Working on the heraldry appendix for the 576 CY Atlas, and I need to check the layout and presentation with you guys before I'm doing more than a few pages.

The shields comes in three sizes, from nation heraldry via provinces down to cities and other less prominent heraldry. I've kept the sizes not too different so the small ones are fully detailed. Major labels are above and smaller labels are below, I hope this is not too confusing.  Major shields are three per row, medium are four and small will hopefully fit five.  It is a compromise between giving eash shield space and still keeping the page count manageable. I'm not sure how many pages it will be, might be too many already..lol.

So what do you guys things of this?

This is a first sneak peek into the next generation of my Greyhawk maps. The technology and style of my Flanaess map is over twenty years old, and it is based on tools that was cutting edge in 1995, and much, very much, has happened since. I continued to use Bryce for terrain generation until about 10 years ago when I started to use World Machine, a then new tool for 3D virtual terrain creation. 

Now 10 years later I'm still using it, despite many including me have predicted its demise. Despite half a dozen new competitors I'm still using it, not because it is such a great tool, but because it is still the best for large area virtual terrain creation. After sending a couple of thousands of dollars and many weeks to try out other tools, I must admit it is still the best. For me that is based on three key features. First quality of the terrain details where WM is still as good as the rest of the competition, not better but as good as. Second, large area terrain creation, it is still by far the best  in this category with virtually unlimited area to work in. Third it is the only tool that can properly create river systems, not by default but with some workarounds and hoop, it is possible to create realistic river systems spanning a whole continent. 

The textured maps I how here are 5 ft per pixel scale and show 1 square mile, and only halfway done, but they show the potential of a modern mapping standard for fantasy mapping. This is the kind of map I want for my overland adventures, making it possible to run them almost as dungeon adventures. The characters can get lost here, and it is not the easiest thing to find your way across a kingdom if there are no road markers, so an in game map prop might be really useful. 

One of the main reasons it has taken me years to get to this stage is rivers, which I see as a necessary part of the landscape but something that was not doable with 3D terrain tools. Until now! The latest version of World Machine  has some basic functions that together with some clever programming makes it possible to create rivers using a combination of manual placement and procedural generation. 

When you are trying to recreate the terrain of a fantasy world you have a need to place major, and some minor, rivers along with a lot of other features in the places they are shown on maps and written about in the text. Then t flesh out the rest of the terrain and make it believable and interesting you need fractal power to place the myriad of other features, including lakes, rivers and other forms of wetlands. This is not an easy process, since you want all this realistically eroded and well blended without losing the ability to still edit things manually. 

This examples are maps that have a combination of elevation coloring and highlight colors indicating possible rivers, lakes and wetlands overlayed onto the terrain. This will all be saved as grayscale images that can then be used as masks both inside World Machine but also in Photoshop to make it possible to create stunningly detailed textures.  

Above is a quick test of this for a swampy area around a river. No blending is done yet so it looks rough but with a couple of hours of editing it can be made to look stunning. The same texture and masks can then be used in Game engine and GIS tools to create different versions and scales of the area.

More on this will come soon!  

Work on the Heraldry Appendix is gearing up and her are a first look. I have tried to make the simple vector graphics look more appealing with some texture and lighting effects. 

My idea is to present them alphabetically, but under country and some regions like the Nomads or the Thillonrian Barbarians. 

and here is a loser look at the Dimre shield to better see the quality.

This is a product aimed primarily for print so the details need to be good, and I think this is good enough even for high resolution printing.

What do you guys think?

You can get all the 50 maps, legend, overview, index and political here:

https://bit.ly/GH-Flanaess-Atlas576CY-2020REV2

This concludes the main part of the Atlas, but I have a couple of appendixes planned: heraldry and module locations. I'm going to take a week off for Virtual Greyhawk Con, and get back to the Atlas again after the convention.

Here is an ad for my seminar:

Thank you again for making this possible!! 🙂

Here comes the first take on the Atlas cover. I made two versions, one more colorful and one more minimalistic. I want to hear your thoughts and then create the pdf's

Worked on the Legend today, done a couple of prints, adjusted and printed again. Here is a new version that I think will work.

Full quality JPG here:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/h8nb8a93blyd0n6/Legend-3.jpg?dl=0

I've made the border and travel parts a bit larger, and increased the size of the borders and roads t make them a bit bigger.

I made a PDF of each of the pages so you can try and print one to see if they look good.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/alxss8agjr2ni40/Legend-3%20left.pdf?dl=0
https://www.dropbox.com/s/wbje54dbbfkq4ee/Legend-3%20right.pdf?dl=0

Thanks again for your input making this project better!

The Atlas work continues and here comes a look at the legend, please take a look at it and tell me what you think should be changed!

I opted for a "expansive" legend covering two pages, including a quick guide to how to read the index location info. I'm not sure it's needed or the right way to do it, but there was room for it so I added it. Anything missing that should be there?

I will also make a blank page that can be used to print a filler page, for note taking or as a base for your own custom page. 

Here is the Atlas Master Index, and it is thanks to amazing job by Duane Costa it was possible to compile a list of all the names with their location on the maps this quickly. The index fills 28 pages each 11 x 17 with two columns on each page.

You can find PDF and JPG versions in the Atlas Dropbox Folder:
https://bit.ly/GH-Flanaess-Atlas576CY-2020REV2  

Next up is index and credits!

Here comes the overview maps for the Atlas of the Flanaess 576 CY, they come in the standard "satellite" and political, each of the with or without the map layout squares.

You can get them and all the other Atlas maps here: https://bit.ly/GH-Flanaess-Atlas576CY-2020REV2 

This should have been ready a week ago, but there have been an unusual amount of "real life events" making life a bit more difficult around here lately, temperatures above 115F, two large fires within 20 miles with massive amounts of smoke causing power outages and the still ongoing pandemic. Thankfully the temperatures are now back below 100F and power is stable again, one have to try and stay positive 🙂

The index is now ready for formatting and page design, so I'll work on that as well as legend, credits and covers next. After that it's time for the appendices, heraldry and module locations.

I hope you are all safe and thank you again so much for making it possible for me to work on this, in times like this that means extra much!!

An essential but often overlooked part of mapping are symbols, the little bits of art that are put on maps to convey all sorts of information. The symbols I use on my Greyhawk maps are over two decades old now it was one of the first things I did when I set out to map the Greyhawk setting.

More detailed maps would need way more symbols and also more variation, to indicate various aspects of the feature the symbol indicated. My design was based on the symbols of the Darlene map, with a lot of additions and a few tweaks. I shill like them and thing they work, for the most part, but my design skills and the tools I used back then where not much to brag about, so an update is needed.

The Atlas will mark the end of a generation of maps made using Illustration tools like Corel Draw and then the last ten years Adobe Illustrator. Future maps will be made using GIS, various 3D software and still some Illustrator, so a solid set of symbols is needed. Several sets in fact, my intention is to give my existing set of symbols a work over making sure they are less scruffy and look well even in large sizes.

Two new symbol sets, at least, will be needed. Larger scale maps that will move in closer and showing much more detail will need and new set of symbols for things like urban areas, city walls and more. All the symbols I've used so far have been very useful for reference maps mainly used by the DM to who what the world actually looks like. Traditional RPG maps are more of the type of map the characters would use to navigate the world, handout maps. These maps need a whole new set of symbols to depict things like towns and cities, of a more illustrative tradition found on fantasy maps.

Getting all this done is a long term project that will take a year or two to get done, but the first step is to the existing symbols ready for a round of edits to get improve them. I did most of the symbols on an early version of Corel Draw back in the 90's and then imported them into Illustrator and added some more. There a number of inconsistencies that become painfully visible when you enlarge them, but its a necessary step to see what can be kept and what needs to be redone from scratch.

So I have enlarged all my exiting symbols and saved them as PNG's with a transparent background to make it easier to use them as a reference image. They are all available here: http://bit.ly/GH-Symbols-Folder

Future symbols sets will be available here as well when they are ready.