(more maps after the jump)

The adventure takes place in and around an ancient temple on a remote island that has been occupied by a present day threat. But ancient temples always hide some darker peril, and this one is no different. The maps had to hark back to the older magic woven through the fabric of the temple itself, so I added some swirling spiral patterns through the walls and floors. As players explore, they’ll see bits and pieces of the design, but only the GM sees the full picture.

A hidden staircase behing the temple chamber leads down into the dungeons where the true secrets of the temple lie in wait for intrepid, or unlucky, adventurers.

I’ve also partnered with Illusionary Press to provide these maps as map packs. You can get your hands on the full res (100px per grid) maps, along with multipage pdfs for home printing, and maptool files with vision and light implemented – over on my map store or over at Illusionary Press. The maps are available individually (click each map above to go to their product page) or as a discounted bundle for all three.

Using Layer Effects and Blend Modes to create quick dungeons

Last week I posted a short tutorial on using grids in Photoshop to create a quick dungeon map. The last panel of that tutorial showed a dungeon map with some layer effects added to give it a little pop. Today I’m going through the layer effects I used to show how it’s done.

A note of caution on layer modes – they can easily be overused. If you turn them all the way up to 11 then they’ll scream their presence to anyone looking at your map. Bang them in at full opacity, then dial them down to create a more integrated effect.

1. After last week’s tutorial you should have a nice floorplan for your dungeon map.
   1. First find a nice neutral background with some slight textural variation to it. Paper and stone textures are good for this (try http://cgtextures.com). I’ve placed the floorplan on a new layer and changed it’s colour to light blue ( #868ba6 for those that want to reproduce this in Photoshop or Gimp). You can change the colour of a floorplan by locking the transparency of the layer (first of the four Lock options at the top of the Layers panel) and then fill with a colour (Edit->Fill, or option/Alt + delete to fill wth the foreground colour.
   2. Finally I’ve set the blend mode of the layer to colour burn. Notice how the texture of the layer behind is clearly visible? The colour and tone difference separate the walls cleanly from the background, but the texture keeps the whole thing unified.
2. Here’s the map with a couple of layer effects added. To access the layer effects panel double click the layer in the Layers window, or with the layer selected go to Layer->Layer Style->Blending Options…
   1. Here I’ve added a 2px stroke in black at 100% opacity to clearly delineate the walls (they are important after all).
   2. I’ve also added a black outer glow with a blend mode of overlay and an opacity of 75%. Notice how the walls now separate from the floors and you get a sense of depth.
3. The shadows aren’t quite deep enough.
   1. Rather than bump up the outer glow I add a drop shadow with no offset (offset drop shadows imply directional light, and I don’t want that impression inside a dungeon – light sources should be in the rooms, not outside shining across the map). The drop shadow here is dark brown and has a blend mode of color burn with 75% opacity. That gives some great over saturated shadows and really dark nooks and crannies.
   2. Finally I’ve added an inner glow. This highlights the edges of the wall, and contrasts with the dark shadows. I’ve used an inner glow in white with a blend mode of overlay, 40% opacity and a size of 50px (half a square).

I this case I’ve avoided using any Normal, multiply or screen blend modes (other than for the stroke). These modes mask the underlying texture, whereas the overlay and colour burn blend modes combine with it. I want the texture to unify the layout and provide some visual variation throughout the map.

Play around with the different options. Inner glow, outer glow, drop shadow and inner shadow give you lots of options for creating edge effects around an area. Once you’ve found something you like, click the New Style… button in the layer effects palette and give it a name. Now you can apply this layer style to any future selection by going to the Styles item on the left hand list and finding it again.

These skills don’t just work for dungeon layouts, but also for text effects, logo design and much more. It’s really worth the time to dig in and get to know the layer effects panel.

For Gimp users, there aren’t any layer modes (well, not out of the box. There’s a plugin that replicates them and you can find details on installing it here). However if you have a floorplan you have a selection. This selection then allows you to use filters such as drop shadow, which mean you can replicate all the effects here very easily by a combination of layers. You can also use Stroke Selection to create the stroke in step 2.

Using paths to give pretty wall textures

This is another long one, as it’s a technique that takes a little mastering. However it can be summarised in 4 steps. Read through it, then skim these four steps again:

1. Generate a selection of the region you want to edge
2. Turn the selection into a path
3. Stroke the path with a brush on a new layer
4. Mask out the side of the stroke you don’t want to use (using your original selection).

It’s pretty easy, and can also be used for coastal highlights on world maps, regular parallel lines to create a railway or surround an area with buildings. It all depends on the brush you stroke the path with.

(click the image to download the full sized image, or right-click -> Open Image in New Tab to see it full size whilst you read along).

1. Start with a textured base and draw your walls on a separate layer. Make sure your floor area is entirely enclosed by walls or the edge of the canvas.
2. Use the magic wand tool to select the area that will be the walls (and use Select->Modify->Expand to make sure the selection runs down the middle of the ink lines). Then go to the Paths dialog and click the ‘Make work path from selection’ button to make a path from the selection. (also use Select->Save Selection before going any further – you’ll need this selection later)
3. This creates a work path. Drag and drop the work path to the New Path button to create a permanent path. You also want to invert the selection and do the same process to get a path that surrounds the floor space. You’ll now have two paths.
4. Now a quick tweak – I desaturate the background layer using an adjustment layer. I also add an overlay layer that’s masked to just hit the walls.
5. Create a group (folder icon) and mask the folder so that the floor is masked out and the walls are open. In the group create a new layer. Now select the path that surrounds the floor. You don’t want to have a selection going round the outside of the walls, because we’re going to stroke the path and we don’t want the outside of the canvas to be highlighted. With the path selected go back to the layers palette and make sure the new layer is selected. Pick a nice large brush and press enter. First off, I want to put in a grungy highlight along the edge. I use a large grungy brush with a low opacity (around 10%) Start off really big – like 100-200px – and stroke the path with white (hit enter with the layer selected – you should see a brush stroke around the path). Then reduce the brush size and do it again. Rinse and repeat until you have a nice gradual highlight up to the wall edge. I set the layer to overlay to get a nice textured highlight.
6. This is nice, but it needs to have an extra texture. I set up an extra layer and this time I’ll use a hard round brush with lots of scatter (1000%), colour jitter to swap light and dark and a low opacity (around 20-30%). Stroke the path again (make sure the path is selected then hit enter with the brush tool selected) with a few different sizes of this brush. You should have something like panel 6.
7. Now set this layer to overlay and set the opacity of the overlay layer to have it blend in.
8. The wall shadows are the same trick. In this case set up a new group, and mask this with the inverse of the previous mask (we’re working on the floors this time). You can do this by selecting the previous mask, right click->Add Mask To Selection, and then use Ctrl/Cmd-shift-I to invert the selection. Click group icon and then click the Add Layer Mask button (to the right of the fx button at the bottom of the Layers dialog). Add a layer to the group. This layer will be our base shadow layer. Select the second path – from the Paths dialog – and then go to your new layer. Choose a nice dark colour, and a large, low opacity grungy brush (again around 5-10% opacity) and hit enter to stroke the path. Reduce the brush size and repeat. This will give a nice grungy shadow
9. In panel 8 I have this layer set to multiply at 100%. It’s a little overbearing, so I reduce the opacity to 10-20% and create a new layer, this time set to overlay. Repeat the process of stroking the path and you should get something like the final image.

Here’s the original psd if you want to look at the full breakdown of how this was created. Note that this process is the same amount of work for 1 room as 100, so it’s great for adding texture to a large map – and it still looks hand drawn rather than too photoshopped.

Old School Dungeon Mapping

In honour of the news that Wizards will be reprinting the 1Ed core rulebooks I thought I’d go old school and put together a quick old school map.

This is less of a mini-tute and more a set of guidelines for creating a map like this:

• The walls were placed using the tips on grids from earlier this week.
• The colour is key to getting that old school feel – it’s #18769d.
• To add the grid, open this file in Photoshop and go to Edit->Define Pattern. Now you can flood fill a region with a grid by going to Edit->Fill… and choosing Pattern -> 100px grid. Lock the transparency and fill with blue to get the old school blue grid.
• The doors are white squares stroked with blue
• The statues are just a circular graphic (provided below).
• I used Arial Bold for the secret door label, again stroked with blue (Layer Styles->Stroke)

The Gimp version of this tute can be found here.

Old School Blue Maps in Maptool

Following the quick tutorial on old school D&D maps, Scott Pelegrino asked whether it was possible to set the Fog of War in maptool to be old school blue so that as players explore, they reveal the white floors from the blue unknown. The answer is yes!

Once you’ve imported your map into maptool – go to Map->Edit Map and choose the Fog tab and set the colour using the HSB settings to the values shown in the image above. Now the Fog of War is classic old school blue! You can also set the grid colour in the same way.

The tokens in these screenshots are not mine, but come from the free token packs by Devin Night. Check them out, they’re amazing.

As with previous tips, these first appeared on my Fantastic Maps Google+ page, and on facebook.

Castles are built for more than one reason – people live there, guards are stationed there and often they are political power centers for the region. But first and foremost they are built to keep people out. The weak point in any castle is it’s front door, and a number of techniques were perfecte over the years to make sure that someone trying to attack a castle would have a hard time of it. Now attackers might not be as obvious as a massed army at the gates – unsavoury people sneak in too. This gatehouse design was used in many places – including Linlithgow Palace, the palace I grew up beside and spent a lot of time in.

1. Visitors approach from the south (in this diagram). The outer gate is large and heavy, and often opens onto a moat that’s crossed on a drawbridge.
2. Once inside, the doors are closed behind (often from a mechanism operated from the guard room).
3. Progress forwards is barred by a portcullis, and a set of heavy doors. This allows the inner doors to be opened safely so someone can talk to the visitors, without allowing them access to the castle
4. Guards on either side can target visitors through arrow slits.
5. More guards are perched above and can target visitors with ranged weapons, or that classic defence of boiling oil.

This provides a robust defence mechanism against invaders, but it’s far from fullproof. Linlithgow Palace was taken by a small group of determined soldiers using a simple ruse with a hay cart. The farmer drove his cart with fresh grain up to the palace. The guards opened the portcullis to let him in. He stopped the cart under the portcullis, and armed soldiers burst out from under the hay. The portcullis was dropped, but the cart jammed it open, and provided an open front door for the extra troops waiting in hiding outside. Soldiers poured in and the Palace was taken with relative ease.

For a game with fantasy elements, you’ll want to station some form of caster at the front gate, with some easy divination magic. The murder holes make the perfect vantage point for a sorcerer, and the confined space is just built for flaming spheres.

This tip originally appeared here on G+.

Drawing Isometric Dungeons

There are some classic isometric dungeon maps out there, particularly those of Castle Ravenloft – the original David Sutherland maps inspired the styles of all maps of that castle that have come since. It’s also a style beloved of computer games, most notably the Diablo series.

Creating an isometric map is actually pretty easy.

How to draw an isometric dungeon map

1. First draw out your floor plan as if it were top down. Place lines for all the elements on the ground – walls, doors, outlines of pit traps. I draw these lines on a separate layer from the grid as it keeps everything organised.
2. Make it isometric! Rotate the map 45 degrees. Then you shrink the map vertically by 57.7%.
3. The great thing about isometric maps are the vertical details you can throw in there. Find every corner, and draw a vertical line to show wall edges. Focus on the edges that don’t obscure details further away. Here I’ve added the most detail where the detail doesn’t overlap the actual floorplan. Fill in the blank space with sketched stone texture, add in illustrated doors, throw in some lines to show the rough stone in natural stone tunnels and give the viewer an idea of just how deep the spiked pit trap is. Again, I add these details on a separate layer to make it easy to erase mistakes without rubbing out the floor lines.

Remember that the primary goal of the map is to show the floorplan and allow for easy use for a GM. The extra detail that an isometric map provides can really sell the setting of a map, but it’s also easy to obscure important features.

This tip originally appeared on Google+ here.

Quick and Easy Dungeons using Grids

This one’s quite specific for photoshop, but can be adapted to Gimp (and I’ve added some gimp tips throughout).

It’s a neat tool that often lies buried in Photoshop’s preferences panel that allows you to turn on a grid that you can snap to. This is perfect for quick dungeon floorplans on the fly. Combined with layer effects and blend modes (a future mini-tute) this can give you great looking maps really quickly.

1. There are a few steps to turning the grid on at the right scale.
   1. Make sure that you have your image file set the correct scale. Here I’m creating a map at 100 pixels per square, so I set the resolution to 100dpi.
   2. Open up Preferences and go to the settings for Guides, Grids and Slices. In here set the grid to 1 inch, and add in the number of subdivisions you want. When sticking to drawing features that take up full 5′ squares you can set the subdivisions to 1. If you want to draw some smaller detail, like a 1′ thick wall, then set it to 5 – to get a grid line every foot.
   3. This should now give you a grid on your map. You can show/hide it with ctrl/cmd + ‘ . You can also toggle the snapto grid behavious using shift + ctrl/cmd + ; This also toggles snapping to guides.
   4. Note for Gimp Users – there’s a plugin here that allows you to create a grid of guides that will do the same job.
2. With the snap to grid on, you can create a new layer, and use the rectangular select tool and Fill (option + delete or cmd/ctrl + delete for foreground/background fill) to quickly lay in your dungeon layout.
3. Using that as a base, you can use blend modes and layer styles to build a pretty dungeon (or Gimp users can use this plugin to generate a pretty dungeon map from their basic layout)

This tip originally appeared on Google+ here.

There’s also a new Tutorials tab up on the menu bar, so you’ll be able to find all the tutorials up there from now on in.

How to create simple city icons in Photoshop

This is more of a series of pointers to tools that will make your life easier. The actual tips are in the image this time.

Some useful tricks here:

• When you’re on the Move Tool (V), if you hold down Option (Alt on Windows), the tool will create a copy of an object and move that rather than moving the object itself. This saves a lot of copying and pasting, or duplicating layers and really speeds up laying out a lot of icons.
• There’s a little arrow beside the list of shapes in the Shape Tool toolbar. That has all sorts of useful options, like arrows on lines, or turning polygons into stars.
• Layer styles are very powerful. They are worth any amount of time invested into learning them, especially as they can be saved (using the New Style… button in the dialog). Once saved they can be applied very quickly.

This originally appeared here.

Top Down Hand Drawn Mountains in Gimp or Photoshop

After I put together a post about drawing hills, I had a request to do the same for mountains. Here’s a walk through of my process. For this, you need any piece of software that allows you to use layer blend modes, specifically overlay. I know these appear in Photoshop and Gimp, and I’m pretty certain they’re available in others too. It also helps if you have a tablet, but this can be done using a mouse with a low brush opacity to build up the shadows gradually.

Free background texture, CC-BY-NC licensed.

I build up mountains in 5 steps over a textured brown background. I find cgtextures great for good backgrounds, or you can use this one (on the right). I’ve provided it CC-BY-NC licensed so that you can use it for any non-commercial purpose.

Okay, onto the mapping.

1. Draw the ridge line for your mountains. Mountains form in lines and create ranges spanning long distances, and help to form natural dividing lines for countries. Don’t make it too straight. If your hand shakes whilst you’re drawing this it’s a good thing.
2. Add in the lines for the mountain ridges that come down from the ridge line. These should bunch up near peaks and help the viewer see where the mountain tops are. They spread out as they get further from the ridge where the ground becomes flatter and easier to navigate. This part just takes a little time and practice to get it looking good.
3. Create a new layer and set its blend mode to overlay. Take a large-ish circular brush and either set its opacity to pressure sensitive (if using a tablet) or low opacity (if using a mouse). Now, with the colour set to black or very dark blue block in the shadow on the SE side of the mountains. Always start a stroke at or near the ridge line and draw away from the ridge. That will result in the most overlapping strokes being beside the ridge. This means the darkest regions are beside the ridge, and also you’ll get lots of details around the ridge. Now pick a few region on the SW side of the ridge that would be in shade and block those in too. Switch to white, and do the same for highlights on the NW side.
4. Create another layer and once again set it to overlay. Reduce the size of your brush by at least 50% and repeat the process. This time you’re looking for the drakest shadows and the brightest highlights to give some detail and definition. Focus on mountain peaks and the top of the ridge line.
5. Create a final layer, and set it’s mode to colour. Using a large fuzzy brush, and pure grey, turn the peaks of the mountains grey. Then using the same fuzzy brush, lay in some verdant green around the base. You can also go back to your first overlay layer here and spread the shadows and highlights into the surrounding plains to blend the mountains in with the background.

The biggest leap of faith here is trusting that you can be fairly loose on your overlay layers and it will some out fine. Here’s a quick look at what my overlay layers look like as normal layers on a grey background. You can see that the brush strokes aren’t that careful, but when they are combined into the overlay layers, they look just fine.

You can download the .psd of this mountain test here. This mini-tutorial originally appeared here.

Turning any map into an aged paper handout

The key to a good map is the information it presents. As soon as you’ve done the line drawing on a map, it should be perfectly possible to pick it up and use it. Everything after that point is polish to make it pretty. Today I’m looking at taking a simple map on a white background and turning it into an aged paper handout.

First of all you need a good paper texture. There are thousands of these free on the internet. As always, www.cgtextures.com is a good bet, under Paper->Plain. You can also find hundreds of paper textures on deviantArt.com (just search for “paper texture”). With this in hand it’s a quick hop to a pretty map:

(as always you can download this fullsize, or download the psd here)

1. Take the original map – here we have a simple 3 colour map with a couple of locations marked with crosses. It’s useful, but not that atmospheric.
2. Add a parchment background as a layer behind the map. You won’t see it initially (the white background blocks it out) so change the blend mode to multiply. This only darkens, so the white background will disappear. Drop the opacity of the layer to 50% to give a light watercolour look.
3. The 50% multiply layer is a little washed out, and we want to darken the lines and bump up the colours. To do this, duplicate the layer and set the blend mode to colour burn. This will boost the colours and burn in the dark lines – and once again the white is transparent for this blend mode.. I’ve set it to 70% opacity.

Play with the opacity of the two blend modes to get a look that you like. You can also use colour and saturation blend modes with this to build up a nice effect. And just like that you have an aged paper hand out. Much easier than tea staining or baking a hand drawn map, and with less chance of setting fire to the oven.

This originally appeared on G+.

To give you a taster, Illusionary Press are giving away a primer for free over on RPGNow. Download it and learn more about this land locked in winter. Once you’ve got a taste, you can pick up the first adventure which introduces both players and DMs to the themes of the setting. The adventurers start off locked in slavery, and must escape. It’s a classic opening to any adventure harking right back to In The Dungeons of the Slavelords, and Don Pritchett carries it off with pace and panache.

As cartographer for the second adventure, I can guarantee that you won’t have to wait long for the next installment. It’s great to see more third party publishers supporting 4th Edition with material of this quality. You should certainly check it out.

You can also pick up the maps from the first adventure as map packs, but I’ll be going into more detail about them next week.

Amongst the decidedly nordic themes of the magazine are a number of games of skill and chance. One of these is a game called the Great Hunt, where players compete to kill the Great Wyrm, or each other, whichever comes first. I put together the board and tokens for the game, and to help you all play along at home I’ve got them here for you to download for free. You can download the bundle here (tokens and board and a maptool file). Here they are individually as well:

Piracy is in the air this year. Open Design is now well underway with Journeys to the West – an anthology of adventurers set in the exotic unexplored western ocean – and Paizo is set fair on a course for the swashbuckling adventure path Skull and Shackles. But what good is a pirate (or, ahem, privateer) without a trusty ship?

Well, to resolve that particular problem, this month I’ve put together a ship that any peg legged terror of the ocean waves can be proud of. After some feedback on my previous ship pack, this one comes in a number of formats. The pack contains 2 overview of the full ship, one with the ship underway with sails billowing and the other with the ship resting at the harbour quay. In addition, the pack contains fully detailed maps of all three interior deck levels, with captain’s table, storage and crew hammocks (previews of all three maps after the jump).

In addition to the fully rendered maps, the set includes pngs of the ship if you want to fight mobile ship battles in a vtt, or composite your own map with the ship moored on new and unexplored shores. This should allow you to use this ship map as the base for your players to explore any new and exotic places – or as the home of a recurring pirate threat. All the accoutrements of the ship come as separate objects too – from the ballista and gangplank down to the crates and barrels below decks, and right up to the full rigging of the ship as a separate object (to allow you to show/hide the sails for deck combat, or for high stakes sword fights a-top the mizen mast.

The map pack weighs in at a hefty 122Mb of art and contains:

• Three distinct maps – overall ship in sail, overall ship moored and the three levels of inner deck. Each map is provided with all bells and whistles (grid and objects), without grid, and without grid and without any objects (no ballista, tables, chairs, crates, doors and so on). The jpgs are sized at 100px per grid for poster printing or use in vtts.
• Multipage pdf packs for printing out for your home game table, both in light greyscale and full colour
• A bare sea map (4000px by 4000px jpg) for use in any nautical encounter, or to use as a base for creating any ship based encounter
• A large chunk of pngs with transparent backgrounds – crates, barrels, hammocks, doors, table, chairs, ballista, furled and open sails,  full ship in sail and with furled sails, and a separate png for the ship’s wake.
• Maptool files for the three maps, with all objects placed separately (yes, you can rotate all the ballista to take aim at an escaping smuggler), with vision blocking implemented.

All of that comes in at $4.99 and should give your players, or your recurring pirate scourge, a comprehensive base of operations whatever strange seas they might explore.

You can check out the full pack on RPGNow and Paizo.

You might have noticed something of a theme over the last few weeks. The map packs I’ve been putting out have had a decidedly frigid air to them. These packs come from the critically acclaimed Breaking of Forstor Nagar adventure I worked on with Rite Publishing (it’s swept 5* reviews across the board – I’m actually still a little in shock).

This month we finished the lot and released the full set as a map pack bundle, with all 8 map packs for the sale price of $9.99. The packs detail a wide range of locations in the imperiled city carved from the Forstorheim glacier. Ranging from an ice bridge over an frigid inlet, through the wrecked houses and barricades of a city under siege, to the collapsing tunnels beneath the city as the ice finally gives way and adventurers race to escape before being entombed forever.

It was great fun to detail such an unusual location and I think the set of maps gives GMs a wide range of options. They complement the adventure but can just as easily detail a Frost Giant enclave, a remote exploration outpost in the high mountains or a city encased in an unseasonal cold snap.

Here, for the first time, are the full set of maps in one place:

Each map comes as a map pack with all the normal bells and whistles:

• pdf map packs in A4 and letter size for printing out at 1 square = 1 inch scale at the game table. Packs are provided in both colour and printer friendly light greyscale for ease of use.
• High res jpgs of the map with grid, without grid for easy use with virtual tabletops, or for poster printing for a tabletop game.
• Maptool files set up with light and vision for quick use in any 4e or OGL/PF game.
• Many also have pngs of individual objects – like the fireship, barricades, ladders and more – that can be re-used in other maps.

Check out the full bundle – and the individual map packs – on RPGNow and Paizo.

The challenge with a city map is to lay out information on districts of the city as well as specific locations. The two can easily get confused, especially if you have a very detailed texture showing roofs and individual buildings. In this style I’m focusing on just showing the different districts. Individual locations of interest can then be placed on top by using icons, or something more elaborate.

1. Lay in the roads.

Here I’ve used a fixed width round brush, with a slightly wider width for main roads than minor roads. I’ve also used Photoshop’s layer styles to give the roads a dark outer glow to make it easier to read them. They’re white on a light background, but that won’t be an issue for long.

2. Define the city blocks

Here I’ve use the magic wand to select all the negative space where the city blocks are going to be. You can also use Select Pixels and then Invert Selection in photoshop. I’ve then shrunk the selection by 3px (though that depends on the resolution of your file of choice). The selection is then filled with black and this layer is set to overlay. I’ve also given the layer a layer style which is an internal stroke set to colour burn at 70% opacity. The result is that we can see all the city blocks, and the roads are visible as the negative space between the city blocks.

3. Delineate the different districts

Again we use the magic wand tool to get the selection of the city blocks in a specific district (you can also just get the selection by using the magic wand on the layer from step 2). Now, with one layer and one selection for each of the district, fill with the patter of your choice. Here I’ve used a striped pattern. I’ve set the stripes to a colour and used a combination of overlay and colour burn layer modes to create the effect.

Voila! An easy to read city map with clearly differentiated districts – all in less time than it takes to eat lunch. As ever, let me know if there are any questions in the comments section, or let me know if there are topics you’d like to see covered.

Today – my workflow on hills:

Three steps in the illustration of hills

1. Lay in the shadows with a large fuzzy brush. In photoshop or the Gimp I’d suggest doing this on a layer with the blend mode set to overlay.
2. Lay in the highlights with a slightly smaller fuzzy brush. Avoid sharp edges. You want hills to be rolling, and in contrast to the sharp peaks of a mountain range. Again, here I’ve done this on an overlay layer.
3. Add colour (here I’m a layer with the blend mode set to colour) and leave the hills slightly browner than the flat plains. That helps to differentiate them – and means that even with subtle light and shade they’ll be easy to read at a glance.

A couple of other things to keep in mind:

• Lay in the rivers first. As rivers drain the water out of hills, they will determine where the hills should go.
• Less is more when it comes to shadows and highlights here. Your mountains should have the darkest shadows. Make sure that your hill shadows are quite a bit more subtle.

I hope that’s useful, chip in if there’s a particular topic you’d like to see covered!