[Competition] Vote for your favourite map!

[kensanata]

How To (Kensanata Map)

Would really like some insight into the map-creation...

I draw maps on white paper using a pencil (usually 3B). Then I scan them in, and use the Level tool in The Gimp to make sure the white parts are really white and the pencil part is dark enough. I'm aiming to keep the hand-drawn aspect of it, without keeping the light grey pencil stuff. Usually that's enough for me. I prefer black and white maps, as you can see in my map set on Flickr. In my own games, that's what I would use: Black and white maps. Perhaps I'd add labels in red, Tolkien style.

But the competition called for a color map... So printed my black-and-white map, put a white sheet of paper on top of the print-out and added color shades, scanned it, and added it as another layer and changed white to alpha on the ink layer, ie. two layers: ink only, and colors + white.

I wanted to use very pale colors to match what I had seen in some archives. But it looked very cold & dark. So I played around with the color levels again to get a very green forest. This also turned the ocean magenta, so I did the same trick I had done before, this time using a pencil sharpener to produce little shavings of pencil material on the paper, which I then wiped around using my index finger. Scanned it in, and used it as a separate layer. Now, it was not really possible to make white transparent in this layer, so I returned to my original black-and-white map, connected the edges of the land mass to the edges of the canvas, selected the ocean using the fuzzy selector, inverted the selection and cut it out: This gave me a mask that would blank out the land mass. With it, I managed to get the desired result (and fix the slight mismatches of the color and the ink layer at the edge of the land mass).

I decided to add lots of details to provide for more adventure hooks: More swamps, more deltas, rivers running along borders, dots for unnamed cities that seemed to be well placed strategically, some lakes in the north as the player guide mentioned them, and so on. I added mountain ranges where it made sense to separate rivers flowing in different directions, etc. In general, I placed a few mountains, drew the rivers, added more mountains as needed, then started filling in swamps and forests, to get a plausible geography.

I added unnamed cities but refrained from adding labels (and producing a "GM" version of the map), because I assumed that on the one hand the world was "known" and thus the city names no secret, and on the other hand many of these cities would never show up in official material, thus I needed to have places where GMs could place their own towns.

(Note that the aspect ratio in my maps is a bit different than on the overview page.)

(See these maps at Flickr.)

 

[kensanata]

I must confess I voted for my own map but among all the others I would have picked helium3's map due to the original style.

 

[HALL]

Would really like some insight into the map-creation... they're great (I'm down to three maps...)

I have been doing maps since I started Gaming oh... 18 years or so ago. Back when AD&D was the thing. I found though they did the job the maps at the time were a bit lacking. (no offence to those original mappers out there, the technology at the time was ...well... lets just say that I think my dad still has the Commodore 64 I used to draw out my first dungeon!) I use to hand draw my maps and use color pencil and inking to try and give them that old world look... I have even soaked paper in tea to stain it then torched an edge or two before drawing to really give it a worn look (a bit messy but effective) My drive was to not only give the players a map to look at but to draw them into the landscape itself. We seem to get wrapped up in our character and what they can do and in the campaign itself, nothing wrong with that but when was the last time a gamer actually thought about his or her surroundings and tried to use the land and landscape around you in a battle? Those of you out there that have done that knows it adds depth to a campaign. It makes a regular campaign more interesting. I have had the GREAT pleasure of gaming with (as a PC and a DM) Ashy, for 10-12 years or so. He has that same passion to draw the players in and to make them aware of not just what they as a PC can do but also what the others in your group can do and how to use the "world" around you as you do it. The map work I do is the effort to make the PC "feel" the world around them adding depth to the campaign and to their characters. That is the "Why I do it that way" side of the inspiration, the "How it is done" side starts by sketching a map out by hand (or, as it this case, using a prexisting map)
Once it is inked in I scan the image and drop it in Photoshop ( I have CS it really makes things easier) once there I layout varying layers of water to show depth. Then block off the land in a sandy tone. every thing is layered in order (ie you wouldn't have a lake over the mountains.) If you have Photoshop CS play with the settings. if you haven't double click the layer you are on in the layers box just to the right of the layer title and you'll get a "Layer Style" window. It has glow effects, shadow, beveling, textures tons of stuff. It takes me around 12-24 hours, roughly, of work to get a map done. Unless it is one like the Skyspire Abbey with furniture and all sorts of crazy stuff (www.wowweezowwee.com) then it takes a bit longer. If you have any questions let me know I'd love to help out.

 

[HALL]

I want to have the maps by HALL to hang or project on a wall.

It is quit funny that you would say that. I'm a Muralist by trade and paint on walls all the time.

 

[JVisgaitis]

When I first saw the maps I had my money on tovokas. Hopefully I can eek out a third place...

Anyway, as to how I did the map, pretty much I do all of the initial sketching digitally directly in Corel Painter IX using the scratchboard tool. I like to work directly over the original map on a different layer. In this case, I drew everything over the black and white map.

Everything on the map is drawn by hand. Every mountain, every tree, every town, etc. I'm really not a big fan of using layer styles in Photoshop for Campaign Maps. Don't get me wrong I do it myself with dungeon maps and such, but for a world map I like to have something that looks like it was created in that time period instead of something that's overly stylized and Photoshop looking.

Once I have all of the lineart in place, I take the file into Photoshop (I'm using CS3) and there I make the land all black and the water all white (I find Photoshop is much more accurate for this). With my two new layers of land and sea I'm back into Painter and tweaking all of the actual colors of the map using Preseve Transparency so I'm only painting on either the land or sea areas.

For this its a lot of experimentation to get a look I like and this is the longest part of the process. The brushes I use are the Digital Water Color Broad Water Brush, the Just Add Water Blender Brush, a bunch of custom brushes used by Don Seegmiller, and a custom brush our lead artist created aptly called The Avadnu Brush.

Once I have all of the colors to my liking, I go back into Photoshop and type in the location names, tweak the color levels of the painting using the Levels Command, and put a stroke around the landmass in black using Layer Styles. At this point, I'm really close to done.

I go back into Painter and clean up the map gradiations of color and such so it looks smooth, add in the rivers and the boundary lines between the countries, and clean up the names of the locations by erasing out the land features beneath them. With this map, the last thing I did was the War of the Burning Sky logo. Again, I wanted a look that could have been developed in the time period.

If anyone has any questions on how I do this, I'll be happy to answer. Good luck to everyone.

All in all a fun process except for the middle exploration part which sometimes gets kinda frustrating when you can't find the proper look.

 

[blargney the second]

I was having a really hard time until I got to PBartender. I'm a sucker for RPG maps with that particular look.

However, my vote comes with a caveat: use the map that best fits the production style of the book. I love PBardtender's map, but it would look horrid in a book with a pseudo-technological style. Congruent styles and colour palettes ought to matter the most in any decision like this for a print product.

 

[tovokas]

Great job everyone!

I'm also really impressed by the quality of the maps that were created on a fairly quick time-table.

As far as my map creating style is concerned... it's been a slowly evolving process (and a long boring tale, but hey, someone asked Building maps has always been my favorite part of being a GM. In the days before home computers (if you don't count TRS-80's) I drew everything by hand in pen. I loved coasts, so that was the dominant feature in most maps.

Eventually the names of things began to take precedence. Rather than trying to squeeze the names around the terrain features, I fit the features around the names. This required sketching the map in pencil, adding the names, finalizing the terrain features, then drawing over everything in pen and erasing the pencil lines. If I was feeling frisky I would then color the map with pencils. As the years went by I developed various styles for cities, forts, swamps, etc that I could reproduce by hand quickly.

As I got older, met my beautiful wife, had kids – time became a much scarcer commodity, so I was thrilled when computers (and printers) reached a point where I could switch over. After experimenting with various programs, I eventually I got the Corel Draw 4 suite which became my workhorse.

All the original terrain/feature icons were created in Corel Draw, and eventually colored in PhotoPaint. I’d create the coasts and names in Draw, then bring everything in to PhotoPaint. I loved these maps, but the coasts and names took forever to create, which kind of defeated the purpose.

After messing with various techniques, I finally discovered layer styles in Photoshop, which really simplified the process of creating coasts. Like HALL, I have a land layer over a water layer. The land layer has various styles applied to it, and I erase it to reveal the water below. The names are created in Photoshop using it’s built in text effects. (A real time saver)

Having scores of individual icons as layers in PhotoShop doesn’t work so hot, so I eventually converted the terrain features and icons into bitmap shapes for Fractal Mapper. I create the basic map in PhotoShop, and then bring a copy in as a background in Fractal Mapper. There I can add the icons quickly and easily. I export just the terrain features from Fractal Mapper and bring them back into Photoshop.

From this point on, I just style away. I copy feathered sections of the land and water layers to new layers and darken/lighten/color until everything looks cool. To create the ‘reefs’ around the coast I select the water shape, reduce it, then border it to get its shape.

Finally, I render everything to one layer, and do some final hand edits to try to get away from the ‘computery-look’ JVisgaitis described. These edits can really make a difference – but they’re also not reproducible, so if I have to go in and make major changes to the map’s underlying features, I’d need to do the finalizing process over. No big deal, it just depends on how tight I am with time.

Thanks for having the contest – it’s been fun building the map. If anyone has any questions feel free to ask!

Tovokas

 

[Pbartender]

I was having a really hard time until I got to PBartender. I'm a sucker for RPG maps with that particular look.

However, my vote comes with a caveat: use the map that best fits the production style of the book. I love PBardtender's map, but it would look horrid in a book with a pseudo-technological style. Congruent styles and colour palettes ought to matter the most in any decision like this for a print product.

That's funny... Half the reason I submitted that map was because RangerWicket, the director of the WotBS project, specifically asked for something in that style:

Me personally, I'm hoping someone submits something old-fashioned and 'Here there be dragons'-ish.

Oh well.

 

[Lalato]

For me it was between tovokas and Pbartender. In the end, I chose tovokas, but it was really close. Even now, if I had to choose again, I don't know which one I would pick.

--sam

 

[Nonlethal Force]

I have to admit that I had a hard time choosing. I ended up voting for Pbartender's map.

However, the other three that I was deliberating between were: (In no particular order)

JVisgaitis (Love the color scheme!)
Hall (I love the Mountain and snow effect, woo-hoo!)
tovokas (Looks so tolkeinesqe - or at the very least definately fitting in the fantasy genre!)

In the end, I went with Pbartender simply because the map was cool, but the compass rose and the map key were simply smashing! Wow. Plus. your mountains rock.

But seriously, all the maps looked great. Excellent work!

EDIT: Kensanata, is there any way that you can edit your link in your post? I think your link is throwing my screen all out of whack. Even if you threw a {url=X}Link{/url} in ... where X is the actual link and the {} are changed to [] to make it actually work. I'm not complaining, just suggesting, of course. It just makes it very hard to read the results of the poll because you link is so huge!