Gossamer begins to take shape. I moved south from Shroomsbury into Wormwood and the eastern edges of the Brambles. With 8 pages done, I am now nearly halfway through the Wilting Quarter, and 10% through the city overall.
Wormwood is a sort of urban forest, and also a pleasure-district – a maze of roots and mossy bridges and winding streets, ornate spires emerging from a miasma of perfume and psychedelic mist, all of it overgrown with trees and foliage. As with Shroomsbury, I decided on a few landmarks. Firstly, I wanted a wyvern nest, the beasts domesticated so that their venom would be milked and diluted into one of many potent drugs consumed in the district, many others coming from Shroomsbury to the north. Second, a theatre – I went with an Elizabethan-looking structure, the Grove. Finally I put in the lavish, over-the-top Nymphaeum, somewhere between a shrine and a brothel.
The economic function of the Wilting Quarter is taking shape. Drugs, reagents, poisons, potions – the district is about transformation and liminal states, which fits with the autumn theme of Logris, the fairy realm of Mab. I’m thinking this theme will be echoed in a different way in the part of the city ruled by Titania, Queen of Spring, in the southeast, opposite Mab’s domain.
Next up will be finishing off the bottom corner and the Brambles, a thorn-swathed slum, district of assassins and thieves. It’s also going to include a sprawling witch’s garden where various poisonous herbs are cultivated.
The city as a whole now looks like this:
I was also thinking about how the Quarters will connect to one another – I may end up putting a big bridge between the Wilting Quarter and the Withered Quarter, the wintry section that will be directly east of this part. There’s a nice untaken spot off Deepshade square that would be easy to graft the bridge to without a lot of finnicky re-drawing. Once I’m finished with the Wilted Quarter I’ll likely move clockwise, moving through the Winter, Spring, and finally Summer sections of the city.
Four pages into mapping, the results look like this:
Even at this stage I needed to make some adjustments to the image – tiny misalignments, a paper slightly askew here, a scanning margin there, all meant that to make the images mesh I needed to expand and contract parts of the map, add a stairway here and a cluster of fungi there. This can be fiddly, but in some ways there’s a silver lining – these sorts of realignments tend to further disguise the gaps between pages and give the final result a slightly more organic look while still preserving the overall design.
With the images digitally sewn together, I then started adding names. I sometimes have a list of street ideas jotted down, but generally I make them up as I go. I named the giant (Napping Nog) and labelled a few especially important landmarks. There was some space left around some larger structures, so I decided retroactively to make these notable locations, labelling them the Wheezing Tower and the Collegium Gargantua – I’ll figure out details for these locations later, but the Colelgium will likely be a school focused on sleep-magic and psychedelic enchantments, while the tower might belong to a wizardly cabal. Making “discoveries” like this preserves a certain sense of spontaneity during the process.
Up next I’ll be starting a new district – possibly Wormwood, Rotting Hill, or the Brambles.
I’m drawing a new city – Gossamer, capital city of Elfhame – and thought this would be a good opportunity to show my process for desgining and mapping fantasy cities. This is something of a companion post to “How I Run a Citycrawl Campaign.”
Overall Concept
I start by thinking of the overall concept for the city – who rules it, what its economic and political purpose is, what its overall shape should be, its overall aesthetic, and which historical cities I can take as models. For Hex, I knew I wanted to create a magical university town, I knew I wanted the city to be shaped like a hexagon cut through by a river, and I took some broad inspiration from cities like London, Rome, and my home city of Vancouver. For Erubescence I knew I wanted to construct a vampiric capitol where the Night Queen traps her nobles at court with water (since vampires can’t cross it), and the idea of a pentagram stuck in my mind; my real-world references were Venice and Paris, with a little bit of St. Petersburg.
Gossamer, the Big Cobweb, is going to be the central metropolis of Elfhame, placed at the converge of the four realms of Logris, Annwn, Tír na nÓg, and Mag Mell (Fall, Winter, Spring, Summer). I want it to be literally cut into four, with two rivers carving the realms up, their confluence serving as the site of the city. Since I like giving cities a distinctive shape, and since I’ve picked the name Gossamer for the capitol, I’ve decided to make the city look like a giant cobweb, with canals taking the place of the webbing. This design is partly inspired by Amsterdam and Bruges, the two cities that I’ll be taking most of my visual cues from this time. The canals of Amsterdam were originally a series of defensive moats that slowly transformed into commercial waterways, which I’ll use as the basis for the web-like design in Gossamer.
This map is astoundingly good.
Getting Started
The idea of the city will be that there are four major “quarters” to it, each technically a different country. Gossamer will thus have a bit of the vibe of somewhere like East/West Berlin and other “divided cities” (this is partly inspired by The City and the City, which I’m teaching this summer). Each of the four quarters will have a different ruler, different laws, and a starkly different feel to it. They’ll also need a unique visual identity, so that while the map looks like one city overall, the quarters also feel quite distinct from one another. In the very middle of the city where the quarters meet will be a dockyard and bazaar.
I decided to start with Mab’s quarter, the Wilting Quarter, a borough of eternal autumn and decay. I jotted down some prospective names of districts: Rotting Hill, Grosscastle, Shroomsbury, the Wartward, the Brambles, Wormwood, and Horripilation Circus. For each of these I made notes on how I wanted each district to look, and its purpose within the city. For example, Shroomsbury, the district I’m starting with, is going to be the fungoid district, will have giant toadstool structures, and will be a significant manufacturer of drugs and potions – the alchemist’s district as well. This means it’ll include lots of wizard’s towers, laboratories, and similar places, but it will also be an organic sprawl of buildings and fungi (I picked this first because I figured it’d be fun and easy to draw – a good starting point).
To make sure that the map coheres, my first step is to find a pattern that fits my picture of the city. After some quick googling I was able to produce this:
This will be the “blueprint” for the Wilted Quarter.
Which, when resized and printed off, becomes this:
The madness begins again.
Each of these sections is numbered so that I know how they fit together. I now have a bluprint for the city and can begin actually drawing, placing the map over each section so that the shape of the canals is maintained. I began in the top right-hand corner. After some consideration I’ve decided that the Wilting Quarter does not have walls, but like Bruges uses waterways for defense (I think the Mag Mell and Annwn sections – names not yet determined – might have walls). I want this part of the city to be a sprawl, with structures throughout even the large sections without canals along the edges – indeed, these hinterlands will be the location of the Fairy Queens’ and Kings’ palaces, as far from their rivals as possible.
With a blueprint ready, I then sketched out roughly where each of the seven districts within the Wilting Quarter would be placed. The four “inner” districts will be the Wartward, Wormwood, the Brambles, and Shroomsbury, while the “outer” districts will include Rotting Hill, Grosscastle, and Horripilation Circus, since those districts will benefit from having more space – the first will be a mansion-encrusted hill, the second a series of gigantic ruins built by the exiled Fomorians, and the third will be a sort of demonic amusement park.
District 1: Shroomsbury
With the basics sketched out, I started drawing.
I use the blueprint to guide the drawing and keep track of things like canal position and which district goes where.
As each section is completed, I scan the results and tweak contrast. The result looks like this, for one page of the map. This section will take 20 pages, which means the overall map will be 80 pages.
I really enjoy drawing fungi.
One down, 79 to go. Shroomsbury needs some more landmarks, something to make it stand out apart from just being made of fungi. I brainstormed some ideas, including:
A giant who has been lulled into sleep by the psychedelic spores and now has buildings and fungi built all over him. I do have a giant head already in Erubescence (a zombified trophy), but I like the idea that this visual links the two cities, who were frequent allies in wars with the Giants before the Seven Years’ Mischief sundered the peace. I also like placing “passive threats” in my cities, like swords of Damocles – things that PCs could “set off” if they disturb, like the infectious Thornmaze in Erubescence or the protoplasmic monster in the Warded Ward in Hex.
A giant compost heap/garbage tip, essentially the cesspits and mass graves of the city, which can of course spawn all sorts of monsters and threats.
Since this is the alchemists’ and apothecaries’ district, a fungal hospital or leper house could be interesting, where patients go to have experimental cures involving bizarre growths and drugs.
I then drew the next page of the city, adding in the fungal hospital. This requires some care, lining things up with the precious page, like so:
Scan, boost contrast, reduce light a little, and the second page looks like this:
Now I simply edit these two pages together. I like to perform some minor tweaks at this point to make sure the pieces segue smoothly. I place broader streets at the join between areas, while occasionally interrupting those streets with diagonal canals or long buildings to disguise the fact I’m piecing the maps together as a series of 8.5/11″ pages.
When I add the first two pages together they look like this:
Looking back to the blueprint, I’ve now drawn the first two pages on the top right corner.
In subsequent posts, I’ll share progress on this map as I complete districts and quarters. I’m going to be starting with Shroomsbury in its entirety, and then we’ll spread out from there. Once Shroomsbury is done I’ll get into labelling and naming things, and then start to brainstorm more ideas for the adjacent districts – I have thoughts for each of them, but the specifics aren’t fully worked out, which is part of the fun.
