Shida-worldbuilding map

New worldbuilding map: Creating a Fantasy Town

If my computer could talk, it would be cursing me out. Recently, before the pandemic, I bought a Surface Laptop 3 with an AMD Ryzen 5 processor. It sat right at the top of my budget. The laptop does what I need and I can start getting into 3D graphics. My recent project pushed my laptop and Photoshop to the limit. I’m wondering if there’s some Photoshop setting I can change. I only had issues with this map.

I talked about making Shida’s map for The Wailing Town in this post. Here’s the first map.

fantasy city map

Shida is a historic place for Others, non-humans. Its isolated location was a perfect safe haven for them in the early days when all humans wanted to do was destroy them. It’s built on powerful, rare, wards that are maintained to this day. Now, the town’s mostly a vacation spot. On one side of the river are the cabins for tourists. On the other side, is the small mountain side town for shopping. It’s where the permanent residents live. 

The above map was supposed to the final version. But, I wanted to fill in the forest, make it look thicker. That’s when I realized I didn’t like the mountains. So, I replaced them. 

Shida fantasy town maps

Funny enough, I didn’t change the document size all that much but this looks so much larger than the original. 

As I mentioned earlier, Shida’s known for the magical protection wards built into the land. Visitors and residents can’t see them but I thought it would be interesting to add magical circles to the map.  For some reason, that led me to changing the grass texture to parchment paper. I wanted to see how it would look. 

Shida-worldbuilding map

This is the final, final version. At least it was until I realized the parking lot was far too big. Perspective was probably one of the the hardest parts. Mostly, I put houses and trees near the mountains. If they’re half the size or bigger, they’re too large. 

The Wailing Town fantasy cartography

Resources

Here are some resources I used to make the map. I got them all from Shutterstock. 

Frame

Mountain and bridges

Parchment Land Texture

Occult Symbol

Compass

Trees 

Trees

House

Mountain town

Have any questions about world building or map making? Comment below. 

The Wailing Town a dark fantasy fiction

The Wailing Town drops next month, just in time for Halloween. It’s book 2 of The Other Investigator series. You don’t need to have read Book 1 to enjoy this. Be the first to know when it’s released. Sign up for my newsletter. You’ll get a free book when you do. 

Update: The Wailing Town in now available

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