A thing a week 2021, week 22 (city map)

A couple years ago I drew a city for use in a single-city campaign. Over the months I made several regional maps for the game, two of which wound up documented here, and a couple iterations of a large battle map used as the end of that campaign. That turned out to be a pretty good investment and one that shaped that campaign in ways that I could never have predicted.

I'm now running another single-city campaign now so I drew another one. While I freehanded the Cedarwood map, this time around I started with a seed city from the fantasy city generator at watabou.itch.io. Tools like these can save a lot of time provided you're not as obsessive about these things as I am. From the original seed, I used the site to alter some of the roads to fit what I had in mind, then took a download to draw over. 

From the original seed, I hand-drew buildings in Krita across multiple layers and composited them in paint.net (my two favorite free image manipulation tools). These buildings were mostly in the same places and roughly the same size and shape of the seed but altered to fit my needs. In some cases, I redrew the roads based on some critical thinking. For example, there was no southern road out of the castle even though most of the easily reached significant nearby cities are found in that direction. I also changed a lot of the very acute angle neighborhoods because I don't particularly like triangular buildings because they're hard to build props for.

How much use I'll get out of this map isn't clear yet, but now that I have it, I'm sure various versions will be popping up here in the future. 

(c) me 2021