Post 14: Cities
At this point, you can spend some time playing with colours, saturation, different overlays, etc. to get the land looking the way you want. Once all that is time, it is time to start detailing the non-terrain elements of the map. If you have an idea where cities and roads are to be located that is great. If not, here are a few suggestions:
  • All settlements need water - fresh water for drinking and agriculture.
  • Communities usually have a reason/industry for existing in the first place – farming, mining, shipping, commerce, defense etc. This purpose is often tied to natural resources in the area.
  • Accessibility is important for communities to interact with the world, and people will take the easiest path possible, not the shortest path. Water is one of the easiest ways to travel.

Once you have a mental idea of where you want settlements and roads, start adding them. I have found the simplest way to make cities is using dingbat fonts. The one installed on every windows machine is called “wingdings”. Here is the character map for wingdings generated by a free Windows font manager called “The Font Thing”. (You can get the link by searching in the forums.):
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As you can see, there are some nice symbols for mapping here, depending on your map style. Using a font manager will let you find these easier. For this tutorial, I will use some similar characters to indicate settlements; I will use the symbol that looks like a ship’s wheel (“]”)to indicate ports, the little square cloverleaf (“z”) for walled settlements, and the simple dot (“l”) for all others.

Create a new transparent layer called “Towns”. When using GIMP’s text tool, it creates text on new layers above the currently selected layer, but we will be merging all of them down to the “Towns” layer. Select the Towns Layer, and click on the text tool. Pick the font Wingdings. You can leave the colour the default (black) or pick a different colour now. Click in the general area you want a town marker:
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You can change the text size, alignment, spacing and such at this time. Notice the new text layer created in the layers dialog. Selecting the Move tool and toggling “Move the Active Layer” will allow fine positioning of the icon. This process can be repeated with as many icons desired.
Note: I have not found a way to get non-keyboard symbols into GIMP text. In other Windows applications you can hold the alt key and type the keycode (like ALT+177 to get the crosshair dingbat). Cutting and pasting from another application into the GIMP text dialog does produce non-keyboard fonts, but not what you would expect.
Once this is done, all the icons will sit on their own layers. (I used a smaller size for the solid dots as they looked too big at 22px):
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Now merge all the text layers down into the town layer. This can be done one at a time right clicking the layer and selecting “Merge Down” or by turning off all the other layers and selecting “Merge Visible Layers”. (I added a keyboard shortcut via File->Keyboard Shortcuts to make Alt-m merge down to speed up this action.) You should end up with all the text layers gone, and just the “Town” layer left.

The colour can be changes very simply at this time by checking the “Lock Alpha Channel” checkbox. You can then just drag colours (or patterns, or paint with tools) from the Palette Dialog, and all the transparent areas will remain transparent!
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Create a new layer below Towns called “Towns Outline”. This layer will be used to help the town icons stand out. Right click and Alpha to Selection on the Towns layer. Enlarge the selection by 2 px or so (Selection->Grow) and optionally soften the selection (Select->Feather). I used 5 px on the feather. Now with the Town Outline layer active, drag black (or a contrasting colour to the town icons) to the screen. Lock the transparency.

With both layers having transparency locked, you can drag different colours, or play with the colour adjustments (hue, saturation, lightness) and layer blending modes. Here I ended up with the icons using the “Roofs 3” colour and the outline the “Roads” colour.
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White on black (or vice versa) also work well if set to overlay mode.