I'm working on a city for a campaign I'm running. This is a WIP.

Click image for larger version.  Name: Naserian-01.jpg  Views: 65  Size: 1.84 MB  ID: 135052

Just in case any of my players stumble across this -- Darla, Lily, Vegum! Shoo! Read no further! You'll get here eventually.

.

.

.

.

.

Are they gone? Okay.

Naserian was once a flying city of the ancient Shory (from Paizo's world of Golarion). They were, in fact, the last flying city of the Shory empire. And, unlike the rest of their peers, they did not crash. Nor did they explode midair, or anything like that. No: they deliberately landed the city in order make some modifications to the apparatus that kept the city in flight. Things went ... badly. And the inhabitants were forced to flee, even though the city itself was intact and fully operational.

I've tried to indicate the rough outline of the original flying island in the terrain. But I'm still planning to add a river, possibly a lake, and I may reshape the southern reaches. The land shouldn't reach up that high -- that's where the skyships docked. There should be some cliffs down there. And I also have some points of interest to add.

The general shape of the city (and particularly all those houses) came from the Medieval Fantasy City Generator on watabou.itch.io. I played with the settings and generated cities until I found one I liked. Here's the SVG I began with:

goany_cliff.svg

After downloading that I spent ages in Inkscape, disassembling it into its component pieces. Then I used those to create layer masks for use in Photoshop, where I proceeded to abuse the heck out of layer styles for much of the heavy lifting. I'm tolerably pleased with the outcome so far.

One thing I'm struggling with is that the place looks too intact. It's been abandoned for 5,000+ years. Even assuming protective magics, it should be more ruinous. I scattered trees all over the place, growing through roads and buildings, but that's not enough by itself. I need to figure out how to make some of the buildings partially destroyed. Also, this is a jungle area. I'd really like to have vines covering a bunch of the city, but I've been struggling to come up with a way to do that which doesn't involve manually drawing thousands of one-pixel-wide vines with my mouse.