Birthing the City of Warten

This past week has included continued work on painting miniatures from Pandemic: Reign of Cthulhu. The Shoggoths are now finished. I have also continued my work on preparing for an upcoming surgery to remove cancer from my body. I don't have a date yet for this surgery, but based upon the tests and feedback from professionals, it is looking like sometime in the next 1 to 3 weeks. Finally, I've also begun crafting a city to be central in a new adventure being created by White Haired Man.

I've started and restarted crafting the City of Warten three times now. Each new iteration gets me closer to the vision of White Haired Man's author, Dave. Our last discussion was spirited as I had developed a very detail rich test version of part of the city using Inkarnate. Inkarnate is a fantasy map-making tool that may be found at inkarnate.com. After using this software for about a week, I found it to be difficult to manage to use for city creation. It could be done, but, I reckon many of the assets used to do so, would need to be self-created. There are also no existing tools for creating lines or shapes that I could easily use to begin crafting so called city blocks. Now, I'd rather not flame this tool, as I found it likely that it would excel at regional area maps of a game world. Just not good at city creation at this time. Feel free to contact me with examples of cities made with Inkarnate to show me the error of my ways!

So, this past week I returned to Adobe Illustrator to begin blocking out sections of the city. Old original growth, second city growth, waterfront, the spire, and what lies beyond the walls of the the second city growth. What I have so far is just that, a rough concept map which I will share.

Blue is the water, brown is waterfront and at roughly sea level as the water. Red represents the old growth areas of The Spire, an island where the founders built the government seat and the older section of town that was built behind a sturdy stone wall. Note that both of these areas are to be 60' above the level of the water, thus creating a sharp cliff facing the water, and waterfront areas.

The second growth of the city came later and is also adorned with a more modern stone wall with regular towers set into it. This area is roughly the same height as the older section of town. Everything outside in green either does not fit due to current levels of population, or is simply unwanted.

With this stage approved, it is time to develop more details of this map. I use Illustrator for this so that I can hone into an area later and "blow" it up larger for creating more details. Perhaps a very small section within the city, etc.

For those of you who have skill at this type of endeavor, maybe you would be willing to share something of your process. I am always looking to learn more about creating fictional maps, as well as about the process others employ!