The blog is moving!

Hi all!

This blog is moving to a new location.

http://lostatlases.blogspot.com/

I'm doing more non-hex maps and other things these days, so I wanted to rebrand the brand.

A small hamlet or large farmstead

So I decided to do some doodling today and came up with a very nice hamlet or farmstead.

The map is a small settlement - it could be a hamlet or a large farm set somewhere near the edge of civilization. Most of the buildings are to the north of the central clearing, with a fenced in area for some livestock and an attached barn. There's a statue in the center of the clearing. It could be some old family relative or perhaps the founder of the hamlet. Maybe it's to the local deity.

to the south is another house with a large wrap-around porch. I think of this as the blacksmith, personally. Just to the right of the blacksmith is a stream that flows out of a cave opening, under the central area and into a pond on the north side. A small escarpment in the northeast allows the pond to escape as a waterfall into a small ravine. Lastly, some scattered trees dot the area, which is otherwise grassland.

A quick map of the route to Valenhall...

It's as much an exercise in learning the capabilities of my new scanner as it is giving some perspective to the new geographical tidbits we learned about Arcadia after Distant Shores was released.

A few liberties have been taken with the map (obviously). I've extended the ice across the ocean (as would befit a world coming out of an Ice Age). I added a location in Azlant called "The Lost Light". It is a haunted lighthouse on the northernmost edge of the shattered continent. Most sailors will go no closer than visual range of the lighthouse. Port Valen was also given a location and some of the Akrandida mountains have been mapped (it is very unlikely to be the fullest extent of the range).

That's it. The scan went pretty well (this was hand drawn on graph paper). It could use some tweaking, but it's a good first try.

Been fiddling with the tablet and drawing some maps...

Nothing big or exciting, just seeing what I can accomplish with digital ink. What do you think? I'm not entierly sold on the use of color or the hatching.

This could be the lair of a single hill giant or an ogre. 

I call this one "The Devil's Hole". It would make a good location for a tribe of goblins or kobolds. It's not finished. The name is, for me, reminiscent of something completely unrelated. Given a bit more time I could see releasing a larger scale version for in-game use. But first I'd have to work out scale issues and what not. (i.e. figure out what size grid people would find most useful).

A tabulated population of Avistan

Hi everyone!

Recently, the question came up as to what the population of some of the nations in Golarion were. While I know that the devs officially do not want to say (to give the GM some leniency within their respective worlds), I also know that this keeps coming up as a thread once every few years. So I decided to take an evening with the wiki pages and tabulate all the countries in Avistan. The result is the attached google doc. You'll have to save a local copy if you want to edit it.

A lot of the smaller settlements don't have figures and those figures really wouldn't matter in the grand scheme of things. In cases like this, I've assigned the following totals:

Hamlet: 50 pop
Village: 100 pop
Town: 500-1000 pop.
City: I haven't added anything to these. I'm hoping to get actual figures.

Furthermore, on the first page, I've added a column called "countryside population" which acts as a modifier to the city totals. This is to represent the number of people living on farms, etc... Its listed as a percentage of the city population. So, if you think twice as many people live outside of these named settlements, then you should add 200% to that column.

The spreadsheet is about 95% finished - enough to get a good sense of the relationship between different nations. If anyone has population / settlement figures to add to the spreadsheet, feel free to comment below or add it to this thread on the Paizo boards. I'll try to keep it up to date as much as possible.

Addendum: I've added some more fields on the first page where you can change the percent of people living in cities to alter the total nation's population.

Giantslayer in Veridia

Our Kingmaker campaign is quickly drawing to a close and I've volunteered to start the next AP. I picked Giantslayer, but with a caveat. The party didn't really want to leave the country and story we've been working on for the past 3+ years. So I decided to move Giantslayer from Belkzen to Brevoy. It'll be 25 years after the start of  Kingslayer and there'll be all sorts of changes to Brevoy and the PC Kingdom.

Because the PCs will be going back and forth between their kingdom and Brevoy and because I need to place encounters and be able to figure out where things are - I'm putting together a 6 mi per hex map of the area. The starting town in Brunderton. It requires a bunch of rewrites, but less than you think.

Southeastern Brevoy at 6 miles per hex. Among the interesting features is having the Valley of Fire as "broken lands" as well as having the dark trees as "old growth" forest.  

Introducing the Prefecture of Eastsea

We are currently between Books 5 and 6 of the Kingmaker Campaign I am in. Because our GM has been tirelessly working on this campaign for over two years I thought it would be an excellent idea to fill in for a bit. This will (a) give him a breather and (b) allow him to experience as a player what he has worked so hard at as a GM. As we normally do side adventures between AP books I decided to take on the penultimate side adventure.

As there is very little published for 15th level characters in the River Kingdoms area of Golarion and since one of our characters wanted to "push east" to create a holding on the Castrovin Sea I decided to run with that plot line. The map for this area is based on the maps I made last summer. 

When designing that map, I just extended the local topography down, allowing mountain chains to trail off and taking what few cues I had from existing sources. That was the easy part. The hard part was coming up with a history and explanation for why this area was never settled. In my opinion, the closeness of a navigable trade route to Casmaron should make that area very popular. So, something must have happened. 

In the end, I decided that this once was a settled area. A thousand years before, on the eve of the first, great Kelesh - Taldor conflict, the Taldanes settled this area as their newest prefecture, Eastsea. The goal was to put a permanent Taldane settlement on the Castrovin Sea. But something terrible, terrible happened. Something so awful that sailors and Iobarians avoid this place completely and memory of it has almost been completely wiped from all of Avistan...

So, without further adieu, here is Eastsea as it appeared on the eve of its destruction (as researched by one of the party). 

The Prefecture of Eastsea - as a PC handout. 

A castle from the past

Time for a little change of pace. The map below I drew around 1990. It is the stronghold of one of the PC's I was playing around the end of high school. There's nothing amazing about it, unless you take into account that the map survived 25 years with only some slight wrinkling.

Castle Ziemovit, circa 1990. 

The castle was not much, Just a keep surrounded by some buildings and, further out, a few tilled fields. Beyond that its just open grasslands. There's a small dock in the center that allows boat traffic to the sea. A watchtower is at top-center and a waterfall is center-left.

Given more time and playing, I probably would have filled in the rest of the blank space with copses of trees, small hills and the occasional home or farm. But this campaign wound down shortly thereafter and the map sat in the stack of my notes for a long long time.

Lastly, one item of housekeeping. I am going to attempt to adhere to a Fridays only publishing schedule. I was thinking three times a week, but I don't want to burn out too quickly over this. :) The good news is that it means 3 posts this week (there will be one on friday).

Step Five: In the end it was lizards all the way down...

Phew! This is the last post in my "How I put together a map" series. If you've sat through all five posts, I thank you! I'll be moving onto another map after this, so don't think this is the end.

When we last left off I thought I had a pretty good idea of a surface village sitting adjacent to a cave. But while I liked the concept, I didn't think there was enough 'Wow' factor. In particular, I wanted to have a secret passage extending from the temple on the surface to the cave. And that would be difficult with the previous map. As I thought more about it, I decided that it made sense for the village to at least partially sit on top of the cave.

My "final" map of the Lizardfolk Temple

The biggest change on this map was to divide it into two smaller maps. Lots of products do this, both to clarify the individual sections and to accentuate different things. The top map is the 'surface map' , showing terrain, surface structures and the main level of the cave. There's a key (still penciled) in the top right along with a scale. lol. And I just noticed a typ-o in the scale. It should be 1 square = 5 feet. Oh well, Had I pushed this further, I would have done one more iteration of this map to clean up things like that.

The bottom map consists of a subterranean upper and lower level. I used red to indicate secret things like trap doors (x in a square) and where different levels connect (via letters - A connects to A). On the top and bottom maps I've also included a profile view - the top map has a profile view of the arch. We can at long last see how my arch differs from the one I showed in post one. You can also get a sense of the plant life - large deciduous trees and numerous hanging shrubs off the edges provide concealment for the lizardfolk defenders. The lower map has a profile view between the room in the upper right hand corner of the lower level and the lower room of the upper level. This chimney is one of several ways to move from area to area that an adventuring party can discover. 

I'd now like to walk you through the map (an opportunity Superstar entries don't get, by the way). We will start with the longhouse. The longhouse hasn't changed much since the first map - but now its interior is described. There is a center room which holds the altar for ancestor worship. To the south of that room is the office for the cleric in charge of maintaining the shrine. A trap door in the floor extends down to the one on the left side of the Lower Level. To the north of the altar is another room where ceremonial attire and accessories are kept. 

With the cleric or shaman now occupying an office in the longhouse, the round hut to the south is free for visitors to use. I kept the gardens there partly out of habit but also because they are still convenient for the cleric. Across the path we still have the hut for keeping mounts and north of that we have two additional huts for visitors. The boat launch is still there because occasionally there are nonlizardfolk visitors to this shrine. Lastly, across the river there is a tree whose branches overhang the river. I can definitely see some enterprising thief trying to infiltrate the village that way. 

The sloping mound has morphed somewhat and a potter now resides above the main cluster of huts. Lizardfolk do not work very much in stone and so a potter seemed more apropos. Following along the top of the plateau we come first across the strangle vines and then to a wood platform hidden amongst the trees that acts as a lookout for the lizardfolk sentries. 

Turning our attention towards the palisade in the upper left hand corner we follow the path into the cave. The path turns from gravel to hard clay here. We pass a small room high up on the wall where 1-2 lizardfolk watch for intruders coming from either direction and come to a large room. The stream rises from the north wall and to the south there are stairs down to the lower level (A) and up to the upper level (B). The upper level stairs are behind some beautiful tan and white limestone formations. The main passage extends south to a communal area for lizardfolk sentries. Behind that are is an empty room that the sentries rest in. 

Entering the lower level through A we come to a four-way intersection. To the right leads to the chieftain's room, to the left leads to the priests' area while south leads to the common area. Going left we pass another four way intersection. Up leads to a storage room, down leads to the bedroom of the two acolytes while left leads to the head cleric's room. The head cleric's room has the trap door in the ceiling that connects back to the temple. There is also a secret door that leads to a fungal garden and past that to the back side of a bas-relief face. The head cleric frequently looks through this into the common area to keep an 'eye' on his flock. 

Taking the right path from the first intersection we come to a room that has three doors. All but the middle are false and all three are trapped. This leads to another corridor which eventually heads to the common area. Before that there is a turn to the left that leads to the chieftain's room. His room has three sleeping areas - one for himself and two for concubines. There is also a trap door leading up from his room to the egg room on the upper level. South of the chieftain's room is another gathering room and a sleeping chamber for his guards.

The remaining portion of the lower level consists of the common areas. There are numerous sleeping areas throughout here (wherever there are animal-skin rugs). In the very center is the kitchen, with s secret door that leads back to the chieftain's area. All the way in the southwest is one final passage that leads to pool. This is the lizardfolk's fall-back point. Should the tribe ever be overwhelmed, they all know to fall back to this room. Because, besides being a well, this room also connects to the bottom of the lake. If pressed the tribe flees to the relative safety of the open waters. 

Lastly, we  have the upper level, leading up from (B). This leads first to a large room with a guard monster. I hadn't quite figure out what kind of monster, but it wasn't actually necessary for the map. To pass this chamber one either had to horizontally traverse the wall or drop into the room and then climb up the far side. This led to a passageway which lead to two rooms. The first room housed the tribe's women who cared for the eggs while the second room housed the eggs themselves. 

That's about it. At this point I only felt there were some small errors in the map. The beds were wrong on the surface. Some of the bushes could have been clarified. Maybe the upper-lower profile should have been longer. But I felt pretty good about this map as is. 

Next time I'm going to drag out a map I did a couple decades ago. Stay tuned!

Step Four: Making a map into (hopefully) a Superstar map.

So in my previous post I ended with the comment that while that map was a perfectly serviceable map I was aiming for something higher - a Superstar map. To help to achieve that goal I went back and read through a whole mess of forum and blog posts that tried to explain what made a superstar map "super". Then I went back to paper and came up with the following:

My next attempt at a map. The smaller grid let me expand the map's focus and was more in keeping with what other Superstar entries turned out to be. Also, the scale is back to the usual 1 square equals 5 feet. 

There's a lot of changes in this map, from the artistic style to the content. Lets look at the art first. The most eye catching change has to be the introduction of color. For color I use Micron and Prismacolor calligraphy-style markers. Most craft stores should stock them. Most of the lines are 01 point, with 005 point for the really thin lines and 05 or 08 for the thick lines. I tried to keep the color choices logical - brown for wood, green for flora, blue for water and black for rocks. Its not always consistent - I have my palisades in black, but thats ok. Gravel is represented by a black dot pattern. Muddy slopes are represented by a brown dot pattern. The parallel dashes represent cliffs, although there is no place where I list the changes in elevation. One of the things I consider a mistake was the inclusion of a 'drip line' marking the entrance to the cave. This is deliniated by the black line across the river at the top of the map. On the plus side, the change in line thickness from surface to underground should be obvious.

Layout-wise, I would like to point out some of the changes in the surface village. The river, for one, is wider and, as mentioned in the previous post, deeper. it spans almost the entirety of arch, meaning that the only way in now is by boat. Looking at the huts you still have the sage's hut to the right of the boat ramp, but to the left you have this new hut with a fence around it. This hut is for visitors who bring mounts. Just north of this hut is another hut with some shapes alongside of it. This was supposed to be the village blacksmith. The two huts above them were for temple attendants. The longhouse is only penciled in in this map because I was toying with changing its rectangular shape. The longhouse's purpose was morphing in my mind as I was drawing the map. Initially, I was thinking of having the villagers outside and the temple underground. But after awhile I thought that idea was awful. Screw our ancestors, say the villagers! We want to be safe! Put the temple outside and us inside!

Which brings us to this whole new part of the map where I have fleshed out the underground. The river continues underground for dozens of feet before stopping at at short waterfall (which was only penciled in). The path, which previously had been rocky and uneven, is now a smoothed gravel  bank. Two thirds of the way to the waterfall there is a side passage that goes for several feet before stopping. Where it stops it intersects a crossing passage. This crossing passage is 10 feet above the floor, requiring people to climb the walls to get up to it.

From there, you can follow that passage south to a large, long room. Geologically speaking, this room was where the river used to flow through until it cut its way down to the current level. Now it serves as the major meeting room. To the south of that are several rooms for the majority of the tribe while to the north the chief has his own room. Lastly there is a door leading out into the upper plateau as well as a narrow crack that guards can use to look out across the plateau.

Finally, this is the first map to really show part of the lake. We can also see better why this is such a great defensive location - this whole shoreline is all cliffs. Apart from climbing the cliff face, there is no other mundane way inside besides going through the arch.

I found this version of the map to be the best one I'd drafted of them all. But I still had concerns about the usage of space (there is a lot of white space) and the fact that this was all just one flat map. I wanted some three-dimensionality. In the final map (which comes next) I try to address these issues.

Step Three: the first attempt at putting the map on a grid.

So this post will be about my first attempt to put this small village onto a grid. For the record, this was a rushed map - hastily sketched out to see how the arrangement of features would look and whether it was an overall good use of space. Remember, I was considering using this map as an entry to the RPG Superstar competition. So the map had to be more than just "serviceable". It had to kick posterior.

First attempt at placing the map on a grid.
 Note the scale is different than the usual 1 square = 5 feet.
  (1 square here equals 10 feet as noted in the upper right hand corner above the key.)

Ok. So, what is important about this map? Well, I tried out a few things and you can see that there are some other ideas that are germinating in my mind. First, I've increased the size of the village. There are now twice as many huts, although the basic arrangement remains the same. I have also added additional elevation to the top of the map. The combination of additional dwellings and a better defensive position is an indication that this is moving from just a small outpost to a more important settlement.

It is interesting that there is also a boat lying on the boat-ramp. This small change is the only observable change in a fundamental shifting of my thought processes. Prior to this, I had assumed the stream was no more than a foot or two deep. Now, it is deep enough for at least fifteen foot canoe at the downstream end. Shortly after deciding upon this change in my head I also read that lizardfolk are quite accomplished swimmers and would probably not need boats. Therefore the logical conclusion was that this boat was for visitors. Ah! But what would be here that would attract visitors. It did not take long for me to decide that a temple devoted to ancestor spirits would be appropriate.

Turning this into a temple was probably the largest change I made while designing this map. A temple is very appropriate to this setting. Temples are frequently located in unusual or highly defensible places. A temple would be a reason for adventurers to visit and helping out the caretakers could provide both an adventure hook as well as a base of operations. Its a good, solid idea.

But after sketching this out I decided it wasn't 'Superstar' material. It had the one hook - the arch, but that's it. The village could have been lifted out of anywhere and I felt that I was missing something with not fleshing out the cave. Its what I felt were these shortcomings that made me want to take another crack at this map.

Step Two - A conceptual sketch map

My next step is to make a rough draft of the map on an 8.5x11 sheet of paper. I do this lightly, in pencil, so that I can erase neatly and cleanly. There is frequently a lot of erasing going on in this phase  as I try and figure out what "looks good" before committing it to a hex or grid.

The first rough draft. This was drawn in pencil and scanned such that the pencil marks look a lot darker. 

At this point, I really didn't have a clear idea of what this was supposed to be other than a collection of huts inside a sinkhole. Admittedly in the back of my head I was thinking of some of the native settlements in X1: Isle of Dread as well as the lizardfolk tribe in the Kingmaker AP.  After some consideration, I went with the latter as inhabitants, thinking this to be a small settlement. 

As for what is inside the settlement - there is the large longhouse to the right. I envision this as the main house for the head of the family or tribal elder. Directly south of that sructure is a round hut with some gardens. This, presumably is a cleric or sage's hut. there is a central area (either gravel or dirt) and to the south is a boat ramp fo easy access to the stream. The stream flows from the top of the map to the bottom. At the top the stream exits a large cave, crosses under a wooden palisade, follows the cliff line and eventually passses under the arch. In this iteration the arch has sufficient room to walk alongside the river. 

The cave is unmapped. There is a path leading into the cave but it is quite narrow. Also, above the longhouse are many vines. These could be stranglevines or something similar. Between the house and the cave is a slope leading to the plateau above the village. Lastly, there are numerous places along the stream where the walls of the sinkhole have collapsed into the water. 

That's all. The next map will be my first attempt to put all this onto a grid.

Step One - Inspiration

For me, inspiration is always the first step to any map. I need something to hang my hat on. Usually this something is a room, a landmark or some kind of feature. As a geologist my predeliction is for natural features like rock formations but it could be anything - a castle layout, a bridge, a statue.. even a tapestry. This inspiration is the anchor that I build the map around. Its an idea I borrowed from Sid Meier. Wanting a unifying theme for one of the Civilization games, Meier prominently displayed a painting in the studio with the instructions that if the developers were ever "stuck", they should come back to the painting and reflect on it. The idea was that the eventual design should not stray too far from the original thought.

The inspiration that I chose for this map was a natural feature in Pennsylvania called 'Arch Spring'. Arch spring is a natural bridge located just downstream from a large, perennial spring. I visited the region many years ago, but never went to the spring (it is on private land).

Arch Spring. Photo apologetically borrowed from Temple University's website until I can find my own.

Natural bridges aren't that rare. The US West has many examples of them (there's a National Park called Arches) and Virginia has a much larger and more majestic example as well. But I happened to like this one. The coziness plus the water plus the thickness of the arch contrasted with the greenery of the surrounding countryside screamed someplace that needed exploring. I knew also that the water that fed the spring came from a cave (though in reality that cave had a far different access that what I was envisioning) and I thought of including that as well. The arch itself suggested a natural palisade which could be easily observed and defended.

So all these thoughts - the arch, the cave, the natural defensive value, changes in elevation, palisades - were bouncing around in my head after in the first few minutes after looking at the photo. In my next post I will take all that and quickly sketch what I think the area should look like.

Expanding the focus of the blog - also what I've been doing for the past few months.

Hi all, 

Its been awhile. Been busy with other things - life, etc... But I wanted to touch base with the blog on two points. 

Point One: I participated in Pathfinder's RPG Superstar Contest this year. While, in retrospect, my first entry needed a lot of work, I was fascinated by Round 2: the map round. This is the first year that Paizo is doing this event. The event consists with doing a map - just a map - for the round. I like the idea of having a map stand on its own. To borrow a baseball phrase - that's right in my wheelhouse. Furthermore, in the associated blogs, forum posts and et cetera, I learned that some companies pay people to design maps! Not the completed, painted-like flip-board maps. I knew about that. No, I'm talking about designing the maps that will then be translated into those works of art. Until last week I thought that the design and the art were all done by one person. While I'm certain that there are such talented individuals who can do both, apparently in practice the task is routinely divided between two people. While I don't yet possess the skills to do the art portion, I can certainly do the design. So, that's going to be a goal - to eventually get paid to design maps.

Point Two: I have been working on Kingmaker-related things. Specifically, I have been working on the area to the east of the Nomen Heights. I've been answering some of the questions as to why this area (which should have been populated and a vital trade route to Casmaron) has remained uninhabited. I have a lot of the back-story done and a bunch of the encounters at least started. But I want to hold onto it some - at least until its finished!

However, I will be posting a series of maps very soon as I did make a map for Round 2 of the RPG Superstar contest on the chance that I did make it in. So, I'd like to share that concept in the next few days. The plan is to walk through the thought process I had in putting this map together. So, stay tuned!

Taking suggestions on where to go next.

I know it has been about 3 weeks since the last update. There's been a lot of change around the home so I haven't really had time to devote to mapping.

But I also realize that right now I can go in one of two directions. I can "go broad"which means to just continue mapping a larger area at the same scale and in the same way. with respect to mapping more broadly, which hex orientation would people prefer? Straight up north or Stolen Lands slanted? I'd like to just work off one set of maps regardless.

Or I can"go deep" and fill in some detail about the river kingdoms already mapped. By this I mean creating and explaining some thematic maps (geology, geography, vegetation, fauna, population) for the River Kingdoms. These would be tools for GMs to reduce their prep time and have a little more depth. They would also be completely unofficial.

So, which is more desirable?

A selfish map

In the Kingmaker Campaign I'm currently involved in we're just about to start Book 5. When my GM heard I had resurrected the mapping project, he wanted to know how close I was to being done because he wanted to use my maps in the campaign.

As such I've spent the past few days retooling and focusing hard on the Kingmaker area. The resulting map is about 90% complete and encompasses all of the Stolen Lands, Brevoy, Pitax, Mivon and the western edge of Iobaria. I believe all the roads, cities and trails have been added and I've included the borders as of the start of the campaign. I feel good about most of the hex assignments, but there is always room for debate there. (Is it hilly forests or forested hills?)


It's saved as a MASSIVE illustrator file so that I can add / remove / hide layers. Indeed, the file is so large, I can only save it as a bmp file which itself is about 20MB. I made this jpg from the bmp. I don't have a slow compiuter ;) If someone knows a way to make illustrator layers more open-sourced (i.e. work in the GIMP or something like that, please send me an email.

The beta version of my Kingmaker map. Inspired by several Paizo maps and descriptions.

A little bit about the map. The city font is "Ale and Wenches" while the landmark font is "Bryn Athyn Condensed italic". The scale is 12 miles across (side to side) a hex - just like in Kingmaker. I don't have all the landmarks labeled and there needs to be a legend. 

Farms. They don't say where farms are exactly in the game, but they give general indications and I extrapolated from them. Pitax's farms are sometimes vineyards (its really more of a "cultivated land" hex). Mivon isn't a big farming nation - it makes its living off of the eels, whereas Touvette is all about farming. It would not take much arm twisting to get me to add farms there. 

And a reminder about the Slough, and swamps to a greater extent. The darker swamp symbols are deep enough to be navigable by flat bottomed boat at least. The lighter ones, not so much - though a DC 15 or 20 Profession: Sailing might get you through (check with your GM). Although the River Kingdoms maps don't have any additional swamps listed on them, the text frequently mentions that swamps aren't infrequent. The geography and paleo-history of the area argues for it as well. So I've included a few. 

That's all I have now. you should be able to biggify this map above by clicking. Enjoy!

A quick peek at the progress of the map...

I've made considerable progress in the past couple days. I've also verified that the hex distance is correct. Feeling pretty good now, so I'd like to share what the Stolen Lands look like at 12 mi /hex.

The Stolen Lands at 12 miles to the hex. Click to enlarge.

There are borders, cities, labels and even farms now! The bottom right hand corner has the "good" savanna hex. There's a "bad' savanna hex for the northern end of Brevoy to convey the idea that the land is marginal at best there.

The Slough also has two different swamp hexes. The darker hexes are navigable by flat boats while the lighter hexes are just your average swamp. In times of flood the lake expands to the south to flood the slough. 

Getting down to the roots of why the Kingmaker map doesn't fit.

I was looking through my data today and I had a sudden fear that I'd made a terrible mistake with the orientation of the Kingmaker map and I would have to start from scratch. I ruminated over this during dinner and decided that whether I had to restart or not I would at least get to the bottom of where the inconsistencies lie in a way that was graphically obvious.

So I took the maps I had and I started playing with them in illustrator - trying to fit one to another - and after several minutes realized that I wasn't making any progress. What i was doing was what everyone was doing: eyeballing it. What was needed was a statistical or unbiased approach.

This got me thinking about that oh-so-expensive piece of GIS software - ArcGIS 10. Within its labyrinthine menus and windows was the ability to georeference one map to another. Georeferencing is the art (science?) of fitting one map to another by matching individual points on each map. Get a whole bunch of points on map A, match em' to map B and let the software stretch and manipulate the A to fit onto B. The more points, the better the fit.

I started with two points - the top and bottom of Lake Hooktongue (Fig 1). With these, I was able to get a decent vertical fit. Lake Hooktongue is, i think, the most exactly drawn feature on each map, so it makes sense to start there. Having done that, its also apparent that problems begin. The Kingmaker map is very stretched out along the east-west (x) axis. The map goes almost to the city of Pitax in the west and Lakes Candlemere and Tuskwater are far too east to correlate. Already, we can see that if we want to keep something as simple as hex integrity intact we have to sacrifice something.

Figure 1: Georeferencing using two points (the top and bottom of the Hooktongue Slough). You should be able to click on it and it will enlarge in a pop up. 

Adding more points made matters worse (as expected). For Figure 2 I added three points in the east and two additional in the west for a total of 6 control points. 6 points is pretty good for control. A first pass on rectifying the two maps with these points gives us the best possible answer. Its equivalent to how well most people can eyeball the discrepancies.
However, note that none of the green and red crosses match up. If the points really were georeferenced they would overlap and there would be no blue lines connecting them. All those blue lines are error and its not just error in one direction, its error in several.

Figure 2: Georeferencing with multiple points but allowing for some error. 

 Since I wanted to see exactly how bad this error was, I decided to force ArcGIS to try and resolve these errors. The result is Figure 3. It's pretty much what I envisioned. The Kingmaker map is folded and twisted to try to shoehorn everything into a predefined space. Getting to this point took several tries, by the way, and I had to add additional control points to keep the edges from getting out of hand. But in the end all the points had almost zero error.

Figure 3: Resolving as much of the error as I could from Figure 2.

My conclusion from all this is that the answer in the map I'm creating is an acceptable compromise between different features. It is one solution among many. As such, I'm content to go foward now with only minor revisions to the map.

Postscript: I never used Rostov as a data point. When I examined its location on each map, I realized that it had been misplaced on one map (or the other). Going forward I will use the Kingmaker location because that is integral to the AP.

Progress update 7-26-2014

Hi all,

Its been a busy week and I haven't gotten as much done as I'd wanted. But I'd like to share where I stand.

Below is a portion of the map centered on the Hooktongue Slough. As you can see the terrain is in place for south Brevoy and the Stolen Lands, including the rivers. Right now I'm expanding terrain to include north Brevoy, the surrounding River Kingdoms and parts of Iobaria.

The current state of the map - terrain is looking good!

The symbols are mostly self explanatory. Smaller (or fewer) mountains have been denoted by the single mountain hex as opposed to the triple mountain hex. Triple mountain hexes are the particularly rugged core of the mountain chains. The same goes with forests - triple trees are dense forest whereas the single trees are lightly forested or scattered forested areas.

Green currently stands for plains. I kicked around a lot of possibilities for plains, but in the end I kept to the traditional green. If you could look to the Nomen area (currently off the map) you'd find a symbol for tall grasses or savannas. This is because I wanted a visual distinction for the 'great plains' to the east that are sometimes alluded to in Paizo products.

One thing I don't have a good handle on is how to make farms. I expect much of south Brevoy is farmed and i'd like to add that as part of the civilization layer (which I haven't begun on).

While I'm on things that need improving, I also want to improve on the brush-strokes that create rivers. I like that the rivers naturally shrink down to nothing, but the way the rivers widen and the ultimate width of the rivers needs tweaking. I'll get to that at some point too. Its somewhere in the settings, no doubt.

Speaking of rivers - the Slough. Note that the East Sellen River stops at Lake Hooktongue and doesn't continue south of the river. That's by design. The river essentially stops at the Lake and divides into innumerable channels with little to no current south of it. The current picks up again once you get closer to Mivon. If you look closely at the bottom of the map you map just be able to see the blue line starting up. Think of traversing this like traversing the everglades (although much colder). One of the things I'm looking for is a different symbol for swamp to reflect this more navigable area. There is a geological reason for this (and lots of other things), but I'm saving that for a series of subsequent posts I make describing the Sellen River and its tributaries (possibly as a travelogue).

Resolving the Stolen Lands - Brevoy - Iobaria triangle

"The Brevoy Triangle"

For centuries, explorers entering the Stolen Lands from Brevoy to the north encountered the same difficulty: compasses would turn randomly, geographical features would move or completely disappear and previously rendered maps would be utterly useless. Some of this was blamed on the Sellen River shifting its banks over time, but most of the phenomenon could not be easily dismissed. Capricous fey, Azlanti or Thassalonian magic were each, in turn, blamed. 
The effect was centered mostly on the region bounded by the cities of Restov, Mivon and Pitax - the heart of the Stolen Lands. While individuals or even armies could pass through the affected area with little mishap, the inhospitable mapping conditions rendered the settlement of this area  impossible. 
About fifteen years ago, everything changed. Coinciding with the disappearance of one of Brevoy's major houses, whatever enchantment lay upon the Stolen Lands weakened enough such that accurate exploration and settlement of at least its periphery was possible for the first time in centuries. 

The above is not canon, but it is a convenient in-game explanation for the obvious discrepancies between the provided maps of Brevoy, the Stolen Lands and Iobaria.

The problems with the three maps.

The Kingmaker AP contains three maps drawn by three different artists. These three maps are Brevoy, Iobaria and the Stolen Lands hex map. Three other maps of the area have been produced: the map of Brevoy and the River Kingdoms for the Inner Sea World Guide and the map of the River Kingdoms for the Guide to the River Kingdoms.

Combining all these maps into one large map that maintains as many of the original features is a goal that presents quite a few difficulties. In particular there are a few areas which require special attention. These are:

1) The area around Rostov and the Shrike River. Here, the Brevoy and Stolen Lands maps overlap but the Shrike River deviates significantly from its course. On the Stolen Lands map it heads due east. On the Brevoy map it turns north quickly to a large lake. 

2) The border between Brevoy and Iobaria. This border (particularly at the northern coastline) doesn't match well at all. On the Iobaria map in particular the continuing coastline flies off in a random direction in the fashion of the early maps of the New World.

The "island of California" - an exercise in the dangers of extrapolation. Map created in 1650 by Sanson. Image from Wikipedia

3) The size and tilt of the Stolen Lands. Truthfully, the stolen lands would fit in a lot easier if they were but a little smaller and oriented slightly differently. As it is, the bottom left corner contains part of Pitax and the bottom edge is Mivon. At times, the top edge could be in Brevoy. All these overlapping areas wax and wane depending on how you orient and scale the stolen lands. 

My solution to the problem

In previous attempts to rectify these areas I tried to fit the three pieces together as best I could using only my eye as guidance. That met with some success and the final results weren't too awful.

This time, however, I tried a new tactic. Knowing that I would be expanding beyond Kingmaker I decided to use the Inner Sea poster map as a base map and fit all the other maps to it. I felt this would provide some uniform stability to the entire area. Previously, as I tacked on nation after the nation the accumulated errors compounded. By the time I reached Varisia I had some serious errors.

The stolen lands oriented on top of the Brevoy, River Kingdoms and Iobaria maps.

My first step was to take the map of the Stolen Lands and scale it to the Inner Sea World maps. Once that was complete, I found three points to anchor the Stolen Lands - Lake Hooktongue, Restov and Lake Silverstep. Where I had to make concessions, it was usually with Lake Hooktongue. This is because I suspect Lake Hooktongue's borders shift as the flow from the Lake of Mists and Veils increases or decreases. As a general guideline I decided that if a place on one map was more settled, i gave its features precedence over that same place on another map that wasn't as settled.

As you can see, the bottom left corner of the Stolen Lands actually reaches the Pitax River. I can arm wave that away by saying that the maps are off (darn fey!). I considered the map 'fitted' when the forests, mountains, rivers and lakes more or less lined up correctly.

In the end the Stolen Lands wind up being a bit smaller than we realize, Mivon and Pitax are a lot closer than is first assumed and the centaurs to the east have a whole mess of terrain that wasn't mapped by anyone. The only other major change was alter the course of the river going east from Jovvox to parallel the rivers to its north (the Little Sellen and the Gudrin). This makes sense both geomorphologically and 'historically' as the fey would also be active there. Since that part of the River Kingdoms was not claimed by anyone I concluded the mapping there was sketchy at best. One of the enduring questions I have is.. how does that river end? It looks like it goes through a gap in the mountains. Maybe it drains the centaur valley? That would make some sense as the Shrike doesn't rain it and there are still another set of mountains to the east separating the centaurs from the sea.

Final Thoughts

So what do you tell players after all this? Hand out the official maps and let them figure out that they have discrepancies. If you'd like, put dates on the maps and authors. Make the authorship vary in time by at least a few decades and maybe a couple of centuries. We live in a world with sub meter GPS accuracy - they don't. A little inaccuracy never hurt them so long as the GM has a master map.