Random Fantasy Maps #3 - Kingdom of Vergun

Hello, and welcome back to the Random Fantasy Maps series, where I will be showcasing fantasy maps from different eras. In this post I will be exploring the process of making the Kingdom of Vergun, a middle-earth Dungeons and Dragons inspired map that is based on a later timescale. But this Random Fantasy Map is different in that it is defined in terms of how the project came to light, as opposed to it being a change to the fantasy map style from the previous post in this series.

How did the project come to fruition?

This project came to fruition as a motivation builder for future fantasy map projects that are to come later down the pipeline, after I had been experiencing some sour moments at home which left me in a state where I had very little interest in working on a map. And then the Volkert came to the rescue on the 5th of October to talk things through and to do everything that she could to bring back some motivation - which ultimately ended in me bursting into laughter about coming to observe the pitching event of the next university Bootcamp on the 29th of November. There is no doubt that for me, it was the best part of the entire day.

Following that meeting, I went to the Autism Social Club on the 6th of October, and one of the activities that they had going on that month was that we could produce our own art drawings - and as soon as I was told that I could draw a fantasy map at the event, I imagined to myself "yes, I'm in, let's go". In that session, I was focused on hand-drawing the map as fast as possible - but I didn't quite manage to get there in one day. But at least everybody were very proud of what I was up to. 

Since these two events, I've been left in a situation where I feel more motivated to work on my personal projects again. That said, let's get to the worldbuilding action! 

What is the Kingdom of Vergun?

The Kingdom of Vergun is depicted on mid-15th century AD, and is culturally and geographically a diverse island. Most of the island is inhabited by the Vergunians, who mostly adhere to the Orthodox Christian faith, while the desert areas to the south-east are inhabited by nomadic tribes that adhere to the Islamic faith, hence the visibility of mosque structures on the final map of the Kingdom. 

The main ruler of the Kingdom of Vergun is King Herbert II (born 1415 AD), who has been leading since 1463 AD, along with a separate head of Islamic relations, Adnan (born 1422 AD/825 AH), who is based in the settlement of Ventura (population 1,300) in the nomadic south-east and represents the interests of the nomadic population. 

Relations between the two sides haven't always been warm, as in the late-14th century, disputes over land grew, and between 1392 and 1395, a war broke out in areas around the south-east of the Kingdom, claiming the lives of over 500 people. Since then, King Herbert's predecessor, King Wallis (born 1351 AD), took steps to address the dispute with the nomadic community, and the two faiths have managed to normalise their relationships and build close relationships together.

The main city in the Kingdom is Lorinthium, with a population of 11,500 people, and is a major trading centre of silk, porcelain and wool products, in addition to the usual suspects from Ventura and Lorentia - wines, furs and jewels. On the other hand, the trading environment in the desert regions is slightly different due to the cultural differences, with traders typically offering goods such as halal meat, nomadic linen clothes, as well as the central Asian gemstone lapis lazuli, in addition to Islamic laws forbidding the sale of alcohol-related merchandise.

Different species of fish exist in different parts of the island. In the south of the Kingdom lies the main fishing town of Norton (population 500), where calmer waters of the surrounding Norton Bay ensure that there is a regular catch of cod for the residents to enjoy. In the western and northern waters around the Kingdom, the local population generally subside on a mixture of cod and herring as part of their diet, whereas fishing activity is almost non-existent in the nomadic south-east due to the lack of fishing infrastructure.

In the northeastern towns of Doris, Trella and Lydeard, the residents exist on a more agrarian way of life, with the residents there being given plots of land to cultivate fruit and vegetables, along with some being involved in the harvesting of grain and barley products, and in the exporting of food supplies to other parts of the Kingdom.

Throughout most of the Kingdom, there are three main ways of transportation - on land, the primary way of transporting people is on horse-drawn carts - the Kingdom provides generous subsidies for the poor to allow them to have horse-drawn carts, thus negating the need to have to walk between the towns. In the desert areas, travel is mainly done on horseback camels, with specially adapted carts that are designed to cope with the desert conditions being used to transport people between the desert regions and the rest of the Kingdom. 

Process of drawing the map

The hand-drawing of the map took place over a period of two days. As the process of making the hand-drawn map is carried out in a fairly similar fashion to the process of drawing the Kingdom of Ventura and Lorentia, I am not going to repeat the explanation of how I drew this map here, but I will illustrate the final result from the map drawing:

That being said, it is now time to get on the computer and do some digital drawings, and as for the Kingdom of Ventura and Lorentia, I will be using Inkarnate again to draw the map!

So to start off the digital element of the project, we will be drawing the map using the program's "Fantasy World" style.

Then it was time to move on to the canvas settings. As I found the default "landscape" option to be a little bit awkward to deal with when it comes to drawing landmasses, I decided to go with custom settings, setting the size of the canvas to 45 x 30 as shown in this illustration here:

With the map canvas size defined, it was time to get to cracking on with the map! For the Kingdom of Vergun, I have decided to experiment with something a little bit different by using the hand-drawn map as a guide to help draw the outlines for the digital map, as I had quite a few problems with drawing the map of Ventura and Lorentia to scale in the last project. 

This can be done by importing the image that I had taken of the hand-drawn map and using it as a stamp in Inkarnate. To do this, I went into the Stamp Tool, select the "Open Catalog" button to bring up Inkarnate's sprite catalog, before clicking on the Upload button to import a custom sprite.

Then, I would select the image of the hand-drawn map that I had captured originally (in this case, saved in the Downloads folder), and then click on Open. 

Once the image is imported, I then set the preview stamp scale for the hand-drawn map to 2.6 (so that nothing else but the map appears) and preview opacity to 0.6 (this is important so that I can see where I am drawing on the map later on), before clicking on "Save Stamp". 

I then select the stamp, going through the pop-up windows, and then insert it into the canvas, making sure to set the opacity of the map. Here, the preview stamp scale of 2.6 roughly translates to a stamp size of 280, as seen in this illustration here:

For this map, I decided to play around with a slightly smaller brush size of 8 to draw the map outline, using the overlay as a guide to produce this end result below. Note that the orange resembles the map outline that has been reproduced digitally:

I would then apply the fill effect to the entire landmass, generating this result:

And this is what the map currently looks like without the overlay:

With the outlines out of the way, it was time to draw some mountains! For this part of the map design, I decided to deviate from the original drawing slightly to improve realism, by changing the shape of the mountain range at its eastern end so that it represents the shape of a hockey stick. 

So, to kick off the process, I went back to the asset catalogue and chose the granite mountain sprite - however as there are no snow-capped mountains unlike the last project, the process is a little bit more straightforward, as there were only granite mountains to draw here. 

The addition of the overlay as a sprite means that the mountain sprite is ridiculously oversized to begin with (it doesn't even fit the landmass!), so let's change the size back to 25. The following two images show the difference in size between the overlay size and the intended size of the mountains:

Oversized mountains... no thanks!

And the mountains are teeny-weeny, ready to be spread like shine!

And as this asset is going to be part of the digital map, I had to change the opacity of the mountain back to 100%. 

After drawing the mountain ranges, here is what the map now looks like (with the overlay hidden):

And finally, let's add some hills around the Ellington area to the west just for good measure: 

With the mountains and hilltops out of the way, it was now time to draw the rivers! For the downstream reaches of the main river near the mouth, I decided to use the subtract function with the brush size of 6, before narrowing it down to a size of 3, producing a result like this:

Drawing of the Norton River, south of the confluence with the Vergun River

And after finishing off drawing the upper reaches of the river and its tributaries (using an even smaller brush size), this is what the map now looks like:

With the rivers now drawn, it was now time to touch up the terrain with some desert textures! 

For the desert areas, I would use a brush size of 80, with around 30 to 40% opacity to smooth out the transition from the desert climate to the grassland terrain that makes up the rest of the island, producing a result that is illustrated in this screenshot below:

Now that the terrain has been defined, let's now plant some trees and vegetation! For this project, I am going to be working on the trees a little bit differently compared to Ventura and Lorentia in that there will be a wide range of trees being represented on the map.

For the tree textures, I decided to use two different sizes for the different tree sprites so that it scales well with the town sprites that will be added later. For the pine tree textures, I applied a sprite size of 320, before spraying it down to produce this result as shown here: 

On the other hand, I decided to apply some deciduous tree sprites around the north of the landmass, with the sprite size being cut in half to 160 due to the larger area that the sprite covers.  

One thing that I also noticed when applying the deciduous tree sprites was that the original sprite is coloured olive green - no good if the pine trees are coloured green. To make the sprite blend in with the aesthetics of the pine trees which are already coloured green, I set the hue level on the sprite to 24, which generates a more green feel to the trees, as shown here:

Now that the colour correction work is done, here is what the map looks like after adding some trees:

And with the tree biomes sprayed down, it was time to get to adding the cities and towns. At this point, the overlay starts to become less useful due to the amount of progress made at this stage, and so here I would delete the hand-drawn map overlay from the canvas and proceed with the project in the same way as the Ventura and Lorentia project, in that from that point on I would be relying on the original drawing from the sketchbook as a guide. 

And with that done, we are on to the last big step of this project, which is adding the road network. But unlike the Ventura and Lorentia project where I drew dotted lines to indicate the road network system, I've decided to spice it up with more realism by adding some dirt road surfaces to the map. 

So for this project, I decided to use the brush tool, so that the tracks that connect the settlements can blend in better with the surrounding natural environment. As the geology of the non-desert areas of the map is light clay, I decided to go with the "Dirt Dry Clay" texture, as illustrated here:

Inkarnate texture catalogue, with the texture selected

Once the track texture has been selected, I then went on to apply a brush size of 8 to parts of the map where the roads would be built.

One little anomaly that I encountered whilst drawing the Kingdom's roads was that the  road north of Lantum towards Doris transitioned into desert territories, and so for that area, I decided to change the texture to a darker-toned desert theme, and applied around 40 to 60% opacity so that there is a smooth transition from the clay road further north to desert surfaces, as shown here:

And the fun of drawing the road network doesn't stop at drawing the dirt tracks themselves, as to keep up with the theme of road realism, I would also add in some rickety bridges over the Norton River so that traffic can cross over in no time!

For the other desert roads, I decided to drop the opacity to 70% so that the desert tracks better blend in with the general landscape of the area, as shown here:

And after drawing up the Kingdom's road network, this is what the map now looks like:

With the road networks drawn up, it was time to move on to the easier steps of labelling the map and touching up the oceans. By this point, you don't have to wait long before I finally have the pleasure to be able to present to you the final map of Vergun!

Conclusions from the Vergun Project

I have to say that I have had an even better time playing around with the Vergun project as opposed to the Kingdom of Ventura and Lorentia - the process of drawing the map digitally didn't take too long this time round, as I was using an overlay from the map that I have drawn within my sketchbook, which also meant that I didn't have to worry whether I would run of space to draw some parts of the landmass - yay! I am certainly going to use that technique again for all of my future map projects as it is a very time-effective way to draw maps.

However, I think I could have done things a little better in this project, by making sure that the Great Vergunian Range mountains don't come too near the desert landscape, because bright-coloured granite mountains and deserts don't blend in too well! 

Furthermore, I could have called the Babylonian Desert something else, as although the architecture is similar to that built in Babylonian times (Inkarnate describes the building sprites that I have used in the south-east as being Babylonian in style), it didn't align quite well with the timescale with which this map is based on. Likewise, I believe that I could have named the nomadic towns a bit differently in order to better reflect the cultural differences that are seen in that part of the Kingdom.

In this project, I decided to experiment with using the brush tool as opposed to the path tool to draw the Kingdom's roads. Overall, I think it is a really good way to improve the realism of maps, and it allows people to get some understanding of what the Kingdom's geology looks like as opposed to "look, this is a road, and this is where it will take us". The only little downside about this is that the road from Lantum to Doris was a bit fiddly due to that track running right around the very edge of the desert, and so consequently, you will see a mixture of clay and desert on the portion of the track that runs through the desert.

Anyways, I hope that you have enjoyed the process of making the Vergun map, and I shall see you next time on the next random fantasy map - the town of Frattisham which is inspired by one of the old Ordnance Survey maps. Hopefully, there will be no more motivation-based random fantasy maps, and it'll be back to normal from here on out!

Signing off now,

Jakub