I’m planning a series of posts about Hawk Tales FRP and its development. It was really hard to figure out in which end to start, but after a few days of thinking about it I decided to start at the beginning, both literary and figuratively with a brief overview of the cosmology. The cosmology was where I first started to think in the terms of rules, I wanted a set of rules that treated the fantastic elements like other planes and magic, less like rule mechanics and more as phenomena in the world. This is a quick overview of my take on the cosmology, a bit on how things came to be and a few glimpses of how that ties into mechanics. I hope this brief introduction will peak your interest and prepare to dive deeper into the various parts of abilities, magic, combat and much more.
This also ties into the world creation story I’m using in my Greyhawk campaign. This is a peek into the “behind the scenes” version that tells how things really happened. I’m also working on the creation myths that various cultures use to describe their history as well, together they can hopefully provide a good base for other Greyhawk GM’s to build on and modify to suit their campaigns.
The Multiverse is a BIG place made up of lots of planes of existence, some familiar in nature, others very strange. They fall into three broad categories, the real ones (made up from real matter), the ones that are only in your mind, and the ones in between. Let’s begin with the real ones.
These are real places you can travel to in person, either using mundane or magical means. A creatures Strength, Dexterity and Constitution determines what it can do in the physical world.
The places in the multiverse most familiar to us are the Prime Material Plane, which the world Oerth and its surroundings belong to. It’s a place made of real physical stuff (Elemental and Ethereal) and has life that has (for the most part) evolved here and is native to it. The prime also provides the base for all the other planes mentioned below. This means that all the other planes in some way co-exist on the Prime which makes the Prime a unique and very diverse place, where a lot of things are possible. All of a creatures abilities are a work in the Prime, Physical, Mental and Metaphysical.
Both the origin and end of our existence and what drives it are the Energy Planes. Everything else, in some capacity revolves around the two Energy Planes, the Positive and the Negative.
The tension between these two nodes, created the beginnings of our world eons ago. Rumors have it that a reverse multiverse is hidden on the other side, completing the energy circle between the positive and negative.
Positive Energy Plane
The source of energy for life and everything else that brings life and movement to the prime and other places beyond as well. Radiant damage comes from here.
Negative Energy Plane
The end of all things, it destroys life, brings cold and standstill. Necrotic Damage comes from here.
The Ethereal is what gives the physical structure, time and space, it is the scaffolding of the physical world at a fundamental level. Everything in the Primal exists into the Ethereal (or vice versa). This Border Ethereal is like a window into other dimensions, and is the basis for a lot of phenomena, like Darkvision, and ghosts and other Incorporeal creatures. Force and Vorpal damage is using aspects of the Ethereal.
If you move beyond the Border Ethereal, several weird properties start to emerge. The Ethereal now extends into Time, meaning it can be used to see (and even travel) in time. What effects this has is a thing for a different time, lets briefly look at some of the Ethereal plane’s other aspects. No color, smell or sensation except space, texture and movement. Imagine a place which you can only touch, and maybe even at a distance. True Seeing is using this effect to discern what is there or not, even if it is hidden by illusion or other effects.
Creatures’ native to, or well adapted to, the Ethereal seems to be able to perceive its many dimensions in a much more effective way than a creature with only the normal senses used in the Prime Material Plane. They can use the Ethereal to see through matter at long distances and deep into the Ethereal, detecting anything that stands out or moves. Hiding in the Ethereal is about shape and position; by sitting still and moving only very slowly you can avoid detection for a time. It’s about patients; a patient observer might detect you if it just keeps looking long enough to detect the change over time.
The Ethereal Plane's weird capability to accommodate many dimensions makes it a great way to create Demi Planes that can be very hard to find, and that can in turn be gateways to realms of various kinds. This is the effect used by various forms of magic to create pocket dimensions.
Often referred to as the Inner Planes, which is accurate for most of them - earth water and fire, who literary makes up our world. The Plane of Air surrounds us, and to some degree mixes with the others. The material making up the Prime is elemental and where you find enough of them in a place opens up the possibility to travel to the realm of that Element. For examples volcanoes and places deep Underdark filled with lava are literal gates to the Plane of Fire, you just have to be able to stay alive long enough to enjoy the journey.
Over time life has found ways to exist in the Elemental Planes as well, giving rise to creatures’ native to these realms. The Elemental Planes are well knows to spellcasters with both a Strain, and its own school, and a whole range of Damage Types are elemental.
Mental planes only exist in the minds of creatures, and in a way, every creature’s mind is its own mental plane. It is when these mental planes connect and interact, amazing things start to happen.
The emergence of life, and its evolution into more and more advanced forms have altered the fabric of reality itself. One of the most profound effects, though hard to impossible to detect, is the Dreamscape. Every creature advanced enough to have feelings and urges creates its own realm where this mental exercise takes place. And when creatures who are aware of each other can share this realm, and with creatures expanding capabilities the scope and reach of the Dreamscape has been ever increasing.
Mental Planes are realms you cannot visit in person, only travel to in your sleep, using magic or interact with using your emotions and feelings. The real world can be perceived while inside it using a creature’s senses, but that is where the real world ends. The Dreamscape lacks dimensions and distance, things are connected by thought and perception. What you see, hear, touch and even think of is present in the Dreamscape. Time is a weird concept in these realms, moving back and is possible and its not all that obvious when it time something happens or have happened.
Magic can be used to harness various aspects of the Dreamscape, like accessing the minds of others, send mental messages, or even travel through it in spirit. Some creatures do this regularly to stay in touch and keep safe, like the Fey and Elves who can use their revery state to share a world together. Other creatures and magic are far more capable in this realm so beware, lots of pitfalls here!
Psychic Damage hails from the mental, and it has its own Strain of magic, the Cerebral.
The Dreamscape over time given rise to a whole new form of planes, the Metaphysical. Let’s look at this part of the Multiverse next.
As life grew more and more capable, it had an increasing impact on the expanding multiverse, in many ways life made it expand. Creating a myriad of metaphysical realms, places that are both a product of imagination and real at the same time. So far, the true location of these realms has eluded scholars and wise folks, there are many theories but few hard facts. Widely known and accepted are the impact these realms have on the world, from life and death itself to ideas, visions and tragedies. These realms covers it all and more...
Each creature has an essence that carries its metaphysical aspects, humans and many others have a soul they are born with that must take all their life’s ups and downs. These aspects are Comeliness, Presence and Taint describing a creature’s impact in the Multiverse and rule over its life, death and beyond.
The urges, desires and feelings of the animal world gave rise to the early Dreamscape, and as the animal world developed so did the multiverse. Eventually something managed to escape into it and reside there, and the first Metaphysical realm was born, the embryo of the Feywild. A world full of all everything that animals have been busy thinking about since the dawn of time was starting to see new forms of creatures’ spawn that was a form of spiritual offspring to the animal kingdom starting to develop all by itself.
Who was the first Fey is long lost, but a whole range of creature has sprung into existence in the Feywild, maybe even more than anywhere else in the Multiverse. New waves of creatures from the prime managed to make the transition to the Feywild, and inevitably some made it back again. This is, most scholars agree with, the source of a lot of creatures that possess extraordinary and often even magic powers. Everything from striges to dragons has been blamed for having their origins in the Feywild.
Day and night are a key aspect of nature and so always played a key part in the Feywild as well. The lower parts of the Feywild is often named the Shadowdark. Over time, as the multiverse expanded and developed further the Feywild and its gloomy sibling the Shadowdark developed into a realm with lots of connections to other parts of the multiverse, especially to the upper and lower planes.
The role of the Feywild has become more and more of a transitional realm for those who want a way to travel around the multiverse without relying on powerful magic that can be detected and traced. The drawback is that travel in the Feywild can be very dangerous, it is a world filled with all the dangers of nature in various twisted and exaggerated forms.
The Feywild can be likened to a gigantic sloping landscape full of dramatic geography, life in all its forms in forms that are often "larger than life" in every way possible, both size wise, smarter, stronger, and so on. Higher parts of the landscape are continually lit by an increasingly brighter sun the higher you go, the lower you go, twilight slowly comes and eventually you will be surrounded by a perpetual darkness.
Portals to the higher planes are found in the higher parts, and portals to the lower planes are found in the lower parts. The Feywild has not only given rise to a lot of strange and awesome creatures, and it also fuels the Strains of Fey and Shadow magic.
The Energy Planes seeps in from the portals to the Outer Planes, slowly spreading their influence around bringing the struggle between them into the Feywild.
When life became really intelligent its mental capabilities expanded beyond simple instincts, urges and feelings. Reasoning morals and ethics became powerful forces when masses of intelligent creatures could harness their thoughts in way previously impossible. Their devotion, rituals and persistent dedication started to build on top of what already existed in the Feywild, and over eons it gave rise to the outer planes.
This part of the multiverse is more often the playground of intelligent creatures combining intellectual and cultural traditions, worries and triumphs put on top of what already existed since the dawn of time. The result is the Great Wheel Cosmology, Good, Evil, Chaos and much much more.
The outer planes are home to most of the gods and their kin of various forms, the worst creatures that have ever been imagined and more. From paradises and places of joy to the worst pits of despair, the outer planes make the Feywild almost seem tame....
These planes are the collective creation of the minds, spirits and souls of the world, it is the combined subconscious (and conscious efforts) that creates them.
Metaphysical planes are partially real, but things can spontaneously spring into existence here, even things resembling living beings. The plane itself can react as a living environment, spawn things and change quickly. Time, energy and matter don't follow normal rules here.
Can be visited both mentally and in person, but at great risk, few things come back from here for reasons good or bad..
The power of Positive and Negative Energy is a huge influence here, turning the existence of everything into a struggle for greatness or extinction.
In the center of the Outer Planes are the Outlands, like the eye of a huge storm it is an enormous expanse of land harboring gates to all the outer planes on its rim. In its middle it said a tree grows all the way through the Feywild down to the lower planes. A river is sourced here that flows through all the lower planes.
This is the place where petitioner will end up, if they made the journey passed death unhindered. Where they spawn and in what shape is guided by their Taint and circumstances surrounding their death, so choose your demise carefully....
Above the Outlands is a vast expanse of sky, the Astral, made up of all the casual and mundane thoughts that have existed in history. In it endless and so much can be found there and even more is said to have been forgotten.
One rim of the Outlands is always in daylight and its edge is always obscured by clouds. Rising behind the clouds is an otherworldly range of impossibly high mountains. These are the Higher Planes, where the best ambitions of creatures find solace, hope and ambition.
The other rim of the Outlands ends in darkness and the land disappears into the dark. Down there are places where light, hope, love, respect and empathy have ceased to exist. Endless horrors await those who dare (or are forced to) enter...
This have been time where time has proven it will affect things, especially computers. First it was CPU cooler on my main desktop computer that failed. Thankfully it was still under warranty so a trip over to Micro Center to get a replacement pump and radiator and a couple of hours changing it and things was up and running again.
Next failure what both more expected and more costly. I have three 30 inch monitors that are over 10 years old, I bought them the first summer I spend in California the hear before moving here permanently. One of them has shown its age for several years which an increasing amount of background light bleed and discoloration, which have made me shuffle them around every few years to keep the best one in the center. With calibration done every six months its been doing its job, until a few days ago when it gave up altogether.
I've been expecting this and thanks to your support I'm now able to get a new monitor that will hopefully serve me well for a decade to come. I bought my first 30 inch monitor in 2005 (back in Sweden) that had a resolution of 2560x1600 which was among the best you could get back then. Now a decade later its time to upgrade my desktop experience significantly with a Samsung Odyssey Neo G9, which will replace my three old 30 inch monitors. It is a 57 inch monstrosity with a resolution of 7680x2160 which is higher than all three of my old monitors combined.
It is scheduled to arrive here tomorrow and then I will use this opportunity reorganize my workplace which will take a while so no Twitch streaming on Friday (June 20th), and hopefully I will be up and running again for Gabbin on Sunday.
This upgrade will be fantastic, and a great boon for working with huge maps, especially in QGIS, now I will be able to get both an overview and detail at the same time. Thank you again for making it possible for me to invest in proper tools for the job!
Work on a new generation Greyhawk maps have been ongoing (until my monitor gave up) and progress is being made. It is the first bit of what will be a new generation Greyhawk cartography. Here are some sneak peaks:
I'm editing the textures, rivers swamps and bogs at the moment. A lot of this have to be done manually to get a good result which takes time but I'm very happy with how things are looking at this stage. Things looks more than a bit barren at the moment, due to lack of vegetation, trees will be added in the next stage together with settlements. Then it is final adjustments the area is ready to be turned into a map.
I have several other areas in various stages ready to be textured when this is done.
My rules are currently getting an overhaul to be ready for con season that starts in a month for me with a secret private convention. A second alpha generation is soon ready to be play tested there, online and later at Gamehole Con, Virtual Greyhawk Con and more.
New in this update are Comliness, Taint, monsters that are REALLY good at combat, planar aspects, more senses and rules for dying and beyond. Luse your Presence and become a undead Thrall will soon be a real risk. My first alpha was low to mid level play, this one will cover high level play as well, planar travel and even Cerebral powers...
Thank you again for your support!
A minor milestone passed for this project today, over 300 map names are now referenced. Lots of typos and small mistakes gets "unoerthed" which improves future editions of the map greatly.
You can find the Sources Database here: https://annabmeyer.notion.site/19e0da32cbe6806a922ee8a3e80dd169?v=19e0da32cbe6803b824c000cc8429cc1
I'm adding things every week. It is tedious works like so much of what I do, but this I think is really rewarding and useful for all Greyhawk gamers. Over time this will be a really useful resource to find things and where they come from. When it is done I'll export an Excel version as well, keeping it in Notion makes it easy to edit and it is immediately available online.
Thank you so much for making this possible!
Now I'll go back to Shield Lands again!
The terrain is created and rendered, but due to limitations with World Machine and memory I can only work with areas 150 x 150 miles, so merging them properly is a key part of being able to do this. After years of trial and error it is still a struggle, but the results are getting better and better. I’ve now created the Shield Land tile, and all its neighboring tiles and blend them together. The results are 90% satisfactory right away, but with a few key issues needing manual editing to fix.
Rivers are the big thing with this since each tile calculates them independently, the border overlapping areas will have two conflicting sets of river systems and manual editing is needed to soft out what will be the final remaining rivers and lakes. This might sound easy but is tricky and VERY tedious to make sure that the result is believable and flows downhill. Lots of back and forth between 2D in Photoshop and 3D in World Machine to double check. The benefit is that you get intimate with the terrain and what each area looks like.
The other issue requiring manual editing is harder to spot at a glance, but once you see it, it can’t be unseen. Large straight lines of slightly differing slope angles stretching sometimes for miles. These come from the masking away differences in the overlapping areas. I’ve back fed areas into the neighboring areas when working on the to try and make sure they match, but inconsistencies creep in. Fractals outcomes vary depending on how centered they are in the render, what they are surrounded by and many other things, hard or impossible to hide or compensate for. The solution is a combination of editing the heightmap in Photoshop and going back into World Machine and patching over the faulty parts. This inevitably introduces new errors, so the hard part here is to settle with the doable rather than perfect.
Error in the terrain mirrors the issues real world cartographers are facing. 3D and image data of the real world is also dotted with faults and missing bits, and a lot of the tricks I use are taken straight from real world ways to fix things. In some ways doing fantasy cartography is easier, making stuff up is the game, and there is no real world to consider. Working on famous areas of Greyhawk is the hardest, they are full of detail everyone knows well and getting them right requires precision that can be hard to get.
Almost done with the fixes to the main Shield Lands area and I have already tested out texturing to make sure that the data quality was enough to get the results I’ shooting for. Below is a test with vegetation for reference. The colors are a bit off but I’m very happy with the detail. With a final tweak, added farmlands and settlements it will look great.
Combining and fixing errors is tedious and boring; texturing is tedious and fun. Fixing render errors feels like working your way out of a hole, texturing is more like bringing life to a place. Once you have defined a set of textures and see the landscape rendered it is like magic, and I instantly start pouring over it dreaming up adventures and trying to figure out who lives there and what they are up to.
After having spent a few weeks in the weeds fixing errors it is good to know that I have learned a lot and a lot more terrain is already well under way. The downside is that fixing errors is where a lot of my time spent re-mapping Greyhawk again will be spent. I’m going to try and see if going from 50 to 100 feet or more per pixel will be the way forward to map Oerth in its entirety. Once I’ve done a few more areas I will make a comparison and see which might be the better way. The key bit is how well the data can be used to create more detailed area maps of key locations. Another consideration is that areas away from the Flanaess gives me a lot more freedom, it doesn’t matter if a river are a few miles one way or the other.
Here comes a new batch of heraldry, and it is a varied bunch this time. No overall theme, this time its more about filling in gaps in my to do list and a few ones I found while researching other things.
First out are two Dwarven Clans of the Yatils. Below is Khund, the clan that guards the passage from Perrenland to Tusmit and it comes from the LG campaign. It features a symbol that is a merge between the anvil of Moradin and a battleaxe.
and Blackhammer, the Dwarven clan from the heart of the Yatils. You find the Blackhammer Vale nestled along the Wyrms Tail Pass. The symbol shows the alliance between the Blackhammer and the Silverpick Clans.
Lets stay in the Yatils and take a look at my proposal for Exag heraldry. The ancient city made of a red clay, and is being rumored to have been around since even before the Flan. I see it as a place steeped in old traditions so I used my Flan shield shape for it. The symbol is a homage to the three pyramids and a sun peeking through the mountains.
One more from the region, Ulmt another very old city with a Flan heritage still being proudly honored. Their shield is a homage to Allitur and the Lyre of legend.
Next up is from the Shield Lands. In WG6 The Isle of the Ape one of the pregens is Baron Franz of Torkeep, and on page 7 there i an illustration of the party talking to Tenser and a guy that looks like the Baron of Torkeep carries a shield. On it is a black eagle-like symbol that I have tried to recreate.
and here it is in an old rusty variant, in case its being found after Iuz have occupied the area for a while.
Next up is one from my Shield Lands campaign, but for neighboring Furyondy, the Barony of Eragern, on the western shores of the Veng opposite the Shield Lands. It depicts the Critwall Bridge which are under its protection.
Found an illustration in an LG module of the Dwur Kingdom of Glorvardum in the Glorioles heraldry and here is my take on the very Dwarven classic of a crossed hammer and axe.
The cover of the module Return of the Eight has a guy with a shield on it. My take on the symbology is that is topped by the hawk from the full crest of the Free City of Greyhawk, but in this case it is in silver (white) instead of the usual gold. I have it that is is a shield used by mid ranging officers of the City Watch, and thinking of it, I need to make a golden version for the higher officers.
and here is an aged one as well.
Next up is a shield that probably belong on an old English battlefield than in the Flanaess, but I included it just in case someone find use for it. It comes from S2 Tomb of Horrors, the green cover version, which shows a warrior with a white shield with a red cross.
and an aged version.
Nessermouth in the very south of Nyrond haven often been overlooked, so I thought I have a go at giving it some attention. It lays at a crossroads in the Flanaess, but has not seen much lore or or developments. Its shield shows its allegiance to the viscounty of Eventide and the three golden dots signals its Oeridian roots and trade ambitions.
To round off my take on the cities of the Solnor Compact, here is Ountsy the lest famous of them. So I gave them a shield that plays it safe and just shows it as a city of the Aerdy, with its sun rising from the Solnor with the signs of infinite water on top to really bring home the message.
One more from the lads of the Aerdy, the Principality of Stringen, one of the more obscure provinces of the North Kingdom. Its colors and Griffon is a way to show its ties with both Eastfair and Edgefield.
And a find from the Age of Worms campaign, the shield of Prince Zeech. A pompus design of Hextorian black and purple on a custom made shield.
You can download all of them in a single zip file here (154.4MB): https://annabmeyer.com/Downloads/Heraldry/Heraldry%20May2025.zip
After having tried to map using a “Bottom Up” approach, with a 5 feet resolution very detailed map covering nearly a hundred square miles at a time, found out that they maps looks great, but the approach scaled badly. Lakes and rivers that covered multiple areas where nearly impossible to get right, and those subtle elevation differences that stretch out over long distances impossible to get right. Add to these problems with tiling data import problems, it forced me to rethink my approach.
After a couple of years of experimenting, testing, and better tools with bug fixes, I have finally worked out a top-down approach to replace my previous bottom up way of doing things. It requires no tiling, well suited to cover huge areas and regions can be seamlessly merged. The resolution I settled with is roughly 50 feet per pixel. Not good enough for battle maps, settlements and the like, but well suited to give great overview maps that scale all the way up to planetary size. With the new workflow each 16K area covers 24,000 square miles.
The data from this set of maps can be scaled up, so it will be fairly straight forward to take an area covering a hundred square miles or so, scale it up to "Porta-Potty Scale" and at the detail as a separate project and since they are based on the large lower res data they will match. This means a first set of overview maps covering whole countries and more and then zoom in and make more detailed maps of areas of special interest.
It has taken me a decade of World Machine and 3D terrain making to get to this point. With several thousands of hours honing my skills, better computers and improved versions of the software, it is my pleasure to present a first sneak peek at my vision of what the world of Greyhawk looks like. This is till a work in progress with nothing final yet, but all the hard bits are solved. I’ve managed to render well over a million square miles of terrain covering the Shield Lands, White Plume Mountain, parts of the Bandit Kingdoms with Rift Canyon, half of Furyondy and the Horned Lands as well.
The work will be divided into several steps:
1. Terrain creation and rendering
2. Area merging and correction
3. Texturing and rendering final data
The first half decade doing this I spend figuring out how to try and get it to look the way I wanted, the next half decade I spent simplifying the process enough that it became doable. Thanks to both my increased skills and more computing power, I can now crank out an impressive amount of terrain of a quality that is good enough. To render an 16K area have gone from around 20 hours down to around 3 hours. I upgraded my old desktop with a new 12 core AMD CPU and a Nvidia Quadro GPU so I can render and work at the same time which means I can do at least two iterations of an area per day, and another two overnight.
In this first step I create two height maps, one with water surfaces, and one without. A special height map depicting water depth and masks for lakes, rivers, ocean, an elevation color texture and a shadow map so I can look at things in Photoshop if needed. The height maps are 32bit EXR files for maximum precision. For masks, shadow and texture files I’m using 8bit PNG’s which are good enough, and here storage needs are considered. When you start to ram up things, the number of files pile up and storage need can skyrocket if you use files with too much precision. Several tens of Terabytes will be needed for this project while working on it, thankfully a lot of the work files can be deleted when final data is rendered for each area. This will hopefully keep the overall amount of data small enough to be possible to share with the world. I will also keep the World Machine files which are like the source code for recreating things again if needed. They are only about 100 KB each so they can be kept.
I’ve used World Machine 3 for this step, but the latest update of WM4 made the new version stable and good enough to be used which pleases me immensely. WM4 has a whole slew of improvements to erosion and rendering which will make the terrain better, so I’m really glad to be able to start using it at all the steps of the workflow. I will also use Gaea for some areas and then import the data into WM, this so I can make use of Gaea’s special erosion and terrain creation tricks. This will mean more variety and higher quality.
This workflow scales well so I can see this project spanning the entire globe. With QGIS and georeferencing paired with this mapping even polar regions should work seamlessly. In fact mapping other areas of the planet is easier, the less that is known of an area, the easier it becomes. The reason for this is that things like coastlines and river placements don’t need to be so precise if there are no previous sources to match. Algorithms are great for producing fine details, but it can be very hard to order it to place the details exactly whare you need them to be. So, mapping a large area of Western Oerik will be way easier than the Flanaess, and my way to tackling problems is to try and go the most difficult bits first, knowing that if I can get that done right the rest will be easier.
Merging areas together is the key bit to getting right, and where countless of my attempts have failed before. The fact that lake water surfaces must be at the same height even when they span over more than a single area, and rivers must flow downhill the same way and be of a similar width when they flow across area, has caused me countless headaches.
Over time I have figured out how much overlap is needed for different types of terrain, and where to split things into different regions. Main rivers and highlands are most suited features for splits, and with plenty of overlap you hopefully have enough to play with in the merging process. Key here is hot managing data and masks properly, and it was when I realized you can create a common mask that can then be used for multiple types of data to simplify the work needed as well as improving the result.
Even after doing this for a decade, it is still a great feeling when you see things work the way you want them too. It also never seizes to surprise me how long a simple solution evades me, why the heck couldn’t I figure out how to do it earlier. It is often the easy straight forward solutions that are the hardest for me to see, but I guess I must be happy I managed to figure it out eventually, even if it takes a long time.
This phase is also where I try to make sure what I have done is good enough, and one trick is to place the camera low to see if the landscape looks believable from a ground perspective. Below is a view of the Shield Lands that shows large part of it stretching out a hundred miles or more, and the distant blue is Nyr Dyv and Walworth Isle in it.
Here is a view from the eastern slopes of the White Plume Mountain looking southeast, with the Yellowflow River valley beneath the foothills.
A part of the interior of Shield Lands with the White Plume foothills to the left and Walworth Isle to the right in the far distance.
I’ve merged the Shield Lands area in the north and west, left to do is east, which I will hopefully get done tomorrow, then it is time for the next step.
I haven’t taken any of the new Shield Land terrain through this phase yet, still tweaking the details as I write this. Texturing is both the most fun, but it can also be the most frustrating part. Fun because it is so cool to get a first glimpse at the near final result. I’m not worried about this bit, with heightmaps that are detailed enough there are few pitfalls to get a good result, just a lot of trial and error. Another good thing about texturing is that a lot of post processing is possible, and often necessary to do in Photoshop, so with enough work you get good results.
The key bit wit this step is to figure out what makes the terrain convincing at the resolution it has. Here is an example of my Critwall map down sampled to 10% of its original size.
This is close to what I want the quality of the new large area maps to be. Detailed enough to get a basic idea of the landscape, and larger settlements. Not enough to see houses and roads properly but hinting at all the col stuff that is there. I will need to experiment with how to best depict forests in the form of bumps to create the right chawing, and color variations. On this down-sampled image, shading might be a bit too harsh. The good ting is I can adjust that more on the new maps done the whole way at the same resolution. The same goes for building height, I need to test that too to see what gives the best result.
Compared to my now over 20 years old Bryce based maps this will be a fundamental leap forward. The Midgard maps I have done for Kobold Press represent a kind of halfway between the two, not in results, but in technology used and approach. For my Kobold Press commissions, due to time and other constraints I had to cut some corners which meant that true 3D maps with proper rivers and lakes had to be abandoned for what could be done in time that could do the job. My Midgard maps are something I will always be proud of, but now the time has come to leap ahead again, this time for Greyhawk and Oerth. My goal with this project is to set a new benchmark for fantasy cartography, to prove what can be done with dedication, skills and most importantly, the support of you guys. Thank you so much for making this come true!
A technology deep dive with World Machine files will come soon or top tier members.
Here comes the last of the 1:2,000,000 Digital Series maps, Hepmonaland South.
You can get it here (JPG 110.1MB): https://annabmeyer.com/Downloads/GIS/2Million/Hepmonaland%20South/Hepmonaland%20%20South%20-%202%20Million%20-%202025-04-01.jpg
Next up when it comes to my GIS work is to go over my Evernote notebook where I keep my to do list. It has a number of things to correct, add or look into. I want to make sure the GeoPackage is as up to date as possible before splitting into a 576 CY and a 578 CY versions, plus a MeyerHawk version as well. When this it is updated, I will share if here and then my GIS work can continue.
Two major GIS undertakings are the 576 CY changes and a series of maps for printing. I will probably split things into separate GeoPackges, a series with the map data (576, 698 MeyerHawk) and another series for the presentations (Digital, Print, and others). This way styles and purposes can be reused for the different data sets. I have to do some tests to see how well it works.
In my To Do list is also more heraldry, which I will dog into as well to sprinkle into things as well.
Here comes the next installment in my 1:2,000,000 Scale Digital Series, Hepmonaland North.
The size is a bit too big for a layered PDF and a PSD files, sorry about that. For digital use JPG format is good enough, and the GeoPackage gives you what you need to make a custom version. You can download it here (JPG 66.2MB): https://annabmeyer.com/Downloads/GIS/2Million/Hepmonaland%20North/Hepmonaland%20%20North%20-%202%20Million%20-%202025-03-29.jpg
The southern part is underway and will be ready shortly!
Back home from a week in Wisconsin at Gary Con XVII, with lots of fun, friends and gaming!
During the convention I held a two hour seminar talking about my cartography endeavors. I didn't have a chance to record or stream it, so I will run it again on my Twitch Channel this Friday the 28th @6PM PDT.
I will show the slides comment and answers as many questions as possible. During this stream I have access to all my stuff which means I can show some more things than my old laptop can cope with.
See you on Friday! 🙂
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