Kingdom of Kenland

[MistyBeee]

That's really cool, Edward ! I'm discovering this thread and it's a pleasure to see it. You already worked really hard, and I hope to see more in the future

[Edward II of Kenland]

I haven't been checking on this thread in a while, so thank you MistyBeee for the kind comment!

It's been a long time since I've last posted on here but I've managed to do a lot of work in that time. I've filled out the towns and roads in the northeast, central, and southern regions to my preferred densities. I still have more to go in the eastern section and a final pass to make the western section a little denser, although the eastern section is meant to be much more sparsely populated than the central region.



The first image is a stroke of my roads and dirt trails, the second image is a stroke of all the towns and villages I have placed. I do say I am particularly happy that my rivers can be traced just by the town placements. I'm attending law school in the fall, so my goal is to at least finish up my town placement in Kenland proper before then.





Edit: I also figure it would be a good idea to show what the increased density looks like around the capital, since I posted that the last time.

[Edward II of Kenland]

Hello everyone!

It's been a long time since my last post, however I have been working diligently on the map for a lot of the time since I last posted.

Since my last post I have:

1) Overhauled previously "finished" areas by adding in more towns, villages, roads, and highways. This was 90% of the work I had to do. I would take it in 3,000 sq mile chunks and add in more settlements and the corresponding roads. I am very happy with the changes done here. In addition I also finished the North East section of the map. I believe I did the math on it one time and I was adding around 125ish villages per 3,000 square miles. I added probably somewhere around 8,000 villages in the 200ish thousand square miles of Kenland.

2) My overhaul of the towns and villages allowed me to make more defined political boundaries. Down below are the boundaries of the Tenants in Chief of Kenland (some of these lands are within the Royal Domain, however). They hold their land in fee directly from the King. The lowest on there is a lordship, then a county, and then a Duchy. Lands with higher seigniorial status may have a lord who owns in fee a sub-infeudated lower holding, IE a County may be under the jurisdiction of a dukedom, but a Dukedom is not subject to a county. (This does get confusing in places like 13th century France where you could be the Duke of X, tenant in chief of the King, only owing fee for that land to King, however if you owned county Y, subinfeudated to you from the Duke of Z, you would owe your fee for the county to that duke.) I have as of yet to make interior borders of the counties and duchies and of the Baillages (Sort of kind of like medieval version of US federal district courts. Think of them as those who enforce the jurisdiction the King himself has within the realm, the Bailiffs administer to those duties.)

3) New mountains Yay! I am actually finally satisfied with these mountains.

4) I have started to make some guys in the style of medieval manuscript miniatures. I hope to fill them out on the map however I am worried about how to actually make them "flow" into the map. Advice or critiques on them would be appreciated.

I do ask for some advice for my map is getting quite filled with details and I am trying to fit in the county names on the map, however I am not seeing a way to do this without just creating a new map with a more zoomed out scale. If you have any advice on how otherwise I would do this it would be greatly appreciated!

Finally I ask this: Is this map of a good enough caliber that I could eventually sell it on RPG drivethru or something of that nature? I have in some ways been working on this since 2013-2014, and it would be nice when I finish this to make a supplement for it.

I have added a lot of images here such as the dots and lines of all the roads and cities to show progress because the map file is so large it is hard to tell what work I have done.

Outline of the placement of cities:


Outline of the roads and highways


Political borders:


New mountains =-)


Hunting miniatures mostly inspired from the Livre de Chasse:


Battling miniatures: Outlines from Codex Manasse, Machiejowski Bible, I used Wappenwiki griffin, and for the footknights I saw an image from the deus lo vult boardgame and used the general outline of the miniature to aid me in my drawing.


Finally, a general shot of what the map looks like in general:

[Edward II of Kenland]

Hello, just a quick little extra thing I worked up. I have changed up the horse caparison, shield, and surcoat of the knight to fit different coat of arms to see how they look. I certainly think my shading looks better on darker colors, as the folds on the knight with the white base and red owls looks less deep. I chose the checkered Coat of arms just to see how much detail still shows up in a very busy coat of arms. I think it still remains readable! The blue one looks like its the best though. As of now I am still unsure how I will place them on the map. I may not place them on the map as I have yet to think of a good way of placing them, and instead may make a Roll of Arms as reference to the map. We shall see though.

Credit to Wappenwiki for the owls.

[Edward II of Kenland]

Hello, I have done a few things since my last post that I think has tied a few things together.

I have done my oceans again. I certainly like it zoomed out all the way, however I am more skeptical about it when zoomed in properly. Any advice on this would be appreciated!


I have also named every single one of my rivers which took quite a while, but it was certainly something that needed to be done. I also made symbols with the coat of arms for the large cities in the kingdom. I do hesitate on them, as I had to make them smaller in certain areas to make them fit in decently. Somehow though I can't shake the feeling that they don't 100% mesh with the map. Perhaps a second set of eyes would be more useful at this point! (Credit to wappenwiki again for many of the COA assets)







I am personally feeling like I am coming towards the finish line on Kenland proper. I still have to figure out a way to make the little drawings of knights, people, and animals I did fit in. I also have to finish making the interior political divisions of counties and duchies which shouldn't take long. Making a border for the map is perhaps something I will scrap and just not do as the map is 21.2 ft x 20.6 ft. Obviously this map will never be printed out in full because it is so large.

After that I suppose I will finally be done with Kenland itself, and then I'll move on to the other areas which you can see that haven't been filled in on the map.

Thank you!

Edit: I want to apologize for my images being blurry. I tried using snipping tool this time as it makes things quicker, however it obviously degrades the quality of the image.

[Edward II of Kenland]

Well, I decided to make duchy maps at least. This way I can show the smaller divisions of the counties and have some nice visual elements. Please see this thread for the image!

I plan on making similar maps for each Duchy since I think this one turned out so well!

[Azélor]

I like that. There aren't a lot of maps at this scale that go into such details. Also, the heraldry is well made.

[Edward II of Kenland]

I like that. There aren't a lot of maps at this scale that go into such details. Also, the heraldry is well made.

Thank you! This project was originally inspired by looking at a lot of RPG maps and realizing that often times only the mega cities are on the map. I wanted people to realize that you would encounter tons of small settlements and manors while traveling through the rural areas of a medieval world. Unfortunately, that meant that about 3/4 of the time spent on this project was adding thousands of places and then naming them. Thankfully I made a random name generator using names from the Domesday book. I don't think I'm ever going to go into this detail on such a scale on another project again!

[Edward II of Kenland]

Hello everyone! I have finished 3 additional duchies for Kenland. Please see this thread to view them in the finished maps section!
Thank you again for everyone who was helped me or given me critiques, encouragements or compliments.