Out Of My Mind

I have some private projects that I keep returning to. On of my favorites is the map of my campaign city. The City of Tallon was envisioned to be your basic Edgar Rice Burroughs-style Big-City-In-The-Middle-Of-The-Wilderness. This is an inherently insupportable fantasy, yet it occurs in much early fantasy and pulp sci fi. A great deal of my campaign world’s economy, ecology, and magic system was created specifically to make this type of city possible. But that’s the subject of another post. Today I would like to show how the city evolved graphically. Pretty pictures follow the cut.

The original map was fairly simple, and designed to look like an artifcat produced within the campaign. In other words, it looked like something a character might possess, rather than a campaign document. The exception is that neighborhoods are labeled by broad categories, rather than what people would actually name them. This reflects the state of planning at that point. That level of detail simply didn’t exist.

Early Map of Tallon

Eventually, as the years of real time accumulated, details began to create themselves organically. The characters wanted to go to a different tavern, or wanted to buy a horse, or wanted a place to get cleaned up after a journey. Every business they went to or NPC they spoke to was given a location and maybe a quick notation. The city map began to grow. This became fun to do, and I would begin to add places they might be likely to go, or city infrastructure that might have a bearing on the action of an adventure (where are the guard houses, for example).

The map grew and grew. Eventually it became too detailed to display as a small graphic, so I tiled it and inserted hot links to all the write ups. What had been a prop now became a tool. As I grew more proficient with my graphics software (or as new capabilities were added), I tried to make the map as graphically pleasing as possible. The result is mark 2 (actually, tehre were several evolutionary steps, but they have been lost, or were never completed). Here is a tile from the on-line map as it currently stands:

City of Tallon Second Map

The rate at which new places and NPCs are being added has slowed down considerably, since the game has shifted to play-by-post, and the action has been primarily overland, but I keep returning to the map. It is now a pastime, an artwork as much as a campaign tool. The latest version (which is a long term work in progress is shown in excerpt below. Buildings are now rendered in detail, using graphic tools to simulate roof-lines and building shadows. Larger buildings are simply drawn in a more realistic format, although still essentiall graphic in nature, to keep the project manageable. Eventually, when this is finished, I will either simply replace the current map on-line, tile for tile, or possibly use a Google Maps interface, allowing players to zoom and click to their hearts’ content.

Work in Progress at comparable zoom

City of Tallon Work in Progress Detail

Now I have no illusions about this. It’s a project for fun. I’ll never detail every building, nor would I want to. No one is going to read the whole thing. But it’s just pleasant to create and creates a great sense of immersion.