Going too big……

Posted on April 30, 2015 by clercon

Mapping cities is probably one of the most demanding things you can do, but also one of the most rewarding ones. I must admit that I really love mapping cities and by using a tool like City designer 3 from Profantasy it is something that actually anyone can accomplish. But even though the program is fantastic it has its limitations, and so does the human mind.

In my fantasy world “the Etrakien world”, there is a city named Ankh-Bathor that, like Rome in the Roman Empire, is the actual center of the world. Ankh-Bathor was the first part of the world that I worked on. I had this idea of a large city that was situated in between two oceans on a small strip of land. The city would be both a lock and passage between the two sides of the world, a strategic location that would make it rich, splendid and the natural focus point in the world. From there the world just started to grow in all directions, until what it is today.

After having made a map or two of the world I felt that I also had to make a map of the city. But as it turned out this wasn’t really an easy thing to do. I think I have at least ten different versions of the city and none of them is complete. There are so many things I’d like to add but the size of the city makes the task quite challenging. Also some limitations in City Designer 3 did put an end to one of my most ambitious attempts, and probably saved my mental health.

At the top of this post you can see part of the map of Ankh-Bathor that I made in the black and white style that was released in one of the annuals from Profantasy. But as you can see in the zoomed out map below the sheer size of it is quite enormous.

What actually happened is that the size of the .fcw file got too big for the program to handle. In the end the file ended up being just over 11 MB big when the program crashed. As soon as I got beyond that size I couldn’t open the map anymore, so I had to divide the map into many smaller map parts that I later had to stitch together in Photoshop. This made the whole process more complicated so after a while I gave up. I also felt that the end result wasn’t what I really wanted, so when the whole process of making the map got more complicated it was actually a quite easy decision to make to drop the map. Sometimes you have to kill your darlings.

Still there are parts in the map that I really like, and I hope to be able to finish a map of Ankh-Bathor one day. Or let me rephrase that, I will finish a map of Ankh-Bathor one day.

Etrakien revisited

Posted on April 20, 2015 by clercon

I think we all carry a world inside of us, a world that sometimes just wants to get out and have its story told. For me that world is the Etrakien world. I think I must have been working on and off on it for about 15 years now. I have bits and pieces of it spread around in notebooks, papers and maps. Mostly maps I must admit.

It is so easy to drown in your own creation, one thing leads to another and suddenly you are trying to describe a world so vast that it is impossible to get it all down on paper. Things start to contradict each other and quite soon you are losing control of it all. For me it has been a challenge to try to narrow down my world to a size that is manageable. This whole process has of course forced me to rebuild the world more than once, I’m probably on version three or four now, since I started out.

At the top of this post you see the latest version of the map of the Etrakien world. So what is different in this version compared to the other versions of the map? And why have I decided to do the changes that I have made?

Well first of all I’ve decided to concentrate the development of the world to a smaller area. Before I tried to focus on the whole world but the task soon got a bit overwhelming. And since most of the ideas I have are concentrated around the city Ankh-Bathor and its neighboring states I figured it would be a good idea to make a new map with this area in focus, a map which I can use while continuing the work on my world. Or at least a map I can use until I decide to make a new map again.

So what is the Etrakien world? As I wrote before I’ve been working on the world for almost 15 years. That might sound like a lot, but it hasn’t really been a straight road of work, Sometimes I haven’t worked on it for months, or maybe a year. But for some reason I always come back to it, I kind of like having a world of my own to discover and develop.

The world itself is a Fantasy world where humans are the dominating race, there are other humanoid species as well but they are mainly concentrated to smaller areas in the outskirts. In the world you have the civilized area where you have kingdoms, empires and great cities. Outside the civilized area you have the wilderness, vast forests, great deserts and enormous mountains. Here you can find ruins of past civilizations, mythical creatures and barbarian tribes.

The kingdoms and empires of today are all built upon a world of ruins from an earlier civilization that was destroyed during the war with the gods. This happened a long time ago and today the memories of this time is long gone, only the ruins remains, and the scars in the fabric of the world. Scars that in some areas tend to break, opening a gateway to the other side, the borderlands.

After the war of the gods the world was on the brink of total destruction, but humanity survived and slowly started to rise again, creating a new world in which the darkness of the past only lived on as children’s stories. This new world would be dominated by the Etrakien Empire for hundreds of years. But when the Empire was on its height of power the black plague started to spread, in which nearly half of the world’s population died. This caused the Empire to collapse and from its former domains many smaller kingdoms arose. The Empire itself does still exist but is only a shadow of its former strength, affected by civil war and corruption.

So that is the Etrakien world, a world of adventure, corruption and war. And hopefully one day I can have it finished, but I doubt that will ever happen. It tends to have a life of its own.

Some maps are never done

Posted on September 9, 2014 by clercon

If you have followed my blog for a while you probably know that I’m on and off is working on my own fantasy setting, the Etrakien world. The world is mainly concentrating on the area around Ankh-Bathor, the world’s largest city and market place, dividing the world between east and west.

Earlier I’ve made two versions of the map for this world, but some maps just don’t seem to have a last version, so I’m now restarting the map for a third time. Why you might wonder, well the reason is actually quite simple.

Since the world is developing all the time with twists and turns the map in the end didn’t really work out with the plot. The biggest reason for this is that it felt like everything was too far away from each other, I wanted the world to be more concentrated to one are. This would open up some new possibilities in my world building, and making a new map is never something bad, that is always good.

As you can see in the sketch of the world above I’ve kept quite a lot from the older maps, actually most of the coast lines are from the earlier ones, they have only been moved around quite a lot. I also decided to have less countries then before, mainly because this will make it easier to keep track of the politics of the world. Instead I’m adding some free city states that are under their own rule, but will be in coalition with one or more countries.

I’m in no hurry to finish this map, and it is something I’m working on between commissions and some other stuff, so there might be some time between updates. But it will be a fun project to work on.

The Etrakien Calendar

Posted on April 3, 2013 by clercon

If you look back in history we have always had systems for how we count time. Days turn to weeks, weeks to months and month to years. When it comes to my Etrakien world I started to think about how they divide the year. An easy way, that many use, is to just convert our calendar to your fantasy setting. Twelve months made up of approximately four weeks.

But I felt I wanted something else, I wanted a system that kind of felt unique for the world, a system that also had some logical connection with the metaphysical universe of the Etrakien world. After some thinking I decided on the following.

The Etrakien universe consists of seven worlds, once created by seven gods called Archonts. These worlds where just bleak copies of the original world, created by the original God. So the numbers seven and eight are very magical for the Etrakien world. Because of this I decided that an Etrakien year consists of seven months that all have seven weeks. Every week has seven days which makes the total number of days per year to 343.

But every seventh year there is an extra week of seven days called the eighth year. Those eight years will together build up what is called a cycle. So when you ask a person in Etrakien what exact day it is he will answer something like this, – It is the fourth day of the third week in the fifth year of the 28^th cycle.

When I was thinking of the calendar I also thought about the moon. The moon has always been important and we generally have had a good knowledge of the moons cycle. How many days it is between the full moons and so on. In the Etrakien world there are actually two moons. One moon has a cycle of 28 days between its full moons, the second one can only be seen during the eighth year, and is regarded as a very strong foreteller of how the next cycle of eight years will turn out.

The very few times that the two moons will be full together during the eighth year are regarded as times of great change to come. How often that happens however I still have to count on 🙂

Writing a world Bible

Posted on February 4, 2013 by clercon

When you make maps for a made up world you reach a point where you actually have to start to think about the world beyond the maps. What kind of world is it that you’re creating?

I’ve worked on my Etrakien world for about ten years, it’s been through a lot of different phases, things have been added and things have been thrown out. In the beginning it was more of a classic fantasy world with forests full of Trolls and Dwarves hiding under the mountains. But through the years the world has slowly changed in to what it is today. The problem however is that I’m not really sure of what exactly the world is like today.

A lot of my ideas and thoughts has been written done in different forms over the years. Some things I have on paper, some in different threads on forums where I’ve put up my maps for display, a couple of documents are on Google drive, still some on my hard drive. Some I’ve actually lost due to a hard drive crash some years ago.

So I felt that all this information had to be collected into one document, a world document for the Etrakien world where all the up to date information could be found. But how do you do this in the best way? What do you have to think of to make your world as believable as possible? Because I want my world to feel real, that if you read about it or play a game in it, it should feel plausible, like it could exist.

For a long time I’ve looked all over the Internet for information about world building, how do others do this? So far the best thing I’ve found has actually been the Kobold Guide to Worldbuilding, a brilliant little document where different authors from the RPG gaming industry gives their view on how you create your own world.

This little gem gave me some great ideas on what to think of while writing about my Etrakien world. It covers some good essays on world design, creating religion, magic, technology etc. Everything you need to be set up for a great start. Of course I also have some ideas of my own, but this guide has really helped me to put my ideas together.

So I decided to start with a blank document titled “The Etrakien world”, or to be more precise “Den Etrakiska världen”, because I’m writing it in Swedish, and in that document collect all the information I have that I want to keep together with new things I come up with.

First of all I tried to think of what is different with the Etrakien world compared with our world. A lot of things are alike, after all the world is based on my knowledge of the classic Rome and Greece, mixed up with some influences from the Hansa and medieval Europe. It includes mainly humans, like us and they like to wage war, make love, be rich and just survive for another day. So what is different and how would that affect the world?

First of all there are two other known humanoid races, one that mostly is seen as a slave by the others and the other is more equal to the humans, or in their own eyes superior. How will a world that has enslaved nearly everyone of a humanoid race develop ideologically? Will it become like Germany during Second World War that divided people in “Untermenschen” and “Übermenschen”? Does everyone in the world think that is ok?

There is also magic in the Etrakien world, or mostly there is magic that is wielded by the priests and clerics of the different religions. How will a world where the priests actually can perform miracles through powers they have been given by their gods look? In medieval times the church had the European population in a tight grip without being able to perform any real miracles. What will happen if some priests really can bring people back from the dead or heal wounds etc. What kind of power will they have in the world? And what happens if someone that’s not a priest learns magic? Will they be persecuted like the witches in our own history, that didn’t even know how to do real magic?

As you can see the questions are many, but I feel I have to get them down on paper. As I’ve said before, if you have a story to your map it will be much easier to get a great result that looks believing, because then your map will tell a story and not just be a flat picture of land, sea and mountains. And by writing my World Bible, as Scott Hungerford calls it in his essay in the Kobold Guide to Worldbuilding, I hope that I can achieve that. Maps that tells a story.

The city Vadsbro

Posted on January 11, 2013 by clercon

In a post just before Christmas I told you about a campaign/adventure I’m working on for my Etrakien world. Well now when the overland map is done it is time to start concentrating on some city/town maps as the next step.

This is a map of the main city in the area, Vadsbro, a for the area rather large town with around 2.000 citizens. Trade is the main income and a lot of goods are distributed down the river to the rest of the Armadien kingdom. Mainly the trade is in Copper, wood and different goods they get from the Traals in the area. At the moment the whole area is experiencing a peaceful and quiet time, but things are soon going to change.

The map is actually an old map I made of the town while practicing CD3. By then it was called Littlebridge, but when I decided to write a campaign in Swedish I had to come up with a Swedish name for the city. At the same time I also added a border to the map and worked a bit with the light and effects in Photoshop. I decided to go with the same border as in the overland map of the province Vadsbro to make the maps feel connected. I probably continue to use the border for the upcoming maps as well.

Now I just have to remember to do some writing as well.

Vadsbro

Posted on December 17, 2012 by clercon

In the last post I published a mind map for an adventure, now it is time to start making maps. First of all I need a campaign map of the area where the actual adventure will take place, with that one in place it will be easier to plan the other maps I need to draw.
To make the map I decided to use the style I made for the December issue of the Annuals from Profantasy. The style was made for creating campaign maps for smaller areas, so it will fit very well for this map.

The adventure will take place in the country Armadien, close to a city called Vadsbro (Littlebridge in my Armadien map). Vadsbro is situated close to the Armadien border, next to the Traal infected Skymningsskogen (dusk forest) and the Traal mountains, so there will be a lot of forest in the map.

As soon as I started on the map I realized that I had to improvise a bit with the style. The main feature in the map, except for all the forest, is the river that split up in two rivers closer to the mountains. The rivers in the style aren’t really suited for depicting a main river in this scale, so I decide to use the ocean texture for the rivers. In this way the river will look more like the dominating natural feature in the area.

The river tool however comes in handy to show smaller rivers connecting into the main branches, but I had to change the colour of the rivers to blend in more with the main rivers. When I created the style, which is based on my Truscian map, I wanted the rivers in a darker colour and the ocean in a lighter one. That works very well if you do a more zoomed out map. But if you zoom in closer to an area for a map, and you suddenly want to use the ocean textures as rivers, the colour for the river tools don’t really blend in. So I decided to change them.

It is actually quite funny how a style you’ve created yourself, suddenly needs to be trimmed when you start working with it. But I think you can say that for all styles. At least I always trim the styles so they’ll fit into my way of working.

Now that the map is done it will be easier to decide what more maps I need to do. You can say that I’m making my adventure from the maps, the story I have so far will probably change a bit with every map I make. But that is the fun part of mapping, to weave a story around your maps instead of making maps from your story.

Kizik – the Krugian lock

Posted on November 6, 2012 by clercon

This is the town of Kizik, also referred to as ”The Krugian lock”. The town is placed in one of the more densely populated areas in the Etrakien world where the three countries Krug, Truscia and Illyrien meet. In this three border area the trade is blooming as well as the tension between the countries rulers. Krug is closely allied with Ankh-Bathor, the city of trade, and Truscia has very close ties to the Etrakien Empire. It might be worth to mention that The Etrakien Empire claims that Ankh-Bathor rightfully belongs to them, a statement that the powerful city state obviously doesn’t agree on.

The third country Illyrien mainly has to deal with the problems and opportunities that the northern border to the eternal forest gives them. As a fourth power in the area you also have the City of the lost that is situated in the middle of a vast river delta where the river illum meets the Etrakien sea.

The area has seen both one and two military campaigns that mainly has brought death and destruction to the farmers and workers in the area while the kings and their lords has fought for control of the land. But lately the income from the trade has become more and more important to the ruling class so the last couple of years the area has been relatively calm, even though the tension is growing and smaller skirmishes has taken place. The growing strength of the Etrakien Empire and its ambitious future plans might however put a stop to this peaceful time.

The name “The Krugian lock” the city got from the fact that it controls the entrance to the river Kaznik, that is the major river in Krug. Because of this the tactical importance of the city is very big. If you look back in our own history you will see that rivers where the highways of the past, roads where in many ways hard and dangerous to travel. A boat on the river could travel in a far greater speed then a traveler by foot or wagon.

Of course there are exceptions if you look at the roman roads that where a marvel of engineering art. Roads that let you travel fast and far, but they are an exception, most of the time if you look historically roads were not more than a trampled path between the villages.

Another difference from today is actually that it generally was easier to travel in the winter. When the rivers froze you had great even roads where you easily could travel. This of course applies only to places where you have a river. Travelling on roads in the winter time was not a good idea.

The map is made in City Designer 3 and Photoshop CS5.

Mountains galore

Posted on August 31, 2012 by clercon

This is another old map made in Photoshop depicting an area of the Etrakien world that ceased to exist in the latest version of the map. In my earlier world map there was a chain of mountains that effectively created a barrier between the civilized world and the wild north. The only way for a traveler to easily pass the mountains was to use the valley in the northern part of Krugland.

When I remade the Etrakien map the mountain chain disappeared because the story of the world needed an easier path for the barbarians to get to the civilized world. They kind of gave a helping hand to the demise of the two great empires that had struggled for a century.

The reason for me to do the map was that I after having finished the Ankh-Bathor map wanted to do a map with mountains. You can say that the map was a way for me to try a new style for my mountains. And secondly the area was an interesting place to map, valleys are always exciting.

As usual when you look back at old maps there are things that you are pleased with and things you would have done differently today. This map suffers a bit from the same problem as the one in the last post, too many details, or more specifically too much of the wrong thing. For example the hills in the valley are killing all the other details, they are too small in comparison with their surroundings.

Getting objects in your map correspond with each other in a way that gives the map the right feeling isn’t always so easy. The only way to get better at it is to practice, and that means making more maps. Sometimes it also means remaking things that you might have struggled with for a long time, but in the end doesn’t look right. Don’t be afraid to challenge yourself, the worst thing that can happen is that you worked on something that you have to throw in the bin. But at least you’ve learned something from it.

Making a City part 5

Posted on May 10, 2012 by clercon

Now it is time to leave CC3 behind and start to do some Colour correction in Photoshop. CC3 has a lot of advantages when it comes to making city maps. It is easy to use and you can quickly come up with a very good looking city map. One of the drawbacks however, in my opinion, is that the colour palette used in the included styles are a bit too bright. That is something I usually change by opening up the finished map in Photoshop and applying some filters and effects.

This guide is not meant to be cut in stone, it’s more a way to show you how it can be done. You can pick bits and pieces from here and add to your maps. You might feel that some steps are unnecessary or that some are missing. See it more as an inspirational guide.

As you can see in the picture above I’ve added eleven layers to the map to get the look and feeling I’m after. First of all I add the layers I’ve marked as 1 and 2. They are for a start purely copies of the background image.

1. On the first layer I apply the Pixel bender filter’s oil paint effect. Pixel bender is a free addon from Adobe that let you apply different effects by using the GPU on your graphics card. This makes it possible to do some really great stuff. With the oil filter the best way of working is just testing your way through the different settings. Don’t worry if the effect comes out a bit strong. You can reduce it later by lowering the opacity of the layer.

2. The oil paint filter has a tendency to blur the image a bit, and we want our map to be clear and sharp. To achieve this I apply the Other/High Pass filter in Photoshop to the second layer. This will make the layer grey and the details light up a bit. You’re looking for a bit of a neon feeling in the picture here. When you have applied the filter change the layer setting from Normal to Overlay. This will sharpen the details in the image that got blurred in the earlier step. Again if you feel that the effect is a bit too strong just lower the opacity of the layer.

3. Now we have a nice and sharp map with a oil paint feeling but we do need some texture to make it look more genuine. For this I’m adding a texture that I’ve downloaded from the Cartographers Guild’s forum. Set the layer of the texture to Multiply. This will darken the image a lot, but don’t worry we fix this in the next step.

4-5. Time to fix the lighting in the map. At the moment the map is way too dark. To change this I add two adjustment layers/Curves. The first one (the fifth layer in the picture just to complicate things) I use to lighten up the whole map. The second one (the fourth layer) is used to darken the waters. Here I’m using the layer mask to apply the effect only to the water areas.

6. Now it is time to reduce the colours of the map to avoid the cartoonish feeling it has at the moment. For this I’m adding a new Adjustment layer/Gradient map that will turn the image into a black and white. I change the opacity setting to 50%. This will let the colours bleed through the layer but the colours will be reduced. You have to try how much you want to reduce the opacity. It depends a bit on what end result you’re after.

7. Next layer is also an Adjustment layer, levels. As you can see I’m very fond of adjustment layers. The big reason for this is that you can easily go back and change the settings or even remove the layer completely if you’re not satisfied with the result.

As you can see in the picture above what I do is that I move the white and black arrow into the middle on the graph. This will clear up the picture a bit. Be a bit careful with the settings here or you will over expose the picture which means that you will lose details.

8. Next step is to add some shadows to the forest and land. Add a new layer and fill it with 50% grey. Change the layer settings to Overlay. This will make the grey colour to disappear. Now you select the Burn tool and change the exposure to 15% and start to draw. As you will see youre now creating shadows in the map. I’m using this to make the forest a bit more interesting and alive and to add hills.

9-10. Now we’re nearly done, but the map is at the moment a bit blue (or at least mine is) and I want to change this. To fix this I’m adding yet another adjustment layer, Colour balance. In here you can increase or decrease the colours of the picture, or more correctly if you increase Red you’re decreasing Cyan and so on. When I’m done with the layer I’m still not fully satisfied so I’m adding the adjustment layer/Hue and saturation to the map to decrease the colour a bit more.

11. This layer just includes the black frame around the map.

Well that’s about it. The map is done, except labeling, and we now have a map that in my opinion has a much more appealing atmosphear than the one that comes straight from CD3. Below you can see the differense in the map before and after I’ve edited it in Photoshop.

Mapping worlds

Maps of imaginary worlds

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