# Mapmaking Discussion & Philosophy (WIP/Critique) > Town/City Mapping >  The City of Deestan

## NeonKnight

So, as I posted in my big CITY MAPS GALORE thread, I had found one of my old City Maps for the City of Entiny, and Ravells said I should work it. Well, oddly enough that was my plan, to bring it up to a nice digital copy.

To that end, here is a screen shot of my current WIP for the City of Deestan for my new 4.0 D&D Campaign.

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## alucard339

A classical style map (the castle, the old city & the new city), but then in those time, that style of building was the way to go.

So in the end, it a great sketch of a map and I like it. I'm sure that with your talent, the final version will kick *butt.

Let's only hope you develop a new mapping style so that we can all use it, because in the next year, I will have to work on the city maps of my Vinnengael country (around 30 to do).

Take care, 
Alu.

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## pyrandon

MAN, Neon--you were a machine!!  Wow--you certainly were prolific.  (Ah, the good old days, when you had nothing to dut but mess around with a map all night...)

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## NeonKnight

So here is the City map so far.

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## delgondahntelius

Very nice Neon.. are you working with CD2 or CC3?

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## NeonKnight

It's pretty much nothing but CC3.

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## NeonKnight

And the outer town now grows.

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## delgondahntelius

That's looking really good... you are a machine brother... I say roll on...  :Very Happy: 

btw, neon, I sent you a private message... with a question or two...

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## NeonKnight

Did some more work on Deestan.

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## delgondahntelius

Outstanding! I look forward to the finished product  :Very Happy:

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## terrainmonkey

i haven't taken a look at the progress of this map for a while. great work! plain, simple, yet dynamic. if this is going to be the main city in your 4th ed game, i want to visit. can i play a gladiator in the arena?! good job. i'm not usually a fan of maps in CC2 or 3, but you've managed to break the mold and do a style that doesn't have that CC sameness to it, if you catch what i'm saying.

keep up the good work. i'll keep checking back.

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## pyrandon

Coming along very, very nicely, Daniel!

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## RobA

Nice detail!  Can you estimate how much effort you have put into this so far?

-Rob A>

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## NeonKnight

> Nice detail!  Can you estimate how much effort you have put into this so far?
> 
> -Rob A>


Effort would be....maybe about 2-3 hours work so far. That includes tracing the original Pne-Paper map, making a few changes, playing with details etc.

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## Sigurd

Looks clean and beautiful,


What are the semi-regular blue dots? Fountains?


-sigurd

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## NeonKnight

> Looks clean and beautiful,
> 
> 
> What are the semi-regular blue dots? Fountains?
> 
> 
> -sigurd


Yes, the semi-regular blue dots are fountains/wells. Its something I notice almost all city maps are lacking but all cities need: a source of fresh, clean water.

Look at movies like 300, or even more older movies like Ben-Hur or the 10 Commandments. Communities had a centralized source of fresh water, drawn from wells in small towns to cisterns in large communities.

Examples can be seen here:

http://www.waterhistory.org/histories/nimes/#photo3

http://www.castelnau-pegayrols.fr/adduc/aduca.htm

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## NeonKnight

Ahhhhh....ANother update, added some tombstones to the cemetery (upper left)

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## rwaluchow

It's looking really good. I love the building distribution, especially in the outlying areas. I also love the scroll.

Reminds me that I need to get back to work on my own port city.

Keep up the great work.

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## ravells

This is looking great Neon! Hope you didn't get carpel tunnel after drawing all those buildings! What is interesting is that in your city the building density is virtually constant. I guess that implies some sort of formal planning rather than piecemeal evolution. The road width to building size ratio is also quite large, again suggesting a 'planned' city. 

One interesting side project to do would be to draw the city in a side sillhouette view. One of the difficulties in drawing city maps the way we tend to draw them is that vertical components tend to get ignored and these are very important to the look and feel of the city.

Lovely work.

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## NeonKnight

Thanx. Ravs

The back story, for the Big 4e Points of Light aspect is the City was an imperial Port City of the now shattered empire. As the Central Government collapsed and areas became more isolated the citizens are now encroaching on the city viewing it as a place of safety and refuge from the chaos of the lands about. Hence the sort of dual nature of Refined City within the walls and sprawled chaos without.


***EDIT*** Rather than Bumping my Post count I will add the BACK STORY NOTES of my new campaign here:

The Shattered Empire of Karhielohrn (KERR-ee-ah-lorn)

The Empire spanned nearly the entirety of the continent of Keihlsteef (CAEL-steph).

The Empire’s demise began approximately 500 years earlier as a result of the following calamities:
·	Through arcane magic, the sorcerer kings, mages, and high priests of the empire bound elementals and other extraplanar beings to form the infrastructure of the empire. Examples are Air Elemental driven sky-ships, Water Elemental operated irrigation and other water systems, Fire Elementals for heating and smelting, Earth Elementals to mine and shape the nation.
·	Towards the height of the Empire, this huge reliance on magic force, and enslaving magics caused a Planar rift to form above the capital city of Branshoon (bran-SHOON).
·	The Planar Rift allowed many demons and devils ingress into the Prime Material plane, no longer held back by the ancient wards.
·	With the Collapse of the Central Government, the armies were called back to the center of the Empire in an attempt to repel the fiends.
·	With the frontiers of the empire now unguarded, the humanoid hordes and other fell creatures previously held at bay were able to overwhelm the weaker portions of the Empire. As a result, most smaller towns and villages were overrun and cast into ruins. Larger cities were able to repel the hordes that soon fell to warring amongst themselves. These larger cities are now cut off from each other (see above because collapse of governmental infrastructure), and have formed independent city states controlling surrounding territories at most up to a day and half’s ride away.
·	With the collapse of the central government, and decimation caused by the Infernal Wars, the Elementals were mostly freed, and nature has run wild over the wild lands, overgrowing ruins. Out in the wilds can be found many spectacular remnants of the ancient Empire (War Wagons, Auto-wagons, ‘Railways’ etc.)


Before the fall of the Empire, the ruling class of Karhielorhn became obsessed with secret snake worship. Soon snakes were viewed as holy creatures. This lead to an internal destabilization of the government and an early danger of fragmentation of the empire. As the royalty and nobility embraced their snake cults, some became more and more snakelike, as a result the upper nobility became split as those with snake like aspects became superior to those who were not (Basically the Yuan-Ti).

City of Deestan (dee-STAN)

A far removed port city of the Empire, Deestan is situated on the shores of the Azure Sea

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## loogie

being fairly new to cc3, and mapping for rping in general, i'd like to hear your process in creating a city like such.. few big questions of mine are...

The process you take to create the city... as well as what tools you use (you said cc3, i have citybuilder for cc3, do you use that or place everything by yourself? i've messed around with it, but only found the simple "random street of buildings" do you do that all over? or some other way?

What are the basics of a city you need to process... 

IE
castle/keep, walled city, outer city? i've never really done anything in a fantasy sense so i'm a little lost to how cities came about at that time...

any help would be much appreciated.

thanks

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## NeonKnight

> being fairly new to cc3, and mapping for rping in general, i'd like to hear your process in creating a city like such.. few big questions of mine are...
> 
> The process you take to create the city... as well as what tools you use (you said cc3, i have citybuilder for cc3, do you use that or place everything by yourself? i've messed around with it, but only found the simple "random street of buildings" do you do that all over? or some other way?
> 
> What are the basics of a city you need to process... 
> 
> IE
> castle/keep, walled city, outer city? i've never really done anything in a fantasy sense so i'm a little lost to how cities came about at that time...
> 
> ...


I have the City Designer Pro or whatever it's called (waiting on City Designer 3  :Very Happy: ), but for me, I have built cities using the random street function, and similar things.

In this thread here: http://www.cartographersguild.com/showthread.php?t=845 is collection of all the city maps I have done on Pen-n-Paper. I have mapped a lot of cites.

For Deestan, I took a Pen-n-Paper map, scanned it (did to post in the above thread  :Wink: ) converted to BMP, and then insert that as a layer in CC3. To see how to do that, follow this tutorial:

http://www.cartographersguild.com/showthread.php?t=1431

Then. In CC3, I made a drawing tool for the buildings that would allow me to draw polygons in White, and then outline them in Black. This I use for the buildings, thus allowing me to draw, draw, draw the buildings as I like.

As for cities, a non-planned cities (and a lot of cities were planned, look to the Ancient Egyptians for City planing at it's finest):

http://touregypt.net/featurestories/amarna.htm

There was even an Egyptian city that was physically transported in it's entirety many miles up a river as conditions had changed to drastically at it's original location. Can't remember though.

As it is, most cities usually began as small collections of locals around a primary reason for congregation (a ford in a river ala Oxford England, a an ancient fort (London for Roman Conquests) or castle at an important geographic feature. The town then sprigs up following the lay of the land (easier to build at the bottom of steep hills and along a source of water like a river or lake) and as it grows in size and prosperity a wall may be built to protect the place. Of course a place may continue to grow after the wall has been built in which case a second or even third wall will be built to surround the whole.

In Deestan, the Original city was built as a planned community around the keep which hold a position of prominence at the mouth of a river (the smaller rivers form a bit of a delta). Good farmland, the place grow in size until the power of the nation through use of the enslaved Elementals allowed them to 'build' a new expansion tot he city. Thus the 'Old' city of Deestan has some order to it. With the collapse of the empire and refugees from the holocausts of the region, new communites are forming outside the city walls in a very chaotice fashion. If the regio continues to grow, a new city wall may be built to encompass these outsprawled areas.

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## Kagehito

Very nice work thus far Neon!

I opened up all the images and flipped through them like a flip book... It really helped me out as far as seeing the flow process that people use when making there maps. 

Some really good stuff here. I'm intrested to see how you work the rest of the map to bring it to a polished "finished product."

Guess I'll just have to be patient and wait!

-Rob

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## Turgenev

Nice work, NeonKnight. Very nice work indeed. Its an inspiration to me to do some more city maps!

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## NeonKnight

So, the City of Deestan is pretty much Finito for mapping purposes.

Now comes the BIG work of the Write-up  :Wink:

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## The Cartographist

NK - Really nice, although it appears really pixelated.  Do you have a higher res copy that you could post?  I'd love to look at it in greater detail.

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## NeonKnight

Whew. Takes a lot longer save Higher Res  :Wink: 

But, here ya go!

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## Ascension

Don't know if it was intended or not but, personally, I like Swrod road  :Smile:

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## NeonKnight

> Don't know if it was intended or not but, personally, I like Swrod road


No it's not  :Wink: 

But thanx for pointing out typos.

I like personally how I can typo the same thing over and over. EVEN when I pay attention.

I had typoed Arena Street three times as Arean Street, EVEN WHEN I CONSCIOULY TRIED TO TYPE IT (check the Low Res version above  :Wink: )

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## Sigurd

Very pretty!


The hi res version is so pleasantly clear! Good job.


And now for extra points, list the populous  :Smile: .


Sigurd

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## Redrobes

You can tell I am on the hunt for cities and localities for the main CWBP map...

I am a little confused by a few things too. The name of the sea and river on which its placed here seem different to the main map tile. So I am not being confused here am I ? Is this is the Deestan from your Skolvendun tile ?

Well, if it is, I came across this more by accident as its not being indexed in the list of places for CWBP. Do you think this should be retitled [Region 1][Mao 6][City x]Deestan ?

I am getting the feeling that this is not part of CWBP tho...

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## NeonKnight

> You can tell I am on the hunt for cities and localities for the main CWBP map...
> 
> I am a little confused by a few things too. The name of the sea and river on which its placed here seem different to the main map tile. So I am not being confused here am I ? Is this is the Deestan from your Skolvendun tile ?
> 
> Well, if it is, I came across this more by accident as its not being indexed in the list of places for CWBP. Do you think this should be retitled [Region 1][Mao 6][City x]Deestan ?


It could be. I am big.....re-user. Nothing I ever make goes away. If I can rehash something I will. 

That said, to make it fit to the CWBP I need to rotate the map, and rename the River and Ocean.

(Much Like I plan on reusing the pne-n-paper map for Shirdon for....Shirdon  :Wink: )

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## Redrobes

Ah, ok thats cool. I try to reuse as much as possible. With all these cities they appear as specks on the main map so ill keep this one on my map as a sort of reference so that in the future it will be easier to update.

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## jreiswig

This is pretty awesome. I love the riverbanks, I'm going to have to steal that technique.

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## Durfio

Being completely new to CC3 I'm just learning how to achieve some things with the software but I'm slowly getting the hang of it. NeonKnight, I would love to know how you managed to have a land map of Deestan and then add the rivers in. This is exactly what I am trying to acheive on a local land map I have. It is an inland map with no coast, but I would like to add a river. The CC3 tutorial only shows how to add rivers using the curved path tool but that simply creates a line of a certain thickness. I would like to have varying distances between the riverbanks like you have in your map. If anyone can shed some light on how to do that I'd really appreciate the help.

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