~Rhia's Fantasy World Design & Roleplaying Class~

[Rhiannon]

This will be a guide how to build a fantasy world, draw maps and other stuff, how to write a story or how to bring it to life when role playing with friends. Please no roleplaying in this thread (you don't have to "come in and sit down  ;D ). You can ask questions anytime. If you want to get opinions about your own work, feel free to upload your own pics. Unfortunately, proboads dont't accept harddrive uploads. To get your pics online, you can go to services like www.boomspeed.com There you can get a 1MB account to upload pictures from your harddrive for free.

The first part of this class will focus on:
Material
Story outlines
How to make good maps
How to design towns, cities, villages
How to draw maps of houses

[Rhiannon]

Getting Started:

Get a good old paper note book! Of course you can start typing your ideas on your computer right away, but believe me: You'll have the best ideas on a long drive to visit your grandma or in a math class... Sorting your ideas in a computer file comes afterwards  ;D

How to start on a first story: if you don't have any ideas right away, just think of your favourite fantasy fiction. Were you sorry when you finished the book because you liked the characters so much? Been unsatisfied with an ending? What would you have liked it to be? Take your time...
You don't have to write an epos before proceeding. General story outline is enough, you'll get most of your ideas while drawing a map.

[Rhiannon]

What does general outline mean?

- What will your world be like? Forests, deserts, seas, polar? Will there be magic? What level of technology?

- Write down a general storyline in keywords (you'll probably change it several times, but it's good to keep track of everything right from the start  ;D ), so that you have a general plan of your story.

- think about how many main characters there will be (one will be enough at first). How many side chars? How are they related? At which state of your story will they meet? Who's the bad boy?

- make some short background notes on their lifes so far. Age, where from, special abilities, why are they part of your story (the old one "I'm a poor boy from a peasant village and monsters have killed my family so I'm here for revenge" is rather overused, but not bad for a start  ;D )?

- in the course of your story, set up important locations like towns, mountains, castles. Make notes on place on map, populations, wealth, etc.

[Imrel]

other than dibeln, i have a project which is mainly for hettie shade's background. (for those of you who don't know, shade is my char on another site.)

info about her is here: geocities.com/argosdanae/hetties_cavern

info about naron, her home, is here: www.geocities.com/argosdanae/naron
still working on it.

[Rhiannon]

Great map, Firebird!

Fantasy Cartography

Material & Getting Started
Obviously, you’ll need paper. For the first overview sketches, you can use any piece of paper. Set scales, distances and proportions of the main places. Add notes on climate zones, lay out mountains and seas, etc. Keep this map next to your main map for reference. Mapmaking will require some time and effort so it’s good to use a high quality thick paper. Always take a large sheet, you’ll come up with more and more details when drawing.

Pens and pencils: take pencils of several hardnesses for the first outlines and shades. Have a good clean eraser next to you for corrections. Ink pens are great for high quality final drafts. Aside from pencils, you can use anything else like crayons or aquarell colors for a nice finish (here comes the high quality thick paper in again: it doesn’t allow ink or aquarells to seep through.)

Sample Maps & Style
There are many fine maps in many fantasy books and someone once said that „imitation is the highest form of admiration“. So it’s fine to start by copying a style you’ll like. Sooner or later you’ll develop your own. It’s important to stick to one style throughout one map.
You all know Tolkien’s maps, so I give you some other examples below. They are all details of published fantasy maps.
Authors are below images

Raymond Feist: Shards Of A Broken Crown

Terry Goodkind: Sword Of Truth

Michael Moorcock: Elric Of Melniboné

Margaret Weis & Tracy Hickman: The Legacy of Darksword

Uh, one of my own quick sketches to show another way to draw mountains (a more topographical style)

[Rhiannon]

Layout
Balance: Avoid a high cluster on one side of the map vs. a large open space on the other side. Try to keep an overview on concentrations of details. You can also use large mountain chains, rivers, etc. to connect different places.

Overview: is where the map is seen from. Usually from high above. Important part for scaling, distances, size and shading. The higher up your view is, the larger the distances between places. If you draw a map over 180000miles, you may have to draw very small.
Light: Very important concept for shading, e.g. mountains. Decide from where the light comes from and stick to it.

Dead Space: Sometimes you need to fill open spaces for balance. Unfortunately a compass rose works only once. So you can use things like dragons, other animals, trees, etc or a distant guage. Vary the type of images but be careful not to upset balance by filling in too much.

Actual Drawing
Mountains: Mountains provide depths and elevations in a map that otherwise would be just a plane interrupted by forests and rivers. Mountains usually occur in chaines, they curve and wind about the map and can cover large distances as well being a contrast to plains and forests. You can draw them in a topographical style or, like in most maps, from the top down for overlapping effects. Try to vary size and shape.

Rivers: There are some important basic principles:
1. They are long, thin and winding. Rivers twist and turn.
2. They connect to other water. Exceptions are mountain run off rivers that dry out in a low land. Rivers flow into the sea, not out of it.
3. They never criss cross each other.
4. They are surrounded by life. So there should be plants around them
5. Think about what makes rivers look unique. Rivers in a rocky area will twist less but be narrow and quick. Rivers across a sandy area will be shallow, wide and turn frequently. Think about gravel rivers or rivers in a muddy area.
6. Rivers are like trees, with branches and a trunk. They get larger when another branch joins.
7. They twist with the land

Swamps: ideal for filling area around river deltas. They need a good water source and are formed in low soft ground. For an example look at the left side of the Melniboné map ("Nebelsümpfe")

Forests: use different forms for different kind of trees to create a wild, living forest. Use different shades of green when coloring them or different pencils.

Other landmarks: Think of landmarks like a single rock, a lonely old tree or the remains of an ancient culture like pyramids and temples.


Adding Cultures, Cities, Villages
By now you probably have a good idea about countries on your map and the kings and queens that gover them. Now place cities and other settlements.
Major cities: What makes a city great? Location is most important. A thriving city is less likely to develop high up in polar mountains than in a fertile plain at the union of two major rivers or the crossing of the main trade routes.
Smaller towns will be scattered along rivers or streets, small villages can be found even in remote mountains valleys and deep forests. For all settlements there should be a source of food and water supply. A large town in the middle of a desert without a lake or river is highly unlikely...

Names: Different cultures will have different names for places (though you can stick to a „common tongue“ for your first tries.). If you use different styles of names, be coherent. Try to evoke a certain image with a name. Swamps e.g. will be associated with dark, gloom, a wet and muddy environment.

[Rhiannon]

ooc: sorry, been really busy offline, more soon ;D

[Rhiannon]

City, Town & Village Maps

General Location: Where will your settlement be and what kind of people live there? Is it an oasis in the desert or more like the city of a medieval king? This determines what houses, castles, trees, etc. look like.
Now take a closer look at the spot you want to place the town. Is it a wide open space, at the union of two rivers or will it be in a narrow valley?

Population & Housing: Of course, the king will reside in a castle but how about citizens, workers, craftsmen, etc? Will there be a slum or other dark and doubtful corners?

Development of cities: Cities grow in rings like trees. Old town centers tend to have small and narrow lanes, there might be several city walls, etc.

Culture and Houses
Different people build different kind of houses. E.g. Arabian style houses have flat roofs, western style houses a saddle (the normal ^ ) roof.

Oasis

Western village

Now that you know how to do all this stuff on paper, we'll go on to how to design maps on your computer

Oasis

Western village

[Rhiannon]

Computer Generated Maps

First of all, you need a graphics program that allows you to import and paint with custom textures. The one I used to make the maps above is Micrografx Picture Publisher 10. If you want to follow the instructions step by step, you can get a free fully functional demo here: www.micrografx.com

Preparations ( I have the German program version, so I can just guess what the English names of tools will be...)
#1 Textures.
PP10 comes with a variety of crazy effects and textures. Unfortunately they are no use for making maps. Fortunately you can import your own textures. I get most of the ones I use out of screenshots of games like Diablo2. If you need a good screenshot tool, take a look at SnagIt (free demo here: www.techsmith.com/products/snagit/default.asp ) Save the files as *.jpeg and open them with PP10. Select the „mask“ tool (no 3 on the left side menue) and draw a rectangle around the texture you want to select. Go to the „effects“ menue and select „assistents“. Go down to „generate tiles“ and follow the steps. Now you have a small picture with the texture. Choose the palette on the left menue and select „draw with structure“ (the four turquoise squares). Click on the „Structure menue“ and select „generate“ (the first one under the texture gallery) name the texture and click on „generate“.

Samples:

Earth

dark Earth

Rock1

Rock2

Grass

Grass2

Forest

Forest2

Sand

Snow

Tiles

Old Straw

Old Canvas

[Rhiannon]

#2 Structures
One of the things you can easily prepare are roofs and trees.
roofs: Use the „mask“ tool to draw a rectangle. Fill it with the „tile“ texture. Select a dark color from the picture and add the roof structures. Now select „Filter tools“ from the left menue. Choose the sun/moon to lighten/darken parts of the roof. Save it.
Normal trees can be done with the „forest“ texture. Trees like palms can be easily prepared. Open a new picture. Fill it with a background (desert) structure. Select the „mask“ tool and draw a palm tree. To give it a „living“ look, click on the palette again. Select tool no 4 (brush with defined object). Go to the selection and take one of the „leaves“ collections. Fill the tree. Choose the „crop“ tool and crop the picture to the palm. Save it. You don’t have to generate 100 trees, 3-4 will be enough. You can mirror and turn them around to make them look different.

Drawing a map (western village)
To get used to how to paint with textures, we will start wit a small village map.
Open a new image. Choose „fill“ and the grass structure. Set transparency to somewhere between 50 and 60%. Apply structure. Take the „paint Structure“ palette tool, choose the same texture and transparency and start painting several layers (of course you can set transparency to 0 but the other way looks more natural because it’s very variable, especially at the beginning when you don’t have many textures ready). Now choose the second grass texture and paint over some areas. Do so with the earth textures, too.

Now choose „forest 1/2“ and add some trees.

Now you can create your village. Open the „roof“ file and copy it to the clipboard. Paste one after another into your map. Because each house will have it’s own mask, place and turn it before proceeding to the next one. After placing all houses, you can now paint some streets and ways. Select a dark earth or a gravel texture. Set transparency to 50-60% again. Select an appropriate brush size and paint them. To make your map look more realistic, you can now lighten or darken some areas.

Congratulations, you’re finished. ;D

Just play around with tools, masks and textures. You should be really familiar with them before we proceed to larger maps.

If you have any questions, feel free to ask.
Any comments are also welcome

[Rhiannon]

Now we're going to cover larger areas, e.g. a coastal region

First of all you'll need some more rock textures

www.baertierle.de/eriador/Felsen3.jpg

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[Rhiannon]

First, choose "freehand mask" and draw the outline. Note: you have to plan and do rivers and lakes already, too.
Choose "fill", the grass texture and set it to a medium transparency.

Use the "draw with texture" tool and different transparencies to get some landscape structure. Note: low land as around rivers is darker than high land.

Add forests, swamps, etc

How to do mountains: again, low regions are darker, on the highest summits, there might be snow, etc

As always, use different transparencies to make your map more realistic

Now, fill spaces with forests and lighten/darken parts of the landscape. If you want to place cities and villages, do it now.

To make lakes, rivers and the see, go to the top menue, select the "mask" menue and choose "invert". Now you can fill the still white space with water textures.

Congratulations again, that's it ;D

[Rhiannon]

Next is drawing everything from a simple tent to a castle. It will involve a bit of architectural drawing so maybe you can get yourself familiar with some architecture cad programmes if you want (I'm busy on some sort of fantasy art project right now that turned out to be more time consuming than expected... ) until this topic is continued (probably around wednesday).

[Rhiannon]

In the following posts, I'll not only give you some example maps of existing castles, houses, fantasy building plans but also some pictures how buildings like this actually look like to give you something you can use for describing buildings in your own stories

Now why draw castles, houses and plans of them? Just imagine a roleplaying night with your friends, going along one of your own stories. You planned that the group of brave warriors will stumble upon a small ruin of an old castle tower, discover a staircase and eventually an important magical artefact in the cellars. If you don't give them some pictures and a map, there comes the inevitabe....You'll end up with each member of your group exploring an ever growing 10000 bedrooms castle with sleeping beauties and a huge fairy party in a golden cave below it....believe me...always... Ahem.
For drawing buildings in general, there are some basic architectural rules you should follow. One is of course gravity. Try to not only keep the outer walls in different floors but also the main carrying walls and pillars to keep your building from collapsing in the first thunderstorm ;D. Keep the right proportions. Because space in cities was already expensive 1000 years ago there are houses where the upper floor is larger than the ground floor but you certainly can't build whole castles this way. And, plan stairs or corridors to connect different parts of a house or castle already on the first layout.

The most important thing about castles: most of them were build on mountains, hills, islands in rivers to guard important trade routes etc. This means that their plan is almost never just rectangular.
You probably all know this one:

It's Neuschwanstein Castle...And it's not a medieval one but less than 150 years old
This is the plan of the castle:

Another one, also built after the medieval ages:
Lichtenstein Castle (not to be confused with Liechtenstein, thats a tiny state between Switzerland and Austria ;D )

Now for really old ones. Here are the plans of some British castles:

Pembroke Castle

Conway Castle

Two other famous German ones:

Hohenzollern Castle. And yes, that's a really old one, too ;D

Grevenburg Castle

The following ones are some of the castles around my home community ;D

Wildeck Castle

Reichenberg Castle

Teck Castle

[Rhiannon]

More food for your imagination...And- if you're planning a trip to Europe-all of them are examples of castles turned into hotels. ;D

Marksburg Castle

Schkopau Castle

Schnellenberg Castle

Schönburg Castle

another one with the same name...

Wernberg Castle