Lyndorne Falls - Patrons' Edition
Added 2025-10-21 16:38:55 +0000 UTCIn the seven years that I've been making maps for a living, I've drawn exactly six city maps. When I say a "city map," I mean not a battlemap. So stuff like Vayl's Firth doesn't count. Here's the list, from oldest to newest, along with my opinions on them:
Crap, but crap with a few merits. The lore may have saved it.
This one might have been okay if I hadn't decided to color the buildings pink for some reason.
This map. I think it might be kind of good. I don't know how or why this happened.
The basic idea for this place is that Lyndorne Falls is a unique kind of trade city. Goods come in on riverboats at the top of the waterfall and they're moved down to the bottom on cargo lifts, where they get sold on to seafaring traders. Enabling goods from upriver to reach the sea makes this place a big deal, especially if there are a lot of towns out there. Also, the cliffs and the surrounding jungle serve as natural walls to protect the city. On the whole, I'd say it's a fairly unique town that wouldn't be hard to find a place for in most settings.
Next, I'm gonna get started on the Vatican megaproject. I'll be drawing this one piece at a time and I'll alternate between Vatican maps and other maps, but I'll start with the famous stuff. First, I'll be drawing St. Peter's Square, which looks like this. It's not the most interesting part of Vatican City, but it is the biggest and it should help me to calibrate the size properly so that all the pieces fit together in the end.
All right, I'm gonna go transubstantiate some paper into a map. Our journey begins.
Download from Google Drive here (under NEWEST PATRON CONTENT).
Comments
Nice! Are they gonna have to fight the siege crabs under the fort?
Milby's Maps
2025-10-21 22:01:27 +0000 UTCI think sometimes the most interesting part of a city map isn't the city. Imagine I drew Lyndorne Falls with 20,000+ people. The map would be a huge city with a tiny river and a waterfall running through the middle of it. And maybe that would be cool too, but I think the river and the waterfall are the most interesting part of the map and that would just be a detail if the city was far larger than it is. Also, you're right-- drawing a city map that big is pretty daunting. There's a point at which I'd be drawing rectangles in my dreams, haha.
Milby's Maps
2025-10-21 22:00:16 +0000 UTCI like all your maps! Love them. I’m currently running a game in the black loch. The players are in the middle of slaughtering the Kuo-Toa at their little fort.
Micah Reininger
2025-10-21 20:50:37 +0000 UTCYou eventually turned Finbarr’s Marsh into a very good battle map, so it can’t be irredeemable, you literally redeemed it! I love all your city maps, the one thing I will say is that I suspect you fall into the same trap a lot of people who normally do battle maps fall into when making city maps, which is that because you’re used to thinking at a battle maps fall into scale it can be hard to scale up enough. Cities really are huge and drawing a map with enough buildings to house tens (or even hundreds) of thousands of inhabitants is a daunting task.
Silas
2025-10-21 17:31:07 +0000 UTC
