Battle on the Silt Sea
This was one of the battlemaps I did for IDW’s Dark Sun comic Ianto’s Tomb that had a limited edition module version. The module was written by Christopher Perkins – one of my favourite adventure writers that I got to know in my days as a Dungeon subscriber. It was a real personal milestone to get to do the cartography for one of his adventures. The fact that he’s currently the Creative Director for D&D doesn’t hurt either.
The module follows the plot of the comic and allows players to find their own way through the trials of Grudvik the escaped gladiator. His travels take him to the sea of silt by some very unorthodox means, and he has to get passage on a ship to avoid being stranded. In the adventure the PCs have to fight their way on board to win their passage. There’s space in even the darkest post apocalyptic future for some good clean swashbuckling fun.
It’s fun doing a map like this. As it appears at a small scale in the printed module (less than 3″ tall) it needed to be very clean and legible. The colour scheme was the easy part for this. Athas is hot and sandy, and so it made sense to work with a very pared back palette.
You can find the rest of the maps in this post.
Your discussion of the small scale makes me think of the artists working from paper to software. Have you seen the How-to books showing a process which allows you to enlarge portions of the scanned original to fit in detail impossible otherwise?
Anyway, I would appreciate some posts discussing your process of creation, from concepts through primary features, colours, details, etc. would that be possible?
Cheers,
e
I certainly should put together an actual walk through of my process. I now work entirely digitally – with sketches from the client emailed over and the digital proofs sent back, going via paper only slows things down and introduces error.
I’m not sure what you mean by the ‘How to books’? I’m always interested in new techniques, so if you’d like to elaborate I’d be interested to hear about it.
Jon