#0248 Zoomed in on the 1st Age
Getting a bundle of 100 images is a lot to unpack so here is a general guide for what is meant to be in the maps.
I say ‘what is meant’ as procedural generation can throw up interesting artefacts. I have yet to see any of these maps be just a single plane of featureless water. Nor have I seen one so covered in volcanos it’s just a hellscape, but I’m only about 20 or so maps ahead of what’s publically published so time will tell. When these oddballs turn up, you’ll get to see them here.
The complete Archerland Map Pack can be downloaded for free from DriveThruRPG. I’d recommend doing so as looking at the maps is far nicer than the little pictures on this blog. Take look at the guide pdf booklet that accompanies them and you’ll be up to speed.
The 1st Age & 2nd Age
The 1st and 2nd Age maps are the ‘normal’ ones, they make a good starting point.
Using a picture viewer like the default Windows 10 one: find and open either the 2d or 25d 1st Age map. Somewhere on your picture viewer there should be a key-press, drop down or icon to view an image at 1:1 scale. When you’ve found this, have a look around the map and try zooming in a bit further.
You’ll notice that eventually you really see the pixels but also some of the features are tiny, just a few pixels across. When your players are slogging their way across the wilderness these tiny details become significant features.
Mini preview of Archerland in the 1st Age as an overhead terrain. One of 10 ways to experience this map.
Beaches and Cliffs
Zoomed in 300% on a bay in the 1st Age of Archerland
In this zoomed pic is the bay in the top left of the map. you’ll see a few features pop as you get closer.
The coast is a patchwork of yellow beaches and steep headlands. The beaches also have a few waves washing in if they are large enough. Near the centre of this image you can see two beaches back to back (similar to The Twin Beaches, Isle of Gigha in Scotland). Some beaches are at the bottom of cliffs and perhaps only reachable by sea while others back up into forest.
The large forests are easy to pick out but small patches like this are found by zooming-in. On the left you can see the forest is a brighter green than the moorland and more pixelated looking. As moorland comes closer to forest it slightly darkens as well to help you find the forest edges.
Rivers and Ice
Zoomed in 300% on the coast in the 1st Age of Archerland.
Zoomed in 300% on the coast in the 1st Age of Archerland on the Parchment style map
Rivers are over-stated. This was a design decision as real-sized rivers just faded into the landscape at this scale. These wide raging torrents can be treated as thinner rivers if you prefer. On the player maps the thick outline masks the true width of rivers.
The rivers are a mass of blue and white and this can be read in a couple of ways. On the far left of this picture you can see the glaciers become rivers so the white can be seen to be run off and flows of glacial ice melting as it makes its way to the sea. The other way to read the white is as areas of white water full of boulders and water falls interspersed with wider slower blue pools.
Due to the interplay between Voronoi plates and fractal noise these landscapes often have strong ridges of mountains that climb in and out of the sea to create dramatic coastline. This creates glacial ice from mountains that pours into the sea.
In reality glacier that meets the sea usually stops dead and then only the biggest flows in the coldest regions get that far. On these maps that looked weak and sort of cut-off. To make the flows more interesting they have been allowed to run into the sea and create features that can be read in a few ways.
One way to look at these glacier flows is as massive waterfalls dropping thousands of feet forming a mist that travels out to sea. Alternatively the flows can be ice forming on the sea creating little frozen islands inacessable from land. Or perhaps they are identifiers for cold or noisy regions of sea, societies of Merfolk may shun these coasts but from above the surface you wouldn’t know. On the player Parchment maps, details like this are absent.
Forests & Plains
Zoomed in 300% on a forested valley in the 1st Age of Archerland
Zoomed in 300% on sweeping plains in the 1st Age of Archerland.
The designation ‘forest’ is really ‘fertile land’ as the forest places itself where there would be more groundwater due to the shape of the land.
The forest here has a lot of the features you’ll find across all the maps.
In the top left of this image the pale and patchy trees is where swamp will form. Gaps with murky algea covered water seperate insect filled mangroves.
As forest get to higher elevations they become darker green as swamp gives way to deciduous forest which gives way to evergreen pines. You can see that the underlying land does colour the trees as they go into shadowy valleys in the same way as the moors, but there is a broader darkening at higher elevations. The patch in the bottom right of this picture is as high as forest can grow.
These forests are only the broadest regions of thicker foliage. The moorland isn’t bare it’s just the higher foliage is thinner and doesn’t show up so well, features are smoothed out and simplified for clarity.
The plains have richer and paler regions, some quite stark and some fade in slowly. This colouration shows where the grasses are thicker or sparse and the likelihood of there being copses of trees or patches of woodland.
Everywhere on these maps you’ll see there is a sharp distinction between rock and ground. This is taken as a nod to console games where places a player can walk are distinct from those they can’t. Just because there is bare rock on the map doesn’t mean you need to have bare rock, it’s just so you can easily see where its steeper and harder going. This really serves the game master for making routes.
When making these maps your own, you’ll likely be adding roads and the land is pretty craggy so your roads will probably ned to swing around the steep features. These sharp distinctions between flat, lumpy and steep should help you carve interesting routes with lots of potential goblin ambush spots.
Desert
In the 1st Age of Archerland, the rain shadow from the central mountains has put the desert next to a line of rivers.
Zommed in 300% on a desert in the 1st Age of Archerland.
Deserts are pretty common across all the maps. In the 1st and 2nd Ages deserts are always rain shadow deserts.
If you identify the largest body of water, the centre of it will have mountains between it and any desert. As this has been done procedurally it can throw up anomalies and in Archerland we have one.
The largest body of water, if you draw a box around it, has its centre at a thin part of the sea near the middle of the map (the actual equation to work this out takes a bit more into account). The result has made it look like dozens of rivers are sucking the water out of the desert to the west, rather than it being a result of the mountains in the middle.
Knowing how the maps should work gives a game master opportunites to create stories of unnatural features with unnatural causes.
Deserts have four common features.
The tundra doesn’t just stop, it stipples into desert. The tundra and desert would naturally colour blend and the foliage with it. These maps don’t do that. To make it easier for you to classify the land players are on, the stipple is a visual cue to the percentage cover of desert vs plains.
Forest also stipples into desert. On the ground this will show as a change of tree species or just the richness of ground cover.
Snow doesn’t form in the high peaks in deserts, be aware from the top down a desert looks flatter than it is.
Coming down off some of the desert peaks are dull green patches, like in the centre of this image. This is where hardy foliage has taken root in the sand to make scrubland. On other maps this is more obvious as the scrubland ground is paler and sandy desert ruddier but in Archerland it’s quite subtle.
The rock is also stratified like the Grand Canyon so the desert has a North American feel to foreshadow the Dry Mesa.
Volcanos
A rash of volcanos in the 1st Age of Archerland.
Archerland has a generous number of volcanos, some regions have none.
They are strongly stated like moles on the landscape and the volcanic cones have lava tops and dribbles. Whether they are active or not is up to you obviously, any that are dormant would likely be covered in foliage rather than being a blot on the landscape.
There are also flatter areas of volcanic coloured rock and these are geologically active places. They may be hot springs, lava beds or just ominous places for roads to skirt around. Here there is patch amongst the volcanos. They turn up where the faults are weaker and can be a long way for any volcanic cones.
Comparing Epochs
Five of the ten epochs use the same broad palette of features. The 1st Age, Flood, High Tide & 2nd Age all have the most commonality with Ice Age trailing.
The maps for Ice Age, Floods and High Tide are all based on the 1st Age, their difference is purely water. This makes a massive difference on the ground but zoomed out is less obvious.
If you’re looking at extreme climates like those in Game of Thrones the 1st Age would be the centre of that variation.
The 2nd Age on the left and the 1st Age on the right. Archerland.
The 2nd Age is a sibling of Dry Mesa which makes it more sort-of realistic as it has been eroded over so many variations. Compare 1st Age and 2nd Age side by side and you’ll see the 2nd Age is more rugged but tends to flatter tops on rises. This feature is from Dry Mesa where the peaks are eroded away.
The water is also noticeably higher on Archerland, more matter has literally slipped into the sea and filled in those huge Dry Mesa channels. This isn’t always the case, often the water level looks about the same in both epochs.
On Archerland the number of forests has shrunk considerably across the eons. This does suggest the 1st Age lost a lot of forest to civilisation leaving little for their ancestors. But really it’s how the water table has shifted over the eons.
Next is a close look at the Primordial and Deadlands.
I hope you’ve enjoyed this little tour. Reach out to @Leapin_guy on Twitter or Leap Interactive on Facebook and let me know what you think.