet, I claim the heritage of the Bible and Christianity as my own, even though it was written by and about (and honestly, mostly for) the Hebrews, not the Americans. And I also claim the Classical Antiquity heritage of Greek and Roman history and mythology, even though those aren't my people either. DNA isn't the only thing that makes up a people, and Western Civilization wouldn't be what it is without Christianity and the classical traditions of the Greeks and Romans. Likewise, English tradition wouldn't be what it is without the King Arthur cycle of stories, even if at their root they weren't written by the Enlish, for the English, or about the English, and may even have represented reistance and hostility towards the goals of the earliest proto-English to arrive on Great Britain.

UPDATE: Don't know why, but the link went dead. Here is a better version, I hope.

https://www.e-a-a.org/EAA2020virtual/Repository/EAA2020virtual/Repository.aspx?hkey=ff7ef56e-f2f8-4379-beb3-459ae83a1070

If it actually takes you to a blank search field, put in the author's name: Jorscha Gretzinger. The title of the paper is The Anglo-Saxon migration and formation of the early English gene pool.

Here's the text of the abstract:

A series of migrations and accompanied cultural changes has formed the peoples of Britain and still represents the foundations of the English national identity. For the most prominent of these, the Anglo-Saxon migration, the traditional view, resting upon historical sources and derived concepts of ethnic and national origins from the 19th century, outlined that the indigenous Romanised British population was forcibly replaced by invading Germanic tribes, starting in the 5th century AD. However, to which extent this historic event coincided with factual immigration that affected the genetic composition of the British population was focus of generations of scientific and social controversy. To better understand this key period, we have so far generated genome-wide sequences from 80 individuals from eight cemeteries in East and South England. We combined this data with previously published genome-wide data to a total dataset of more than 200 ancient British genomes spanning from the Early Bronze Age to the Early Middle Ages, allowing us to investigate shifts and affinities in British fine-scale population structure during this phase of transformation. Here we present two preliminary results: First, we detect a substantial increase in continental Northern European ancestry akin to the extant Danish and Northern German populations during the Early Anglo-Saxon period, replacing approximately 80% of the indigenous British ancestry during that time period. Second, we nevertheless highlight the continuous presence of ancestry identified in Pre-Saxon Iron Age and Roman individuals during the Early and Middle Anglo-Saxon period, originating in the Early British Bronze Age and closely resembling present-day Celtic-speaking populations from Ireland and Scotland. Therefore, our study suggests that the early English population was the outcome of long-term ethnogenetic processes in which the acculturation and assimilation of native Britons into the immigrating Anglo-Saxon society played a key role.

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.

On fantasy maps

Because I've been looking at lots of maps, YouTube recommended this video to me recently and I watched it. I'm familiar with this guy, and I've watched some of his stuff before. I got over him. He's reasonably charismatic, but I disagree with a lot of what he says. About fantasy, in particular, but not just about fantasy. And he even makes some pretty bone-headed comments in this video itself (yeah, mountains along coasts aren't common at all. South America, North America, Italy, Spain, Scotland, South Africa, Australia, Scandinavia, Japan, New Zealand... and more: "what are we; a joke to you?"

But whatever. He also highlights a huge part of where my disconnect is with him. And maybe my disconnect is with the "larger" fantasy fan audience. Or maybe it isn't. I don't know for sure how the numbers play out in the broader population of fantasy fans. First off, he complains about west coast sporting maps. Apparently it doesn't occur to him that the vast majority of fantasy genre fan readers are of European heritage, and a map that's oriented and vaguely reminiscent of Europe is much more natural to them? And he praises maps that are innovative and "tell a story"; in particular, a Brandon Sanderson map in a series that has a storm theme has a main continent that is shaped like a storm. Kinda. Or maybe a spiral galaxy. To me it looked more like a slightly flattened and rotated image of the Pinwheel Galaxy, M101 NGC 5457 than a storm, but I admit that the imagery is similar. Other than the novelty value of "oh, hey, that continent and its archipelagos looks like a hurricane!" I'm not quite sure how that makes any real difference to the story.

He also goes on and on about the map of Camorr from The Lies of Locke Lamora. It's just a fantasy city with canals. He calls this really original and unique ("Venice: what am I; a joke to you?") That map does absolutely nothing. It's a round blob, about as useful as the map of Southtown from the first Fatal Fury game, and actually... kinda drawn in a similar style. It's convenient that it shows the layout of the neighborhoods, in case you need to know which neighborhoods you pass on your ride in your Venician gondola on your way from the Temple District to the Dregs. It's a utilitarian map, kinda... and that's it. It isn't evocative. It doesn't tell any story. It doesn't do anything except show you where stuff is in relation to other stuff. If by "stuff" you mean specific neighborhoods, because that's all that it does. And I'm not trying to knock on the map for being that. That's what a map, ultimately, has to do. That's its main purpose. 

I actually think trying to be innovative in your geography is a sleight of hand to distract the easily distracted. It's a novelty trick. A Tijuana donkey show. A tourist trap. Having an "innovative" map is like putting up fifty billboards from Wisconsin Dells all the way to Rapid City telling people to visit Wall Drug and be amazed; only to find that while Wall Drug is indeed a pretty impressive gift shop (especially for being relatively speaking, in the middle of nowhere), that's really all that it manages to be.

Now, I'm not trying to say that there's anything wrong with the Stormlight Archive's continental setting kinda looking like a hurricane, but I don't think that there's anything particularly compelling about it either. As a person who's admittedly never read the books, I don't think that anything about the map is particularly compelling. What is a Sesemalex Dar supposed to be? Or a Ru Parat? Bizarre names that conjure nothing in particular isn't evocative, unless you're already familiar with them from the story. To be fair, there are some more evocative names out there too, that when I see them, even as a non-reader of this particular series, I think—hey, that sounds kind of interesting. Horneater Mountains? Dawn's Shadow? Unclaimed Hills? The Shallow Crypts? Maybe they're not the most innovative. But they do the job better than the "innovative" foreign sounding names that don't sound like anything and therefore don't evoke anything.

Now, I'm not saying that foreign names don't necessarily ever evoke anything. If you have names that sound kinda Japanese or Norse, or Roman or Greek or Hebrew or something; those are names that most certainly do evoke something. Names in English, especially using archaic words or stems when possible, evoke something. Those are maps that tell a story; not a map that just happens to have a weird shape that is a metaphor for the story itself, or whatever.

I've long said that innovation is over-rated; it's always trumped by execution. This is especially true in fantasy. There's a subset of fantasy fans who are really science fiction readers, but aren't comfortable with the smug, nerdy engineer aspect of science fiction. They tend to be the ones who are impressed by a story or setting that does something unusual for its own sake, and they tend to see such novelty dog and pony tricks as a hallmark of some kind of brilliance rather than simply a tawdry carnival trick. But by and large, fantasy fans like fantasy because it echoes with the past. It is a nostalgic genre, which needs to resonate with our cultural heritage, our mythology, our culture and our identity to really work. (As an aside, China Mieville once complained very vocally about that in particular, especially with regards to Tolkien and Tolkien style fantasy. Then again, that was going on twenty years ago now. In the meantime, who's name have you heard more since then, Mieville or Tolkien? Who's going to be read twenty years from now just as much as he is now, and who's going to be forgotten as a fad?)

Which is why most fantasy settings have a vaguely European Medieval cast to them, not only in the themes, the tone, the elements that you're likely to see, but even, yes, in the geography itself. Because fantasy is a genre that is primarily written by and for white men. Nobody else in the world really gets into fantasy in numbers like the people of Western Civilization (and especially men; in my experience there are significantly fewer women who read fantasy, and when they do, they tend to prefer what come across as either grrl-power screeds or romance novels in fantasy trappings rather than actual fantasy anyway.) Latin America, Africa, Asia, etc.; none of them have a big reader base for anything that really resembles the fantasy genre, although they do have story traditions with elements that people (mostly stupid, shallow people) have pointed to as superficial similarities to fantasy, such as mythology, superstition and folklore. 

I do tend to also look askance at people who reject their own heritage, their own culture, and their own traditions and go haring off after some alien novelty all the time, or they can't be entertained. I admit I don't understand it at all. The kind of fantasy that Daniel Greene is advocating for in this map video (and other videos for that matter) isn't fantasy at all to me, half of the time. But I can see why people who only look at superficial things don't see the difference. Just like people often say that Michael Moorcock's Elric books and L. Sprague de Camp's Harold Shea or Pusadian stories were sword & sorcery, when in fact they rejected all of the themes of sword & sorcery and explicitly reversed them and did the opposite of what sword & sorcery would have done. But lots of people just see the superficial similarities and can't see deeper than that. The same thing happened with Westerns, where Revisionist anti-Westerns are seen by many people as great example of Westerns. But the real Western fans weren't fooled. Clint Eastwood once wrote John Wayne shortly after releasing High Plains Drifter suggesting that they work together; Wayne sent him a very hostile, angry response that he wanted nothing to do with his subversion and inversion of the Western into exactly the opposite of what a Western is, yet still wearing the skinsuit of the Western so that stupid people would see that wolf in sheep's clothing and be fooled.

Now, I realize that some people feel all sad and upset that people might notice that fantasy is a white guy pastime. To them, I say: you're a racist. Diversity means actual difference, and not just some superficial thing like skin color or hair texture or regional food. Expecting Africans or Latin Americans or Asians to think, act, and have the same behavior as white people is racist. It presumes that their actual thoughts, actions and behavior have no value, and that they're just interchangeable widgets with white people, that you can trot around and wear like a medallion for your virtue signaling Olympics. Which is really what the Diversity Is Our Strength™ hoax and con job is all about. Ironically, the people who parrot this delusional cult thinking are strongly correllated with hating, at least publicly, everything about being white. White heritage, white culture, white traditions, white literature; it's all there to be non-stop excoriated. If you're one of the people who is sad that I notice that fantasy as a genre is, generally speaking, a white male genre both on the creative side and the consumer side, and that to the extent that is changing, fantasy is also becoming not fantasy; it's just a trophy that POX and feminists wear to try and humiliate white men, as they lecture them via what used to be their genre.The Third Law says that SJWs Always Project. You are a person filled with hate. You hate "people of color" because you hate everything about them unless they act exactly like white liberals. And you hate white culture, because shrieking like a harpy at white people is your identity. You are nothing but hate and bitterness turned into a wimpy, bitter, beta human-like form. I would tell you to go see a therapist and try turning into a person again, but in today's environment that would probably just enable you rather than fix your fundamental dysfunctionalism. Better yet might be a pastor or priest, but in today's environment... again, caveat emptor. 

And another quick aside; for the binary thinker who isn't very bright; speaking about generalities and trends means that yes, of course exceptions exist. They may even be a significant plurality of sorts. But it doesn't disprove what I said either.

In my experience, much of the "modern fantasy" genre is exactly that. It's not fantasy. (Admittedly, my experience is limited. As I saw this trend growing, my interest in following "modern fantasy" withered and dried up right quick, and I usually avoid most of it now.) It's fantasy's corpse, being trotted around all weekend by Jonathan Silverman and Andrew McCarthy, desperately trying to convince everyone that this grotesque fantasy Bernie is still alive by giving the illusion of activity and stuff. But what made fantasy fantasy has been cored out and abandoned, left for dead except in the field of mostly indie writers and older material. 

Now, I'm being a little dramatic. I'm sure that there are people who are writing more traditionalist fantasy stuff that's really good out there that is still in the mainstream, published by big NYC publishers (big being relative nowadays in the world of book publishing) and selling reasonably big numbers.  I'm not so sure that even people like Brandon Sanderson or Brent Weeks, for instance, aren't still writing stuff that is still genuine fantasy rather than anti-fantasy, although I admit to not being very farmiliar with the work of either. But I think much of what the "modern fantasy" fad does is little more than what Revisionist westerns did to the Western; turn it inside out to mock it and ultimately destroy it. And then pat themselves on the back for how clever and more sophisticated than flyover people they are as they trot around the corpse of the genre that they destroyed like a trophy. Isn't that pretty much what Joe Abercrombie or George "Rape Rape" Martin are doing? But you can probably see why I've turned my back on almost anything coming out of a NYC publishing house and want nothing to do with it unless it was published at a minimum thirty years or so ago; fifty years or more is even better. For sword & sorcery explicitly, the best stuff was eighty to ninety years ago!

Revised map

Because the file is now large enough that I can't even upload it to blogger without loss of quality, so I've put the most recent version on Google Drive instead. Unless I somehow screwed it up, it should be viewable to anyone with a link. The thumbnal will give you the blogger version of the file if you enlarge it, but it's also a link to the full resolution version.

A few changes are cosmetic. I normalized the font to a single font, and got all of the city/town names at the same size (some of them were just a step off, but it started to get noticeable to me.) I added the wave painting on land to represent furrows and tilled fields. Not sure that that looks super great, but I don't really have any other options, sadly, that look any better. Is there really nothing in the asset library for large stretches of farmland on world-scale maps? That is kind of odd.  (Honestly, in a hand drawn version, I'd prefer just straight hatch lines over the waves anyway, which would work equally well on water or land for what I want. But we get these wave forms with peaks and troughs that look like water, and I have to live with it until I can think of something else. Maybe I can upload textures as an asset to paint with?) Oh, and I decided to change the little square icons representing towns and cities to little hand-drawn icons. I don't really like doing that in hand drawn maps that I make, but I think it works fine for this kind of map. Plus, I'd never do it on any other style map, so it was kind of fun to make use of a tool that I otherwise don't use. I did forget still to add one thing; a scale. So I guess a little bit more tweaking is in order. I imagine the scale to be on the order of magnitude as the Middle-earth map, although a bit smaller.

The other changes are a bit more substantive, and mostly include filling in some stuff where there were overly large, overly blank areas before, which I didn't like. In particular, the Goldenwolds area was a really big blank area with nothing to do except travel across it, and south of the Haunted Forest in that prairie there wasn't much going on. Let's talk briefly about what was added:

1) The strip along the Copper Hills sandwiched between the Haunted Forest and the Goldenwolds had a bunch of farmland added. I now see that as a bit more densely populated; not with villages and towns, necessarily (although a few are marked) but with much more settled farmland. In a way, I guess I see it as a slightly less utopian Shire. Or maybe it's just as utopian, but my version of a utopian, agrarian society is a bit different than Tolkien's.

2) The Plateau of Leng and Unknown Kadath are added as a big landform right there in the northern Goldenwolds. I realize that this makes its location not at all a secret; in fact, there's a road that gets a decent amount of travel between Lomar and Bucknerfeld that passes within sight of the plateau for days, and another road from Bucknerfeld to Pineytop has it visible from the other side as well. That said, it's extremely difficult to climb up the steep cliffs of the plateau which are very tall; probably moreso than is obvious from this representation here. On top, it is high enough elevation to always be cold, and most of it is above the elevation snow line. Not only is climbing it difficult, but the evil reputation of the place has spread far and wide, and people know to avoid it. Most prefer to not even look at it as they pass, if they can help it.

3) On the western shore of the Darkling Sea I've added the Tazitta Death Cult lands. This is a savage people that I made up, initially for the Baal Hamazi section of Dark•Heritage Mk. IV, but given that the area I put them in is similar ecologically to the Goldenwolds, I think this is a good place for them. Imagine, again, a combination of the Comanche and the headhunters of the East Indies. On top of that, they paint or tattoo themselves to resemble skeletons; black with white bone markings, and they kill and behead (and sometimes eat) people who pass through their lands. They are considered an insane cult of daemon worshippers by most, but then again, nobody has ever really managed to document their societal practices and live, so nobody knows for sure what they believe. They are within a very hard days ride of Leng's eastern edge (more like two to three days of long travel otherwise) and that's one of the few practices known for sure; several times a year, young bands of Tazitta braves make a pilgrimage to Leng. What exactly they do there is unclear. They make travel through this section of the prairie very hazardous, and as you can see anyway, the settlement patterns and roads take great pains to avoid getting even very close to their lands. Even moreso than the avoidance of Leng. Leng may be a malignant tumor on the surface of the earth, but it doesn't aggressive go hunt you down; you have to go to it to be harmed by it. Not so with the Tazitta. In this respect, they resemble the Comancheria, and the pains with which famous drover trails, like the Goodnight-Loving, went out of their way to stay away from them.

4) Further south, I added the  ruins of Rabb's Hill as well as a large section of burn on the northern fringe of the Thursewood. This small town was about halfway between the much larger regional capital of Dunsbury on the edge of Lake Byewick, and the towns of Roanstead and Burham's Landing, which are keys to reaching Waychester by boat through the Waychester Bay. (Waychester is otherwise unreachable, which is unusual being such a major regional center. I see it as not unlike the Euxhine Sea holdings of the Greeks during their age of colonization, though—they didn't follow land routes to get around, but almost exclusively sailed.) Rabb's Hill was attacked and destroyed overnight by a vicious surge of violence from the thurses of the Thursewood. Luckily, thurses are savage and unorganized, so they were unable to capitalize on their quick victory by marching elsewhere before armies from Waychester and Dunsbury converged on them. Although often called the Battle of Rabb's Hill that drove them off, it was really more like an extended engagement across a wide area. The thurses lit fires in the forest to smoke out the hillmen, but this was turned against them when the hillmen proved disciplined enough to drive them back to the fireline with their shieldwalls. In the end, thousands of thurses were pushed into the fire and burned to death, and the population has been decimated and quiet in the generation or so since that battle. (Although scouts are reporting signs that the population may have rebounded somewhat and the Thursewood may yet again be a danger full of the furious thurses.) The old burn area is still fairly barren; the black skeletons of trees stand out from the low-growing, quick-sprouting shrubs that have moved in in the meantime; new trees are still small. The forest isn't expected to return to its original state (or something like it) in the burn area for at least another two or three generations.

5) Although this wasn't a new change that I just made, I think it's worth pointing out that I've extended Timischburg eastward, as can be seen by the Timischer village of Dragomiresti all the way out on the Chatterwash River. This puts Eltdown more firmly in the Timischer camp, although it's still one that has a fair number of hillmen living there, and it does have a hillmen name. At the peak of their past expansion, the hillmen went all the way to the Knifetop Mountains and through the Haunted Forest, although the dangers of the forest eventually led them to abandon their efforts to expand up the Chatterwash watershed and avoid the Haunted Forest and its environs.

Thought of the day

Random clever thought of the day that I heard on a YouTube video: Let Star Wars go. She's just a nasty ex-wife now who ran off with China. Trying to hang on to her will only make you more miserable.

Inkarnate Dark Heritage Mk. V

Well... I spent $5 to get a subscription. I probably won't keep it more than a month or two, because I won't be mapping much (if anything) after doing this, but I was amazed... it took me about an hour or so to get the hang of the interface. After which, it only took me about three hours to make my map!

Granted, it's probably not perfect (I already spotted one label I left off) and I'll likely make minor tweaks to it for the next couple of weeks. But I can't believe how quickly it all came together, and honestly, how good the result turned out. Inkarnate really is cool to use! If you want a really nice, full-color, hi-def map of your setting, and you really only need to do the one map, I highly recommend springing for the subscription, spending some time making the map, and then canceling the subscription if you don't think you'll still use it, with your really nice map as a product that you spent a few days on, or so, and $5. If you think you'll want to tinker with the thing, though, or make encounter maps or other things like that, spring for the yearly subscription (you save more than 50%) and play around with it for longer. Since it's browser based, it doesn't even install anything on your computer, although you'll probably want a decent graphics card or it will lag when you start getting lots of elements together on your bigger maps.

The other thing I didn't label was the Timischburg counties, even though my draft map had those labels. I might still mess around with the labeling, or even redo it altogether. I couldn't figure out a way to fit those labels on without them getting in the way of other labels, so I didn't. 

Other than that; compared to my draft, quite a few things were relocated a fair bit, and the geography overall was a bit stretched and distorted. I knew that was going to happen, both for things I moved deliberately, and because I knew I couldn't possibly use a mouse to draw the same outline for the map on  a large file that I couldn't even see all of on my screen at the same time, except in the vaguest, roughest sense. That doesn't bother me at all; in fact, I think the new set-up is better. Some of the changes are deliberate, though.

Another thing that occurred to me after putting it together is that although my Hill Country original draft didn't feel big and empty, it kind of did here. That's not necessarily a bad thing; in fact, I think it's part of the character of the Hill Country that it has a kind of Old West wilderness feel to it where settlements are fewer, sparser and farther apart. Timischburg and Baal Hamazi feel, relatively, kind of cramped with lots of stuff closer together, even though those aren't exactly meant to be the fantasy version of  urban blight either. While I'm still going with a subscription, I might work up some more stuff to fill in the Hill Country area with a few more different features. There is meant to be lots of ruins and stuff; the equivalent of old Indian graveyards (although the remnant Atlantean skraelings aren't really Indians), the remnants of the old Hamazin and Kurushat expansions that are now reduced to rump states in the north and northwest... but who left stuff behind in the territory that was later colonized by the Hillmen. Not sure yet what any of it will be, and I don't really need more little settlements or anything like that; what I really want is something a bit more interesting and unique to put in that area, if I can think of what will fit the bill.

Anyway, here's the map as it stands now. It's complete... at least until I think of tweaks and changes to make to it. But those will likely be minor, and some of them merely cosmetic.

Another note; few things inspire setting development like a pretty map. Now that I've placed this stuff, I'm feeling much more motivated to start making posts about some if the listed items and, even if I'm posted about them before, updating it to be in harmony with the whole DH5 vibe.

Digital mapping

I'm decidedly luddite when it comes to maps. I've really ONLY ever drawn them by hand, on paper, with a pen (or pencil. But I've always preferred pen.) I've done a bit of really sketchy stuff on the computer, but I don't own a tablet, don't really want one, and am not very proficient in any graphics application, despite owning (and having been the past owner) of several. I really like the look of the colored maps that are often included with RPG products, since those are either full-color products, or even digital products anyway, but my background in fantasy maps comes from mass market paperback which is not even grayscale; it's pure black ink on whitish newsprint paper. That also works well with the ink on paper drawing style that I've cultivated over the years.

Digital mapping is a relatively new fad. It generally requires having 1) some really good software. Some people do OK with freeware like GIMP or whatever, but Photoshop is really the go-to for most, and it's not super cheap. 2) Good hardware, including a decent wacom tablet to draw with. Drawing with a mouse is like sniffing butts and expecting a good result, although if you're willing to put a lot of time into trying to get it to work, I suspect that it can be done. I've mostly lacked the patience for trying to draw with a mouse, and I don't think any serious digital artists do so. 3) Some skills. You can be a perfectly good artist, but knowing how to utilize the features of Photoshop (or even any of its competitors or equivalents) is a whole new skill set that takes lots of time and practice to acquire before you can get any good results out of the software.

Of course, the flipside to that is that you can get gorgeously rendered full-color maps that you won't with ink on paper. (I suppose that's not completely a fair comparison. You could always paint in color on paper, or something. In fact, in the years prior to Photoshop, that's what was done. Although also in the years prior to Photoshop, full color products were extremely rare and what you mostly got were still black and white ink on paper type maps.)

As time as gone on, a few products have moved into that sphere to "democratize" the making of professional quality maps and bringing it to the table of anyone anywhere, but, of course, there's more work to be done there. Campaign Cartographer is an old (I mean, like 1993 old) CAD-based software that's now in it's 9th update to it's third iteration. It is, however, a bit on a pricy side, and I've played around a number of years ago with the interface and found that the learning curve there is as steep as it is in Photoshop. More recently browser-based Inkarnate and a competitor app called Wonderdraft have entered the fray. Both of them have become, over the last year or two, relatively robust and easy to use alternatives. Wonderdraft is maybe easier to use, and more importantly, easier to buy, but I think if you're going to all that much trouble to make digital maps, you probably want something that looks a little better. Inkarnate seems to be that, but you have to buy a subscription to use most of its features, which is a business model that I think really stinks. 

That said, they also have a free version. The free version is pretty limited, but you can at least see how it works, even if your palette of elements to use is too restricted to be all that useful. I have a free account, and I've played around with it for a little bit, and I'm actually considering springing for a subscription (it goes month to month at $5 a pop, or $25 for a whole year. While the business model may stink, the pricing isn't really all that bad.) If I do, would I want to make a full color, digital version of the map in Inkarnate?

I actually think it would be more difficult to get the same shapes and placement, except in a vague sense, and it will probably much more time consuming to use the tool than to just draw it myself. And, of course, using a product like this means getting a lot of repeating elements, i.e, the exact same mountain peak showing up all over the place, etc. (not that my hand drawn peaks look all that unique from each other, but y'know) not to mention the assets themselves being fairly well known, so that your map looks like it was made from the same elements as other maps you'll see online and elsewhere.  But... you get a really cool-looking full color map by doing it this way; something that I otherwise couldn't get and couldn't do. And it looks like it might be a fun thing to do in its own right. And that full color map doesn't mean that I can't do my hand-drawn style map too. Although if I make the color one first, and then trace the coastline and block in placement of a few features, the two maps might even (gasp!) more or less match each other! I imagine the shape will be considerably distorted, however, from the draft I drew. I can't mimic it too closely even hand-drawing, unless I traced the coastline and blocked some of the features in through tracing. Doing it with a mouse on a computer screen? Not a chance. That's OK, though. The draft map was mostly about trialing a few few style elements, and especially roughing in rough placement for stuff.

I dunno. I feel a little like a sell-out after shaking my fist, telling modern gamers to get off my lawn, and swearing up and down that hand drawing with pen on paper was the only way to go (as well as ordering a ton of art supplies specifically to do so!) But playing around with Inkarnate looks so much fun too! If I get the monthly, and only have it for two or three months tops, I only pay $10-15 and it'll be worth it just for the hours of enjoyment I'll get messing around with it, honestly. I'll almost certainly take the plunge here soon.

Rudmont Escarpment

Not to be all posting too many micro-updates... well, maybe to be that. I'm pretty sure I've got a handle on my cliffs now. I do want to experiment with making some more talus sloped ones, either by adding a bit of slope at the bottom (which I meant to but forgot to on the one posted here) or trying to figure out how to add some rubble, scree and boulders at the bottom of the cliff and make it look OK. But this is pretty close to exactly how I want it to turn out. So much so, in fact, that after I drew the cliff, I added some labels and a few other features to show it in context. That only made me like it better.

There's a road that comes right up to the lip where the big crack is (between Rudmont and Escarpment) and a steep mule and donkey trail that gets you from top to bottom; the only route most people consider passable along the entire length of the escarpment. At the bottom is the trade city of Glittering Simashki, which in addition to this fortuitous location, is also blessed with several springs that come up from an aquifer below the surface; one of the only really good sources of fresh water that is both reliable and capable of supporting more than a few people at a time. The road travels from there along the base of the cliffs to Vuukrat at the northeastern edge of the escarpment, where it finally fades in elevation down to the "normal" level and you can get around it. A river that pours off of the escarpment crosses the road about halfway through on its way to the Indash Salt Sea, an endorheic lake that is slowly shrinking and becoming saltier. You can see the stippling which represents the salt flats for miles along the shore.

As you can probably guess by the names, this is not part of the Hill Country area, which is represented by good old Anglo-Saxon/English names, mostly. Nor is it part of Timischburg, which in keeping with representing Transylvania during the Austro-Hungarian Empire has either German-sounding (the aristocracy) or Romanian (the peasantry) names. I actually, when I made this new stuff, freely mixed names from what was once Old Baal Hamazi and Old Kurushat. That was originally done when I expected that both Baal Hamazi and Kurushat lingered somewhere beyond the edges of the map. Now, I'm not sure that I care to distinguish them clearly anymore. Vuukrat might just end up being a kind of stand-alone colony of its people, with the distant Sinjagat being another one. In this respect, they'll not be terribly different from Lomar, which is also a colonial city of a people who's main locus is somewhere off the map.

Actually, since I still need to develop a bit more what's actually going on in my new Baal Hamazi land, or the old Daemon Wastes as it evolved from, maybe having some ethnic tension between kemlings, jann and drylander tribes is not such a bad idea. I haven't quite figured out exactly how I'm going to rearrange my old elements, and which elements I'll be rearranging in my new version of "the Daemon Wastes."

Of course, the other option is to use some actual hamazin names and replace the names Vuukrat and Sinjagat entirely. But I do like the idea that there is at least a place or two on the map that caters to each of the playable races. Maybe it's a good idea to move Sinjagat, make it closer to Vuukrat, and claim that a small corner of the peninsula is majority jann. And maybe I should squeeze Sharkul back into the map as a ghetto village near Lake Byewick again. Sigh. Maybe it's a good thing that I'm taking just a little bit of time before moving from my first draft to the next draft of the map. Give myself some time to see if there's really anything else that needs to be added or changed or not before I make a nicer map that I'll be more reluctant to mess with.

Cliffs

I mentioned with regards to my draft map that I wasn't super happy with the Rudmont Escarpment, a very large, long, steep cliff. Although in this world of YouTube tutorials, you'd think that would be my first place to turn to look for alternative (and actually it was; although I wasn't completely happy with what I found there either.) I was forced to turn to the tried and true method that I've done ever since I was a kid when I needed a style to draw a map feature on my map that I hadn't done before and didn't have in my style reservoir: look at a bunch of other fantasy maps, find something I liked, and copy it. In the process of copying it, I'd do multiple practice runs of it, and it would of course evolve and change and get my own touch to the point that sometimes it didn't look exactly like what I'd originally tried to copy, although usually in gross, superficial similarity, you could tell that they were brothers.

Of course, in this case, the problem I have is that the feature I'm looking for isn't nearly as common as say, a mountain, a forest, a coastline, a lake, etc. I knew it was going to be difficult to find samples. I did find one poking around on the Cartographer's Guild, and I cut and pasted just the section that shows his cliff technique. And I knew that the Pathfinder Golarion setting had that feature too, so I looked up what I could find for regional maps of that area. I found three different versions (and that may not be all of them; just the ones that I knew of off-hand.) I also cut and pasted just a small area that showed the feature I'm looking to copy. So, I've got four samples, from four different maps, drawn in four similar although not identical styles to look at for inspiration. I actually found a couple of other examples, but they weren't done in a style that was going to be useful to me, or I simply didn't like the look of them, so I didn't grap snapshots of those.

First the Golarion ones.

In some ways the top one is my favorite, and I like the crisp lines and the suggestion of rubble or talus at the base of the cliff. The third one looks like a better fit for my style, however. Again, in imitating these, I'll probably end up hybridizing all kinds of stuff from all of these.

Here's the one I got from the cartographer's guild:

The style of this map overall is much more similar to my style of drawing. However, in my own trials, I'm having a bit of a harder time getting the bottom lines of the cliff to look good.

It occured to me early on—at a glance, really—that all four of these styles are not really black and white styles. They are color styles, and they depend on the colorization and shading that that provides, to create the illusion of depth. It's a totally different kettle of fish trying to do that in a more suggestive black and white way of doing maps. I can imitate the linework all I want, but without the lighter highlight at the lip of the canyon and the darker shadows just below the lip, it won't have the same effect. The only one of the four samples that didn't use this technique was the first one, but even that uses the two different hues; the darker canyon wall vs the flat ground on the top and bottom of the canyon to create a simpler yet still effective shading. I can't do any of that in pure black and white, so I need to imitate it with some kind of hatching, and better yet, draw the cliff in such a way that I don't need nearly as much of it to get the same effect.

Now, I do want some hatching and shading, of course. My mountains, my hills, and my forests all use plenty of that to create the effective of depth and 3-Dishness. But I need to find a hatching/shading technique that is relatively simple to do, simple to repeat so I don't have to worry if it's going to turn out good, and which matches the rest of the shading and hatching that I'm already doing on other elements of my map. I think, honestly, that I'm not quite there yet. Using my phone to take some quick-n-dirty snapshots of my scratch paper that I've been experimenting on—first a few of my cliffs. I think the first one (the most recent one I did) shows the most promise so far.

The one above has some promise, but it's a bit too busy looking. If I'm going to add that much hatching, I need to figure out exactly what to do with the lip especially, as I'm not thrilled with how it looks at all.

Here's some layered cliffs, with a bench of sorts separating them. It looks pretty good.

Here's some of my experiements, most of which I'm maybe not quite as happy with as the ones above. You could call them some "failed drafts." Although the one on the right isn't bad.

The lines with hatching above are one of the ones that I'd tried that I absolutely didn't like. I also have a much tighter gorge or slot canyon. There's also a nice version of the mountain style that I'll likely use right in the middle, for comparison.

UPDATE: I did find another example on the cartographer's guild. While curiously the entir emap is drawn in a black and white ink style that I could use, the cliffs seem to be one of the very few exceptions, that seem to have a grayscale brush pen type look (although I have no doubt that it's done digitally.) I'm not sure that I can make anything out of this or not, but I'll do a few trials on some scratch paper and see what we get.

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.

Mapmaker, mapmaker make me a map!

With apologies to Fiddler on the Roof. When I was a kid, we did something with that song in my grade school music class, and I guess it's been stuck in my psyche ever since. Even though the only time I've ever seen Fiddler on the Roof was when my sister-in-law had a part in it in her high school play rendition.

As I'm working on making a map for my latest revision of the DH5 setting, which does require a new map (honestly, I never really made a very good one for the pre-revision version of the setting anyway) I've been concerned with two things in about equal measure, even though they probably aren't equal in actual importance. The first is, how to actually structure my new map? Although I've previously drawn maps for both Timischburg and the Hill Country, and my "Daemon Wastes" or whatever exactly I end up calling it (yet another issue I need to resolve) is loosely based on my older Baal Hamazi material, none of them will be very easily adapted into the new map. It'll just be elements picked up and lifted into a whole new arrangement. For that matter, trying to squeeze all three of them into one map is a bit daunting. I'm not 100% sure that it'll work, although I've got the possible idea of doing two different maps; one a traditional, hand-drawn, black and white one, that like Christopher Tolkien's famous Middle-earth map is fairly high level, and doesn't attempt to show "everything"; meaning that if I have features that I already know of that I don't put on the map, it's not going to ruin it for me, because it's not meant to show all of the villages, paths, and county divisions, etc. that I've already come up with for various reasons.  The second map would be a hand-drawn and digitized hybrid; I'd hand draw most of the features, possibly on a larger sheet of paper (an 11 x 14 sketch pad, I'm thinking—although not in my house, I do have relatively easy access to an 11 x 17 scanner to digitize it.). This would be drawn features only; no labels, and I'd then maybe color it and certainly label it with software; GIMP, or paint.net or pixlr or some such. Because of it's larger size and resolution, I could add considerably more details to this map, if I wasn't able to fit them on the previously drawn one. But still, the first task is just figuring out exactly how to rearrange it anyway. For example, I had originally made Timischburg a stretch of land with a coast along the southern edge. Although I never redrew it, by attaching it to the same setting as the Hill Country, it was going to be flipped so that that southern coastline was on the east and everything was 90º from where it was. I'm now thinking it's much more likely that the coastline will be at about a 45º degree diagonal on the southwest edge of the map. Rather than simply continuing to rotate the country around, I'll probably redesign it to be congruent with this orientation from the get-go. And rather that simply have the two regions tacked on next to each other (now three regions) I'm thinking of more tightly splicing them together with features that kind of cross over the boundaries a bit rather than simply being cut and paste straight edges between each segment. The whole arrangement has yet to be decided. It shouldn't be hard to do, but for some reason, I find myself slightly psychologically daunted by doing it, so I haven't gotten around to it yet. Plus, I'm trying to decide if I want to document my process and maybe create a youtube video of me whipping up a draft on scratch paper, or if I just want to do it and not document it. If I do document it, I have to figure out a few more things yet; I don't really have a set-up that's convenient for recording myself drawing. I'd have to come up with some kind of tripod or armature for my camera, and probably go buy a new desk lamp. At the very least.

The second thing I'm working out is exactly what styles I'm going to use for the various elements of my map. While there are a fair number of youtube series on how to draw fantasy maps that showcase different styles, I don't necessarily think that they are always the best examples of the various styles, nor do they show every style that I've ever seen. Long before Youtube was a thing, I was working on my own style of fantasy map drawing, mostly by looking at lots of fantasy maps, deciding what I thought looked good, trying to imitate it, and then evaluating how well that worked, and going from there. This isn't to say that my map-making techniques have been static since I was in 8th or 9th grade and Miami Vice was still at its peak of first run showings on TV... although I can certainly say that I haven't changed a lot since then. I found my old poster board Dark•Heritage Mk. IV map earlier today, which I hadn't looked at in quite some time and it's probably been the better part of ten years since I made it. That's probably the most recent fairly serious map I've drawn, though, where I really made an effort to make it a reasonably good looking rather than super sketchy map, at a fairly large scale, and there's a few things that I'd tried on that that I don't normally do that I like, and a few that I don't as much. A few minor details and tweaks to the style will probably be called for, but I'm still working out via some tests, trials and experiments, exactly what those will be. Although I did pencil that one in and then ink over the pencils, going back with an eraser, in general I don't like doing that; I like sketching a draft on one sheet, and then simply redrawing it in ink on a blank sheet of paper. The draft doesn't have to necessarily be in pencil either; in fact, if I do decide to record my draft making, I'll probably use pen just so I have better contrast and it shows up better. What did I do on the last big DH4 map that I want to evaluate here? Let me get my phone and take a few quick and dirty snapshots. (i.e., not meant to be high quality scans. I put the poster board on the bed and literally just took some snapshots with my phone. Obviously, the lighting isn't great, and the focus is sometimes in and out.)

While the mountains themselves look fine on this map, their placement relative to each other does not. They seem too separated from each other into odd mountain "zones" rather than mountain ranges. I wouldn't draw them like this today. (Although I have seen professional maps that look not terribly unlike this with their mountains. Just sayin'.)

In general, though, the difference is one of taking time more than anything else. I've always seen my mountain style as highly reminiscent of Christopher Tolkien's style, and it is, at least at an individual mountain level. But his placement of them was tighter, and therefore featured more individual mountains (although they were also narrower than the region shown here, which makes that easier to do.) I probably deviated from that subconsciously just because it's quicker and easier to do fewer mountains a bit more widely spaced. I think that there's two problems with that, though. The first is that I tend to fill up too much space with mountains this way (probably also an artifact of how much space I had to work with since I was drawing on a poster board) and the second is that I obviously just don't quite like it as much. Tighter mountain placement looks better. And if I'm smarter about placing my ranges so that they don't have to be quite so big, it's not necessarily too much more time consuming to draw them either. My loose placement was probably just a bad habit that I got into subconsciously, on one level, but it was probably also a reaction to a problem that I'd created for myself; by needing to have such big mountainous areas, I needed to put a lot of work into filling in the details on those areas. and this was how it turned out. 

Then again, maybe that's just one example of where I'm somewhat refining and improving my technique from the past based on more examples that I've seen and better evaluation of the examples that I already had, too.

This snapshot shows lots of different things, but I mostly took it to focus on the coast, since it shows a portion of a kinda sorta Italian peninsula (complete with a fantasy Corsica and Sardinia) in a fantasy Mediterranean, and therefore shows lots of coast. In the past, I'd double or even triple lined coasts. I'm actually not sure why I didn't do that here, but probably it was related to me not wanting to take the time. In retrospect, that was a major mistake, as the coastlines don't really pop and at a quick glance, they're not very obvious. The coastlines are just lines and don't look like much of anything. Some kind of texturing, stippling, hatching, or something is obviously important just to make it much more clear what exactly it is that we're looking at. Again, this was the only time I've ever drawn a map this size; usually I've drawn it on normal sized sheets of paper. I think the sheer size and amount of coastline to double or triple line intimidated me and I just didn't do it. I guess; I don't even remember now. Because I knew what I was drawing, I guess it didn't really occur to me that it was more difficult to read until I pulled it down and looked at it after a few years of not looking at it. The exception, of course, being where I had cliffs on the side of the sea, because drawing in the cliffs gave me something, certainly, to look at that made the demarcation quite evident.

See those marks where it says Untash Badlands there to the left, and where it says Farmlands there in the center? I'd never done this before, and it was meant to indicate rolling hills, downs, badlands, or just some kind of uplands in general that maybe weren't quite so defined that I'd want to draw in a ton of little hill shapes. I not only had never drawn that like that before this map, I don't recall seeing them done that way anywhere else either. I don't remember what made me think of it, but I had forgotten the technqiue, so I'm glad I looked at this again. Although if I wanted more specifically "hilly" country I'd probably use a more tried and true hills technique that's kind of like the mountains, but lower and rounder, I do really quite like this techique too for some things. For one thing, it can be a filler, that suggests that an area isn't just flat, boring and empty, without necessarily suggesting anything too terribly specific that's there. Just some rolling terrain of some kind to show that it's not just completely blank.

This image is meant to show the swamp area there in the middle, but maybe it's also a good time to talk about rivers, since I have some prominently featuered here. I actually quite like how my swamps turned out back then, although compared to coasts, mountains and forests, that wasn't ever something that I spent as much effort on getting a style that was my own. Today, I'd probably add a few other minor details to make it even more swampy, like some small horizontal lines or hatching that looks watery, and maybe the suggestion of some longer, bent grasses with cattail like tops on them here and there in the grass too. But those are some somewhat subtle improvements. I actually think my swamps still look like swamps to me.

I usually follow the Christopher Tolkien style of drawing rivers as black lines and roads as dotted lines. For whatever reason, I draw rivers as "white" features here, and I don't like the effect as much anymore. I wouldn't go back and do that again. I also didn't even put any roads on this map. Another thing that I don't know why I would have done, but my upcoming map certainly has some. Keep in mind, that I say roads as dotted lines; a lot of people say dotted lines and then draw them as dashed lines. 

My forest technique is shown here, although again, I've come up with a few more details to improve it slightly since I drew this map. But this is still pretty close to how I do them. I had gotten away from doing the suggestion of trunks at the bottom of the forest at this phase in my map-making career, but I'd actually go back and add that, as well as some horizontal hatching on the sides to suggest shadow or just grounding it in the map so it doesn't appear to be floating over the terrain. I've been a fan of the "cloud" style of forest for a long time, but it has to be done well. When I was young, my cloud forests looked more like clouds and less like forests, but I don't think that that is the case with this at all; it certainly looks more like bushy vegetation. With the improvements that I've come up with since, it looks even more like it. Most of the youtube videos I've seen of people showing off the style don't do it very well, honestly. It's no wonder that many of them don't like it, but they tend to blame the technique itself as being one that they don't like, rather than their implementation of it.

And I'd never really drawn canyonlands before. I don't love the way it looks here, and I probably wouldn't draw them quite this way again. Which is good; I actually have some that will feature prominently in my new map. It's nice that I have better techniques now.

And finally, these snapshots probably show the limitations of my calligraphy. Some of my lettering looks pretty nice, but others, especially the smaller stuff (names of cities and whatnot) doesn't really. My "sketchier" map will feature my own handwriting, but my hybrid hand-drawn and digitized one will feature digitually inserted labels using a nice font on my PC.