Faerūn, Toril - Forgotten Realms
I've embarked on my second continent map of Faerūn. The intent the first time was to make a useful map for those who play - something very accurate to 3e canon to be used as a resource and less of an artistic masterpiece. Since (by far) the most time-consuming part of that map was research, that's where most of my attention went - the accuracy. However since the research is already done now, I'm going to have a go at it again with more attention to how it's made.
Admittedly I prefer satellite views so that'll remain consistent and I'll use my first map as the base for drawing the second so it'll share a similar structure, however, it'll all be redrawn and sized up to 20k wide so I can detail it better. This map will have a much cleaner feel and will eventually have a texture placed across it to flatten it all together, specifically for the rendered mountains which pull away from the flat feeling without a texture.
In any case, here's a clip of the map at 100% view.
I've decided I apparently like to torture myself and instead of doing it the easy way, I've decided to map each city and town individually. Which is going to be insane, but whatever. Looking up the shapes and details of each place is slow but rewarding. Where we are so far with Silverymoon and Everlund pictured. So far I've mapped the large cities down the Sword Coast and around Calimshan.
To take a break from drawing roads and cities, I started labeling what I've done so far. I like the sandstone texture to separate the "map" from the labels but I'm not sure if I'll keep it - I'll probably go to a paper texture eventually.
Connecting roads to the gates is actually one of the trickier parts I didn't think of. Rarely does a regional map connect to a city map so those connections aren't always considered and I've found gates and roads on the wrong sides of rivers a few times. I'm also not quite sure how I might make seeing locations easier (or if I want to). Some of these places are only a small dot on the map with a label next to them and they can be hard to find. I've tried to add roads but with the texture, small pieces of roads are hard to see too. I was thinking I might use the black lines (as I have on the far left of this preview) but I think I'd prefer not having the map covered in those. Another idea is to circle them. It'd match the circles that I use in the forest to peek through the trees to locations beneath to canopy (not shown in the preview). *shrug* Thoughts for another time.
100% zoom
Great work! I like especially the smooth graphics and the temperate pastel colours. Are you continuing to work on the Faerun map?
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