All I can say is "Wow!" Are there segments of the population, wishing to avoid the chaos that permeates the land, who have moved to the more remote areas?
All I can say is "Wow!" Are there segments of the population, wishing to avoid the chaos that permeates the land, who have moved to the more remote areas?
Thank you so much! So, on the whole I guess you could describe the setting as "post" post-apocalypse: Societal collapse happened and vast swathes of population died, yes, but society has rebuilt itself with the new status quo, and is on its way to recovering most of what it once had (and the new emphasis on the lower sciences - aka physics, biology, chemistry etc - has society develop stuff never seen before). All this is to say that the northern continent is quite civilised once more, and while the coastal areas and main population centres in the Despaired Lands are quite safe - people are not particularly willing to move to the more dangerous and chaotic hinterlands. To go on a slight tangent it's why the various Torchbearer organisations have effectively become a societal institution - and a lucrative one at that. They're not just mercenaries in the sense of soldiers and guards, but mercenary prospectors, historians, archaeologists, builders, and the like. They scout for fertile, resource-rich new lands, or ruined settlements, clear it out, build an outpost, and scour the land for valuable artefacts; all the while making a hefty profit.Originally Posted by LunaIlena
So, who does move into the remote areas and colonies? The same as those from real history: The poor, the desperate, the persecuted, and the prosecuted. Some are paid by their kingdoms and republics in land and money to settle, some are broke or wishing to start over or make their fortune. Some are penal colonies: alternatives to prison or the headman's block, and some flee to escape persecution from the north. Tieflings (the setting is for DnD) especially make up a large portion of these remote colonies, as they unfortunately suffer a lot of persecution in the north.
I absolutely do not mind, happy to share. I actually posted this on the Worldbuilding sub over on Reddit, so I'll just copy-paste what I wrote there. I can be a bit crap at explaining things, so if I haven't explained anything well, just say so
Okay, so
Base world generation: Songs of the Eons. The base heightmap was created by SotE, an ambitious game being developed over at /r/SongsOfTheEons . Whether it'll be finished...eh, but as it stands it does a nice job of simulating a world. It does tectonics, simulates resource deposits and also has a basic climate model (while it's...okay, I developed my own method based on a really old guide on Cartographer's Guild). This is a coloured height map of the whole world. The blue box is where the setting takes place overall, the red box is roughly the area rendered on the map above. Also don't mind the 'peeling' at the poles, the error was corrected in a later version of the app than the one I used to make this.
Terrain Refinement, Mesh, Texture mask: World Machine. This program is basically Wilbur on steroids. I saved a grayscale heightmap from SotE, cropped it to the desired area (The Despaired Lands), and used it as a base input. I then tinkered about simulating erosion, weathering, and river systems until I had a detailed map. It also has a node to generate a mesh from the height info, and created a 4mil I think polygon mesh of the terrain. It also has some really neat selection tools (such as by height, slope angle rock hardness etc) which I used to create 8k *masks* for the textures, of which I believe there were 11. Speaking of which...
Textures: Substance Designer. A procedural texture generator which I'm quite familiar with from my normal work. Ultimately, I found I was able to cheat and only created three textures: rock, sand, and forest canopy. I just altered the hue and saturation of those two textures to create different rock colours, or turn sand into snow / grass.
Primary Render: 3ds Max + Corona. Terrain mesh, terrain masks, and textures were imported into a single file. Textures were linked up to the correct masks, and applied to the mesh. A camera and light was set up, and then I made the stupid decision of rendering a 14k image for 18 hours in the middle of the British heatwave.
Reprojection & Second Render: GProjector; 3ds Max. I wanted the final map to be curved 1. to reduce distortion as the map is going to be used as a physical prop for tracking progress on the table and 2. because curved maps are dope. The max render output of Gprojector is lower than what I needed for the map (the full-size map is A1 size @ 370dpi, like 12.5k x 8k px), so I had to make it a two-step process: First, I saved a copy of the render, put it in photoshop, and added evenly-divided grid lines to it (important). I put this version of the render into GProjector, and saved the distorted output. Second, I imported both versions of the map into 3ds Max. I then divided the plane the non-gridded render was on to match the gridded version. I then manually matched the vertices of the divided plane to match the grid, which meant the map distorted exactly the same as Gprojector. I then rendered *this* out. Thankfully since, I was basically taking a picture of a picture, this took 2 minutes, not 18 hours.
Composition: Photoshop. This second render went out into an A1 template. The city icons were just some custom brushes I had made a while back. Place names were generated from the language family I created. I used the wonderful sound change program over at /r/Lexurgy and simulated all the different languages' evolutions from a protolanguage. About 5% are nonsense names I got from just spitting respective lexicons through a markov chain simulator, but 95% of the names present on the map do have a proper meaning.
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