Quoted By:
So I made a little blank concept overworld map, it looks like this.
On the last qtg thread I mentioned I wanted to make some exotic oriental sword and sorcery setting with WAR ELEPHANTS and not the Tolkien Legolas mumakil kind lol
The inspirations are
- Southeast asian jungle archipelago stuff (this is what Langkasuka is sort of meant to be from my past games)
- That vaguely Mongolian steppe Conan the Barbarian 1982 film look
- Vaguely Taklamakan desert / Kingdom of Loulan look, a bit like those sand dune scenes from Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon but probably also some Prince Of Persia videogame stuff
- no samurai sorry it is too anime but also because Sekiro and !notFeudalJapan Legend Of The Five Rings Rokugan ttrpg already exists, I think that setting is pretty well covered
- setting is probably all human, that is just how I like my games. You can make your own races if you want by being racist towards other people. Maybe there are some changeling demon feral jungle !notElf people but they are probably called yakshas. They look more like Magua from Last Of The Mohicans and not Legolas. There are demons like Sanskrit Mara (night-"mare", etc)
I am not very good at photoshop stuff, besides my game design philosophy is to only use free materials designed on free nameless open software that does not require registration or signup login lol, so this is just what I made from blending and edge blurring some transparent pngs of stuff I found on the internet.
The base of this map is a splash painting from the more modern Zhang Daqian, I blended some actual old mountain paintings from the Wang Ximeng blue green landscape painting style as well as some other ink type mountains waterfalls and trees.
I am aware of Inkarnate etc and those software rpg map makers but they all produce generic fantasy cartography that all looks the same (and not a very good "ancient Asian" look that I want) so I just made my own.
The idea here is that the desert is created by the rain shadow of those northern mountains against the winds, they can be your wuxia cliche flying immortal mist Stone Forests or whatever but maybe they are also just a dream.
