Monday, July 05, 2010

Final Campaign Map


After much work, and much procrastination, I finally finished my campaign map for Caliburn.  I started back in march and though I took several breaks, including those to create an Ethnic and Religious version of the map, I have been working on this one periodically over the last several months.  I'm happy with the end result and feel it is my best work to date. 

Feedback is always welcome, so have at it.






2 comments:

Pontifex said...

Some thoughts:

1. The mountains are drawn based on perspective, but other terrain features are not. Shouldnt we be seeing the mountains from top-down perspective instead of isometric?

2. Seems a touch too dark for me overall. Maybe that difference is nullified when printed, dunno.

3. Rivers are drawn wide, with two banks and water in between, in many places. Consider the relative width of these to the scale of the map as a whole. I think solid single lines may look superior.

4. Certain text elements bend a little too far for my tastes. "The Highlands" is a good example. Becomes hard to read or weird looking.

5. In a related vein, seems a disproportionate amount of text is arched from upper left to lower right. Is there a reason for that?

6. Are Southern and Northern sea names intentionally misspelled? if so, good. If not, need to correct.

7. The Brecon isles, as a whole, appear too neatly arranged in a triangle. Might want to move them around a bit to create more chaos.

8. Seems like a lot of rivers in the north, relative to the rest of the continent. Most southern rivers feed into watersheds, northern rivers tend to stand alone. Is that intentional?

9. Seems like a disproportionate number of peninsulas are leaning to the east. Is that intentional?


Overall though, quite good. Feels very middle-earthy to me. Fairly mountainous place as well. Love the shields the most though.

Labyrinthian said...

Greg - Thanks for the feedback!

1. Unfortunately when porting the map onto the site it lowers the size a great deal. The mountains are not presented from a top down view, nor are towns, castles, trees, or hills. It can be difficult to see given the small image size. It also seems impossible to read a great deal of the labeling.

2. The map is definitely dark, and actually got progressively darker as I made it lol. The setting has left behind its Golden Age and entered into a period on unrest and war. I tried to convey some of that in the map by making it darker. I'm not sure how it looks printed as I haven't had it printed yet, but you may be right and it may be too dark when printed.

3. Everything in the map (save settlement symbols) is drawn to scale. I went with a 1 pixel = one mile scale in order to keep things organized. The largest river is 7 miles wide at its widest point (Modeled after the Mississippi river)

4. Yeah I think I have to agree with you. The Atheron mountains label is the one that really annoys me. I tried to keep the text on line with the "spine" of the mountains, but maybe that was not the best idea.

6. They are called the Northren and Southren seas, so they are correct as labeled.

7. Too true. Must fix that.

Middle earthy is good to hear. Also glad you liked the shields, they took a while.

Thanks again for the feedback!