Correspondent Joshua Wolfe writes:
"Your maps always look so pretty. Is your process for map-making towns bottom
up or top down? Do you start with your list of hot spots and assemble
how the town should look around that? Or, do you start with an idea of
how the town and topography should look and then see where your location
ideas fit into it?"
Thank you! Those terms sound kinky! The short answer is "neither," but there are
always shades of each, so the short answer is actually "both." Unless
it's "neither." Or
both. I mean
answers. Let's restart.
I've never drawn a town-map without prior context; it's always within an existing setting (
Uresia or some other world I'm mapping that day). Consequently, there's always
something
established before I begin, even if it's just the location of the
nearest coastlines and the nearest relevant mountains and what
kingdom/realm we're in. So even if I wanted to begin
without considering those things, it's never an option.
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My Master Hex-Map, Unpublished For a Reason: It's Super Dull |
After that we dive deep into "it depends." I don't just
write about Uresia; I
GM the hell out of it, so it's rare for me to map a town we (the players and I) haven't already gamed in or at least heard in-game stories of.
Sometimes, that amounts to what
might be called "hot spots." From
recent games in Jubilance, for example, we know the city's Guild of
Lapidaries has a heavily-constructed (stone) guildhall on the east end
of town, that it has two above-ground stories, and a walled yard tucked
against the town's own wall. So, if I get around to mapping Jubilance in
"town scale" (like
Trostig and
Scott's Landing), I'd need to (A) beat
my head on the desk because I really need to stop mapping
cities in
town-scale and (B) make sure there's an appropriately-shaped building
in approximately the right area. Town-scale doesn't include low walls on
the scale of a single burgage plot, so that detail wouldn't need to be
present: just a largish stone building and some greenery in the yard.
Maybe a teensy fountain if I want to indicate how swank it is to be
emerald-cutters in Dreed (it's very swank).
But everything else we know about Jubilance is the kind of stuff that
wouldn't show up at that scale: we know an
inn where the PCs stashed their stuff (they never got to sleep there), a
bordello where one of the knights
did some stuff (again, sleepless), a
tavern where tavern-things happened,
streets down which a happy parade of Trolls bebopped, and a
seaport where seaport-things went on.
There were memorable moments attached to all of them, but on those
town-scale maps they'd all just be ... streets, a seaport, and teensy
little town-buildings occupying ordinary plots of land. Those memorable
locales would look exactly like their never-visited equivalents.
And that's true of
most town locations, really. I generally map
towns in two styles: the town-style, and the
city-style (which shows
only major streets and oversized permanent structures like walls and
citadels).
Now, just between you and I: I'll absolutely
linger on those little boxes, giving them special attention, because they have
identity in my mind's eye. But I also take care to linger, almost at random, on a certain portion of
all the
little boxes, because otherwise the town looks bland. I can't abide a
Row of Identical Rectangles unless I'm deliberately trying to
communicate that
this is a particularly ordinary, even tedious, row of buildings. I want every town map to be filled with stuff I
do understand and stuff I
don't, and I learn a lot about each town when building them.
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Some of the Simplest Boxes Have the Most History and Vice-Versa |
Uresia isn't a "medieval" world in any serious sense, but it does have a certain
Gone Drunkenly to the Renfaire
aesthetic, so most buildings are scaled and arranged in a hand-wavey
Oldeish Europe sort of way, where I stay conscious of how each town
arranges lots and frontages and closes so as to make the town survivable
to tiny
meep-meep cars in the imaginary Uresian future, but terribly inconvenient to a lumbering full-size American sedan.
So, there are rules I draw by (broad rules based on cultures, specific
exceptions based on cultural collisions and local circumstances), and
inevitably a few basics in my head, going in: Jubilance has walls (not
always a given in Dreed); Jubilance has that nice east-end guildhall for
the Lapidaries; Jubilance is a seaport on the northwest coast of the
island. It's a couple of days' hike to the mountains, and it has generic
town-type-things. It's Dreed, and it's got emeralds, so it's at least
partly, grossly, rich (which means broader frontages, more frequent fountains, more frequent greenery).
Having gamed there (and having already mapped all the Uresian coastlines) I have a general shape which emerges from necessity.
So that's square one. A mushy blend of hot-spot
and topography. Instead of top-down or bottom-up it's just sort of
saggy middle. Imitating its creator, no doubt.
From there, the process is
iterative. I don't just start with a
blank sheet of paper and draw 'til it's done (I've seen people who do;
they impress me). I start with a blank piece of paper and scribble a
deeply crappy first draft.
This follows my approach to writing. I'm a huge fan of "splat the first draft, [insert gross sound effect] and then
sculpt it into something that's less like hot garbage." Sculpt it via
second and
third and
fourth and as many drafts as it takes.
As those drafts roll out (freehand, usually on whatever
cheap notebook paper comes to hand, or clean sheets stolen from the
printer tray) I learn more about the town (including hot spots
and topography,
along with history and resources and fires and wars and hills leveled and ditches dug and walls argued-over because pennies got
pinched), and I interrogate the design, engaging in fruitful acts of
doubt, questioning
why-is-this-there and
why-is-that-shaped-that-way and
shouldn't-there-be-a-more-direct-route-from-this-gate-to-this-marketplace and so on.
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Sometimes I Use SketchUp to Visualize the Elevations |
I don't consider
any of this to be the cartography. Not
yet. During the splats I'm just designing the town, and it's a bit like the distinction I make between RPG design and RPG writing (
click here
for that): I want to have a lot of the design finished, solidified,
interrogated and multiply-drafted,
before I start worrying about how to
present it (presenting it:
that's the cartography).
Once I'm
satisfied that I know my way around, I go digital: using
scans of the least-splatty drafts, I begin constructing the territory
(water, elevations) in Adobe Illustrator or some other vector-art
software (I built the original Shadow River plan in DTP software because
Illlustrator still terrified me in those days, but the principle's the
same).
And then I
really go to town ... In city-scale, I focus on the
identities of entire neighborhoods and principal landmarks. In
town-scale, I go
less sane: lovingly obsessing over each close,
alleyway, street and square; every space allotted for caravans or
livestock; every bit of clean water that becomes nasty water and flows
somewhere else. Literally every single tree (within town) and then
swaths of forest beyond it, if there are any. That part's a
long story.
Once it's done, I can drag those nice clean vectors into Photoshop to
thrash them around, warm them up, and give them their final textures and
colors. This often means a return to natural media: the way I get
watercolor textures, for example, is I splat some cheap
supermarket-toy-section watercolors on equally cheap paper and
scan it.
I also use textures made from photographs I take of everything from
rocks to leaves to other rocks to food to stones to rocks.
And that's the process. Such as it is. Tops, bottoms, hot-spots?
Yes? Sort of.
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From Cold Vectors to Warm Textures |