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Last time around, I painted in the different biomes on my map. That’s what the world looks like according to the weather patterns and random seeds and whatever else Azgaar’s Fantasy Map Generator uses to generate landforms. So the draft we’re currently working on is kind of what the planet would look like without any humans to screw things up. So now it’s time for the humans to screw things up. In addition to building roads, chopping down trees, setting things on fire, building cities, and doing all the typical stuff, we already know that 5,000-ish years ago humans caused a massive civilization-ending apocalypse on the half of the continent where Khezvaros is located. It was enough to bury at least one entire city (the one that’s somewhere under Khezvaros), so it probably left other marks too.
Before I turn the humans loose, I need to check again to see what kind of map scale I’m working with here. I think I did that before, but I don’t remember the specifics and the map may have changed since then. Our one known distance is between the City of 10,000 Dagger and the imperial capital, which I mentioned being 1,000 miles somewhere on the C10KD page. These cities are located at the mouths of the two largest rivers, so I use Photoshop’s ruler tool and find that it’s 1800 pixels between them, which means each pixel on the map is about .56 miles. Since I’m always going to be dealing with more than 1 pixel, I round that to .5 to make the math easier. I’m not worried about this throwing off the “1000 miles” thing because 900 is the straight-line distance, the world’s technology probably doesn’t allow exact measurement over such long distances, and I suspect most people would say “1000 miles” for anything in the ballpark. For imperials it makes the empire sound vast and powerful, to anti-imperials it makes the capital seem distant and unresponsive. Win-win.
Armed with the scale, I notice an immediate problem: The spot where Khezvaros needs to go is way too big. For reference, here’s the city map:
And here’s a close up showing that area on the world map:
The distance between those two guide lines is 186 pixels, or nearly 200 miles. The city’s big, but it’s not that big. The only scaled version of the map has hexes that equal 100 feet, which puts the map above somewhere between 1 and 2 miles east-west. That’s probably smaller, which is one of the reasons my next map project will likely be another run at the city map (also I’ve decided I want some canals; not Venice or anything, but it just makes sense to have at least a few since there are 3 rivers running through the city)–but even an expanded Khezvaros isn’t going to be hundreds of miles across.
To bring things in a bit, I go to my landmass layer and paint over the area where the two smaller rivers meet and turn off the grassland layer so I can see the land below it. I attempt copying my city map in and trying to use a semi-transparent version of it as a guide to the rivers, but then I realize that to get it to scale would mean making it 3 pixels wide, and even going down to something like 50 makes it pointless as a guide. There’s no way to get it to scale. The stroke around the landmass is–I think–5 pixels, which means that the rivers have to be something like 20 pixels wide (counting strokes) just to keep them from showing up as black lines. Since the city is shaped by the rivers, there’s no real way to show much on the map. Even the island in the harbor is too big at 1 pixel (mainly because of the stoke). So I just kind of get the rivers more or less pointed in the right direction and close enough together that the city symbol will cover most of the area shown on the city map. Once I’ve got the shape, I re-paint the grass layer to match the new landform. Here’s what it looks like:
The large island was formed by splitting the big river to the east (the Ogregvez, if you’re curious) to bring it closer to where it needs to be. I considered covering up the old river path and connecting the island back to the continent, but decided a nice big island near the city might be useful or interesting at some point. The smaller island was originally the island at the mouth of the Khezvaros harbor. The space between the new blue lines is still too big (60 pixels/30 miles), but again it will mostly be covered with a city symbol here and I think if I use this as the starting point for the revised city map it’ll work pretty well once I adjust for the oversized rivers, expand the city, and maybe allow for a wider flood plain along the big river.
With that done, I’m going to start with the big changes humans have caused. The most potential lies in the cataclysm caused by advanced warring city-states 5,000 years ago, which was civilization-ending enough to reduce what humans were left to tribal hunter-gatherers and return the planes to the herds for a few thousand years. The original city that stood where Khezvaros is today ended up buried, so I’m assuming they had atom bomb level magic here. The kind of destruction that shatters the very earth, turns deserts into glass, straightens the curves, flattens the hills, and can change a tire faster than a one-legged duck swims in a circle. More recently (300-1000 years ago), Khezvaros and other free cities of Tarsa held their enemies at bay by making pacts with dragons, who might have left some piles of slag where cities used to be, among other artifacts. Since I need to think of some cool landmarks, and since the side quest to fix the coastline has this up to over 1000 words already, I’ll sign off here and add the cool stuff to the map in the next exciting episode.
