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clude a sprawling witch s garden where various poisonous herbs are cultivated the city as a whole now looks like this i was also thinking about how the quarters will connect to one another i may end up putting a big bridge between the wilting quarter and the withered quarter the wintry section that will be directly east of this part there s a nice untaken spot off deepshade square that would be easy to graft the bridge to without a lot of finnicky re drawing once i m finished with the wilted quarter i ll likely move clockwise moving through the winter spring and finally summer sections of the city building gossamer part 2 shroomsbury by bearded devil on may 21 2020 in roleplaying four pages into mapping the results look like this even at this stage i needed to make some adjustments to the image tiny misalignments a paper slightly askew here a scanning margin there all meant that to make the images mesh i needed to expand and contract parts of the map add a stairway here and a cluster of fungi there this can be fiddly but in some ways there s a silver lining these sorts of realignments tend to further disguise the gaps between pages and give the final result a slightly more organic look while still preserving the overall design with the images digitally sewn together i then started adding names i sometimes have a list of street ideas jotted down but generally i make them up as i go i named the giant napping nog and labelled a few especially important landmarks there was some space left around some larger structures so i decided retroactively to make these notable locations labelling them the wheezing tower and the collegium gargantua i ll figure out details for these locations later but the colelgium will likely be a school focused on sleep magic and psychedelic enchantments while the tower might belong to a wizardly cabal making discoveries like this preserves a certain sense of spontaneity during the process up next i ll be starting a new district possibly wormwood rotting hill or the brambles building gossamer part 1 overall concept by bearded devil on may 20 2020 in roleplaying i m drawing a new city gossamer capital city of elfhame and thought this would be a good opportunity to show my process for desgining and mapping fantasy cities this is something of a companion post to how i run a citycrawl campaign overall concept i start by thinking of the overall concept for the city who rules it what its economic and political purpose is what its overall shape should be its overall aesthetic and which historical cities i can take as models for hex i knew i wanted to create a magical university town i knew i wanted the city to be shaped like a hexagon cut through by a river and i took some broad inspiration from cities like london rome and my home city of vancouver for erubescence i knew i wanted to construct a vampiric capitol where the night queen traps her nobles at court with water since vampires can t cross it and the idea of a pentagram stuck in my mind my real world references were venice and paris with a little bit of st petersburg gossamer the big cobweb is going to be the central metropolis of elfhame placed at the converge of the four realms of logris annwn tír na nóg and mag mell fall winter spring summer i want it to be literally cut into four with two rivers carving the realms up their confluence serving as the site of the city since i like giving cities a distinctive shape and since i ve picked the name gossamer for the capitol i ve decided to make the city look like a giant cobweb with canals taking the place of the webbing this design is partly inspired by amsterdam and bruges the two cities that i ll be taking most of my visual cues from this time the canals of amsterdam were originally a series of defensive moats that slowly transformed into commercial waterways which i ll use as the basis for the web like design in gossamer this map is astoundingly good getting started the idea of the city will be that there are four major quarters to it each technically a different country gossamer will thus have a bit of the vibe of somewhere like east west berlin and other divided cities this is partly inspired by the city and the city which i m teaching this summer each of the four quarters will have a different ruler different laws and a starkly different feel to it they ll also need a unique visual identity so that while the map looks like one city overall the quarters also feel quite distinct from one another in the very middle of the city where the quarters meet will be a dockyard and bazaar i decided to start with mab s quarter the wilting quarter a borough of eternal autumn and decay i jotted down some prospective names of districts rotting hill grosscastle shroomsbury the wartward the brambles wormwood and horripilation circus for each of these i made notes on how i wanted each district to look and its purpose within the city for example shroomsbury the district i m starting with is going to be the fungoid district will have giant toadstool structures and will be a significant manufacturer of drugs and potions the alchemist s district as well this means it ll include lots of wizard s towers laboratories and similar places but it will also be an organic sprawl of buildings and fungi i picked this first because i figured it d be fun and easy to draw a good starting point to make sure that the map coheres my first step is to find a pattern that fits my picture of the city after some quick googling i was able to produce this this will be the blueprint for the wilted quarter which when resized and printed off becomes this the madness begins again each of these sections is numbered so that i know how they fit together i now have a bluprint for the city and can begin actually drawing placing the map over each section so that the shape of the canals is maintained i began in the top right hand corner after some consideration i ve decided that the wilting quarter does not have walls but like bruges uses waterways for defense i think the mag mell and annwn sections names not yet determined might have walls i want this part of the city to be a sprawl with structures throughout even the large sections without canals along the edges indeed these hinterlands will be the location of the fairy queens and kings palaces as far from their rivals as possible with a blueprint ready i then sketched out roughly where each of the seven districts within the wilting quarter would be placed the four inner districts will be the wartward wormwood the brambles and shroomsbury while the outer districts will include rotting hill grosscastle and horripilation circus since those districts will benefit from having more space the first will be a mansion encrusted hill the second a series of gigantic ruins built by the exiled fomorians and the third will be a sort of demonic amusement park district 1 shroomsbury with the basics sketched out i started drawing i use the blueprint to guide the drawing and keep track of things like canal position and which district goes where as each section is completed i scan the results and tweak contrast the result looks like this for one page of the map this section will take 20 pages which means the overall map will be 80 pages i really enjoy drawing fungi one down 79 to go shroomsbury needs some more landmarks something to make it stand out apart from just being made of fungi i brainstormed some ideas including a giant who has been lulled into sleep by the psychedelic spores and now has buildings and fungi built all over him i do have a giant head already in erubescence a zombified trophy but i like the idea that this visual links the two cities who were frequent allies in wars with the giants before the seven years mischief sundered the peace i also like placing passive threats in my cities like swords of damocles things that pcs could set off if they disturb like the infectious thornmaze in erubescence or the protoplasmic monster in the warded ward in hex a giant compost heap garbage tip essentially the cesspits and mass graves of the city which can of course spawn all sorts of monsters and threats since this is the alchemists and apothecaries district a fungal hospital or leper house could be interesting where patients go to have experimental cures involving bizarre growths and drugs i then drew the next page of the city adding in the fungal hospital this requires some care lining things up with the precious page like so scan boost contrast reduce light a little and the second page looks like this now i simply edit these two pages together i like to perform some minor tweaks at this point to make sure the pieces segue smoothly i place broader streets at the join between areas while occasionally interrupting those streets with diagonal canals or long buildings to disguise the fact i m piecing the maps together as a series of 8 5 11 pages when i add the first two pages together they look like this looking back to the blueprint i ve now drawn the first two pages on the top right corner in subsequent posts i ll share progress on this map as i complete districts and quarters i m going to be starting with shroomsbury in its entirety and then we ll spread out from there once shroomsbury is done i ll get into labelling and naming things and then start to brainstorm more ideas for the adjacent districts i have thoughts for each of them but the specifics aren t fully worked out which is part of the fun patreon genial jack volume 2 genial jack volume 1 twitter edweirdian instagram cityofhex the earwight bearded devil patreon launch the apocalypse archive 43 48 the apocalypse archive 37 42 the apocalypse archive 31 36 the apocalypse archive 25 30 the apocalypse archive 19 24 the apocalypse archive 13 18 the apocalypse archive 7 12 the apocalypse archive 1 6 the apocalypse archive building gossamer part 7 the verdant quarter magic items hexopoly hexian cosmologies hexchess hex cabinet of curiosities the sacred cauldron part 2 fair is foul foul is fair jack is back building gossamer part 6 the blooming quarter encounter tables from the hex gazetteer the sacred cauldron part 1 the barrow of king finvarra building gossamer part 5 the withered quarter building gossamer part 4 the wilting quarter hex sessions xxxvi actual play shadows lengthen building gossamer part 3 wormwood building gossamer part 2 shroomsbury building gossamer part 1 overall concept elfhame session 2 actual play the barrow of king finvarra a century of weird fiction 1832 1937 disgust metaphysics and the aesthetics of cosmic horror elfame session 1 actual play quest for the sacred cauldron adventurers of elfhame elfhame map of the quill coast genial jack is now available from exalted funeral the barnacle barrow of blunderbuss cairn hex appendix n preview of genial jack volume 2 and a lost pages store update 1d100 characters crooks in hex jack is here more maps two sample streets and factions for the hex 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