Shadowlands – revealed at last

A while ago I ran a gallery show of fantasy maps, and through that I met Christopher Merwin – a great guy and a local New York game designer. He was working on a fantasy world for the Pathfinder RPG called Sæmyyr, and asked me to work on a world map. Little did I know just how much detail and thought had gone into the design of that world. Here, many many months later, is the finished product. In the meantime, this world has been the result of a successful Kickstarter campaign and has had some truly beautiful maps created for the cities by Michael Arrington. Check them out on their facebook page.

You’re going to want to click through on this one to the full image. The nice guys at Blackstar have given me permission to post this version at 50% of the print resolution!

It was a new style for me – and I’m really pleased with the result. You can check out some of the details of how I developed the mountain style in this post from last September.

I was asked about the unlabeled version of the map. As it happens Blackstar Games are publishing the unlabeled version too, so here’s a downsized preview of the unlabeled map:

The World of Hominia

It’s been a while since I posted any work, so here’s a piece I did for Noah Murphy for his book series K23 Detectives. You can check them out on Kindle and in print. It was an interesting challenge getting a black and white map to read clearly for the different Kindle formats.

How to colour quick trees for RPG maps

Today I’m walking through my method for colouring trees quickly for RPG maps. This follows on from this mini-tute/discussion on different tree styles from last week. I’m working with style 1 from that tutorial here, though it can be directly applied to the other styles just as easily.

The problem with trees is the leaves.

How to make a grunge brush – Gimp

How to make a grungy brush – Photoshop

One incredibly useful tool in photoshop is a good dynamic grungy brush.

The human eye looks for detail and texture, or patterns and regularity. If you use a hard edged round brush in your work, there will be hard edged circles in your work. We’re very good at picking them out, so your audience will see them. On the other hand, if you use a brush with splattered edges, a random orientation and a variable size then there will be no pattern anywhere. Then the human eye sees other patterns and forms. It sees texture that isn’t there, and fills in regions with the texture it believes it should see.

More City Design Tips

I was asked the following question over on the Paizo boards:

Can I ask a question about city design?

I see advice I’ve seen elsewhere — start with the streets.

But — how?

On the style and rendering of trees

Trees are useful on a battlemap as they provide terrain, cover and a lot of artistic style. As the canopy stretches over the play area, how you depict your trees will affect both the form and the function of your maps.