# Mapmaking Discussion & Philosophy (WIP/Critique) > Town/City Mapping >  WIP - New-Stetven, capital city of Brevoy

## Narolas

Hello there !
After making my own map of the Brevoy area, a custom town in Rostland named Fière-Muraille, it's time to map the capital city of Brevoy, "New-Stetven" !
Like my map of brevoy, new-stetven is an actual location in Paizo's campaign setting for Pathfinder, but only vaguely described, which gives me a ton of room to play with in my homebrew campaign.

I had already made simple hand-drawn sketches a while back, but I wasn't really happy with the way the city is portrayed in those, so I went back and updated them.
I now have a rough idea of what I want, and I've already worked on this for a few days., here goes for the first progress updates :



So I took the area of my Brevoy map where New-Stetven would be and zoomed-in on it to use as a reference.



First rough idea of what-goes-where in the metropolis as well as a start on terrain lines/colours, pictured here are :
- main travel roads/hubs
- areas of wealth (orange = nobility, dark green = rich, green = common, pink = poor)
- circles of wealth (in red) to give myself an idea of a gradual transition from rich to poor areas.
- A size comparison with Fière-Muraille, a large city in Rostland.
- A rough scale



Same version, different layers :
- Elevation map to give an idea of how the terrain looks, more specifically the two hills the city is built on (the old stetven hill north, the high and steep hill to the south where the royal palace is),
as well as the coast and the area where the bridge would be.



First real update, grass and water colours are pretty much done (i'm sure there'll be lots of tweaking over time), cliffs are done as well, haven't touched the woods.



And a better plan for how the city will look, with a more detailed road network and city areas (same colours as before, with yellow = economic/touristic (ie. crowded and lots of shops), blue = docks/fishing/etc..)


There !
Feedback is welcomed as always, next up : shading on cliffs, woods, road network.

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## ChickPea

Off to a great start! I really enjoyed watching you put your last map together, so keen to see this one develop too.  :Smile:

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## Narolas

Thanks ChickPea!

Here's the latest progress :



Roads, shading on cliffs, tweaking of colours and the forest.
I still consider the forest to be WIP, i don't know, it doesn't feel quite right, but maybe that's just me ... thoughts on that ?

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## Ilanthar

Well, that's gonna be another good WIP to watch. Your forests looks already nice, though I would mix a bit more lights&shadows. I mean, there's no particular reason for a forest to be lighter on the edges and darker inside (on a top view). Density and tree-size is generally quite chaotic (except man-organized ones), depending on ground variations and the competition between plants.
Another question : what is the purpose of the (texture?) effect close to the forest that looks more digital?

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## Warlin

I love the color and the variations according with the elevation. I always find it difficult to give the impression of relief from above. Nice work!

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## Narolas

Yea, looking at the forest now gives me some better ideas.
The texture was a quick try to simulate bushes or low density vegetation, i'll change that because it looks fake atm.
Ilanthar you're absolutely right, that's probably what was bothering me, I'll have multiple "levels" of light/dark shading to suggest clusters of higher/lower trees and elevation change. I'll also add some clearings/holes in the forest, make it look less like a single mass of trees. Lots of good ideas of improvement!

Thanks for the feedback  :Smile:

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## Narolas

Tried a different style for the forest, i'm wondering if it's fitting with the rest of the map.
Thoughts ?



Also some slight colour and road tweaks.

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## J.Edward

I like it Narolas. I think it looks good. Only critique would be that I feel like the edges of the woods should be a bit more rounded, less angular.
Color looks good. Shading is nice too.

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## - Max -

Looks pretty good so far indeed. Nice forest shading, I like it. My only critic atm would be on the bevel (or inner shadow) effect on the roads. This digital effect clashes with the hand-drawn map in my opinion.

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## Narolas

Not much of an update, but i'm trying to get those things right first, so :



Tweaked colours and shading a bit on forest, remade some lines to remove the more angular/jaggy lines.
Tried different things with roads, my problem being that I want it to pop out a bit and be readable easily (it is a map after all), but as Max pointed out the "digital effect" look clashes with the hand-drawn one.
This version has a smaller stroke with slightly feathered borders, instead of a bevel effect I tried a really subtle inner-shadow effect. I've also tweaked the mask on roads (I added it last version to make the roads slightly darker/brighter depending on elevation).
I'm also thinking once elements are added to the map and a large portion of it is filled with buildings/blocks/etc the roads will clash a lot less.


Thanks a ton guys, this is why working while updating a thread on this forum is great, really quick feedback from some of the best cartographers  :Smile: 
I'm slowly developing a kinda style and method, i'm excited to work on another region map next and try better things (my Brevoy region map kinda sucks when I look at it now!), or maybe try a really low-scale map, like a building, a manor, a street, we'll see.

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## J.Edward

Narolas - look at some of my old maps... we all grow and improve. All of us.  :Smile: 
Sometimes I cringe when I see my old work.  :Razz:

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## - Max -

Keep it up, you seem to be on the right track here! And to echo my esteemed colleague, there's some of my old maps I would be scared to look at  :Very Happy:  So no worry you'll keep improving eventually.

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## Narolas

I know that's what I mean, if i'm cringing when looking at a map that means I've gotten better, I see it as a good thing  :Wink: 
Next on the TODO list is city planning (finally), aka walls, quarters, blocks etc. The actual fun part!

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## Ilanthar

Very nice improvement Narolas! The forests are good now, and I'm looking forward to see the many pretty buildings.
And, well, as everyone, I've my lot of old scary maps  :Razz: ! Sometimes it itches so much that I can't help myself but redo them.

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## Larb

Not really sure about your water ripples. They're too squared off - you could try using the smooth selection tool after expanding it when making the ripples.

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## Narolas

Yup, good idea.
Honestly the more I detailed the forest the more other elements stated looking out of place, the water ripples is one of them.
Thanks for the feedback !

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## Ilgoth

Liking your workd here Narolas. Also the forests here look lot better than in your previous city map. Will be following your work!

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## Narolas

Fairly busy these days, but some slow progress nonetheless.
I'm done with the bridge, might add some more detail later on if I feel like it.
Started planning the walls and some of the bigger buildings.



Happy with the bridge, not super happy with how the wall around the northern hill would look, it kinda flattens the whole thing and makes it harder to read it as a hill, or something, it's weird. 
Thoughts ?

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## J.Edward

It looks good Narolas.  :Smile:

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## Narolas

It's been a little while, but some progress on the city.



The inner city is the most properly lined (but nowhere close to final), the outskirts and other details are just rough planning for now.
I'm kinda wondering how i'm going to actually represent the city blocks and buildings, because while it'll be easy for the center (big, smooth city blocks), I have no idea how i'm going to draw the messy chaotic slums (especially at the north-east), there's a lot of empty space and after a point it's pretty much individual buildings, so...

Not sure, I don't want to spend a billion years drawing each individual building, any ideas on how to represent the slums ?

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## J.Edward

I guess it would depend on how you draw the main buildings.
You try to maintain drawing style across all buildings.
I'll have to see some other buildings drawn before I could give you a useful suggestion.
Do you have a version with a few finished buildings?

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## Narolas

Well I was kinda hoping to just draw the blocks, just smooth abstract shapes, a lot faster than making individual buildings.
Of course important buildings will be drawn differently to seperate them.

I think what I'll do is make simple rectangular shapes copy pasted for the individual slum buildings, no detail, any part of the slum that's a bit denser will be connected shapes.

I mean, i'd love to have detail on the buildings, but it would take me forever to do, and the result would be very busy looking.

It's still up in the air, so i'll have to think on it for a while.

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## Narolas

Wow, it's been a while!

I've been busy doing other stuff for a while, but I recently got a new computer and opened up this map again, I can now more easily work on it without having Photoshop taking 30 seconds to register every stroke, so that's helping.

Anyway, since I haven't updated this thread for a long time there's been quite a few changes !

Here goes :


It's a little low-quality, the psd file is freaking huge, I could only export the Jpeg to medium quality to keep it under 5Mb.

higher quality : HERE

I've increased the image size, so I now can draw each individual building, I'm still not sure how much detail I should put (don't want it to be too busy), but I can at least line the buildings in black, It's pretty easy to do on top of the existing blocks, and then probably some light colouring/shading to keep it subtle.

I definitely will go back and re-draw a bunch of stuff, because now that I've increased the size it looks blurry. A lot of the terrain (cliffs, forests) looks good enough (tell me if you think it's too blurry), but a lot of the buildings, details and such will be re-drawn (there's not a lot that's final anyway).

Feedback very welcome!

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## Ilgoth

Looking good Narolas.  :Smile: 

Just randomly remembered your project, and after bit of searching found it from the depths of this vast platform you guys call "forum". Keep it up, I like the shapes and that wall line is pleasant.  :Smile:

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## Ilanthar

Hey, glad to see you're still working on this! Increasing size... indeed the best way to improve the information quantity, details and quality. Also the best way to increase the time required to actually do the map  :Wink: .

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## Narolas

Back again for my once-a-year update !
In all seriousness, I'm a lot more busy than I was when I started this, but I still slowly work on it every once in a while.

What's new (I think), some detail work, a few special buildings made, some streets/areas changed, graveyards added (I was DM-ing a session in the city, and realised there weren't any places to bury the dead except temples, whoops), a few other details.

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## snodsy

Nice job Narolas; Really nice forests and overall layout. Coming together nicely.  Your water rings are really subtle might want to bump that up a bit?  You cliffs add a nice change of elevation, looking forward to seeing this develop, it's going to be a good one.

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## Narolas

BY THE POWERS OF NECROMANCY!

So yeah, this thread still exists. So what happened?
Well I got busy with things, but most importantly the campaign for which this map was going to be used happened. I started using it with my players in its unfinished state, and as things developped I added and improvised details, realized things were missing, weren't interesting, etc, etc..

And at the end of that I was left with a mess of a layer with "WIP" neon lines everywhere, and lots of notes.
That kinda made me "give up" and just let the map as is, especially since it was working fine and my players weren't complaining.
But, now I'm planning another campaign (following the previous one which lasted... around 5 years!), and this city is going to be a pretty important place again.

So, with all that said, i've cleaned up my notes and ideas, taken missing things and new events into account, and I've recently started going over everything and redrawing, cleaning, etc...

My last update was version 13 of the map, this is version 19, and there's a lot that's changed!
There's a few places that are still WIP (palace, a park, the two cemetaries, cathedral and carnival), and a lot of "unique buildings" are for now just the outline with a different colour. 
The building clusters were recently redrawn and adjusted after having modified some places so much (I took the opportunity to fix and widen a few streets and other things). I'm still planning on detailing the clusters (or blocks) more, now that I have more resolution and everything is cleaner.

You might notice the buildings/clusters are missing the overlay texture, I forgot to put it back on for this export, it's easier to do things with it turned off. The clusters themselves have very pixelly lines for now, at least it's better than messy blurry pixelly lines.

I'd love some feedback on things, are things better, have I removed/added too much in some places, that kinda thing. I'm uncertain about the palace hill forest (the central hill) for example.



(High res version HERE)

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## Narolas

A quick little update with a slightly better looking export (a few texture changes and tweaks).



As an addition to the previous post, here's a list of changed things :

- Western hill now more of a hill, structured with winding streets going down the slope and lots of stairs.
- Western hill will now have a fort (WIP) connected to the lake tower and protecting the bridge.
- Eastern lake tower now part of a large military complex containing a prison, city watch headquarters and connected to the north to the "iron port".
- Most city quarters redrawn/tweaked, center of the city has larger main avenues.
-- North-east quarter remade, more recently built and "square-y" in blocks, contains lots of more industrial things and working-class buildings.
-- Southern village reduced in size and complexity.
- Ports cleaned up (straigher docks going slightly above the coast), boats still there as a WIP reference.
- cemeteries added, northern one on old stetven hill, southern one next to a new cathedral (WIP).
- a sort of "carnival" (WIP) added to the south-east edge of the city.
- Palace layout redone and detailed (WIP).

Not visible on those is a ton of notes and more unique buildings and quarters, which will become visible when individual buildings and details are added in.

I think the biggest thing to add once all those WIP things are done is shadows. Everything projecting a shadow, especially large/special buildings, will make everything pop out and clearly show the height of everything. I'm especially excited to see how the bridge, hills and forts look once the shadows show the elevation.

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## Narolas

Another update!

So a while back I increased the resolution of this project because I wasn't happy with the detail I could put on individual buildings. Since then I've been annoyed at the fact that the terrain (grass, cliffs, water, forests) still looked low-res, and it being the first thing I worked on was also kinda old and sloppy.

Soooo I redid the whole thing, and it took a while, and I went slightly insane re-doing all the little squiggles for the forests.

Overall, from afar you might not notice much of a difference, but the water was detailed with a kind of "depth" shading and higher res watercolour texture.
All the lines (coast, forests, cliffs) were redrawn and are a lot cleaner.
Forests were redrawn and tweaked, with a few bits of roads tweaked as well.
The entire light shading (not final projection shadows, just the shading) was redone based on the advice of Caenwyr with a light coming from the NW.

Most of the buildings are still WIP ("special" buildings or blocks) and haven't been changed since last time.

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