Diary of creating a city

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Nobby-W

Not an axe murderer
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Building a mega-city from Open Street Map data

"A wretched hive of scum and villainy - you'll be right at home."

Some of you will have seen the modified Tataouine map I did a few months ago. Now, we're looking to scale the process. The Tataouine map was quite fun to name all the streets for - feel free to spot the double entendre, puns and popular culture references. However, there were some lessons learned:
  • For most of the city, it's at a level of detail that won't get used. Only certain areas need mapping in that depth.
  • I didn't do a layer set with a low-res map that could be annotated with high-level detail.
  • The streets are all one object. This is a bit unwieldy to work with and scales poorly.
  • I didn't retain the original lines marking the actual routes of the streets. Not keeping those makes fixing the above issues much harder.
Still, it was fun and has had some use. Doubtless it will continue to be used.

I'm starting on Moseli - an arm of the larger megacity of Vetawa that contains the old starport and startown, frequented by traders, free booters, smugglers and general riffraff - and of course our intrepid party of up-and-coming gangsters.

This series of postings will walk through the process of shaking down existing freely available map data into a form that lends itself to use in a role playing game. The end result will be at about the level of detail of the Duskvol map in Blades in the Dark but it will retain the skeleton of the roads, allowing more detailed sections to be overlaid in layers on the map. The map will also be tiled into chunks that can be printed out or included in a rule book.
_____________
P.S. Apologies for the teaser. The phone running the hot spot ran out of power. Onwards -
 
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Step 1: Frigging with Maperitive

I won't do a Maperitive tutorial at this point, as there are already resources on the interwebs and I'm still not really familiar with it - just frigged about and got this far. However, this is a set of rules that filters out most buildings and minor roads.


Surabaya.jpg

When we take Surabaya and apply these rules it highlights districts, roads, rivers, and land usage with most of the buildings and fine-grained features filtered out. These are still present in the data set and we can frig some rules to get them out if needed, but they are only likely to be useful at much smaller, focused subsets of the map.
 
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Step 2: Getting the geography out

After a bit of faffing with Adobe Illustrator, I've got the coastline and waterways, plus a few geographic features out. These will form the basis of the map itself and I've left copies of them on reserve layers. The grid overlay you see in the screenshot is guides breaking the map up into A4 tiles that could go in an atlas or rulebook, At this point the scale is about 1:10,000 so the whole map is about 2.1m x 1.5m.

This involved quite a lot of tidying up of the data to get out a single coast line and single polygons for the various areas. The rivers implemented as lines got converted to areas with the offset operator, so all the water ways have fill.

Geography.png
 
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Step 3: Major Routes

I've gotten out railways and major highways, feeder routes and major roads. This will show the major layout and should fit with the actual blocks. The streets themselves are quite rough, and will need a some tidying to use them. This process will be the bulk of the work in preparing the map.

Once I have these items out we've got the major structure guides for the city - i.e. we can see where finer grained artifacts will fit. This stuff will also be useful as guides for creating a higher level map of major routes, suburbs and city structure to go with more detailed maps.

Essentially, this process will produce maps at 3 grains:

The first is a high level map with some of the major routes and features marked on it. This would be marked up at the level of 'Highway x, Starport, Metro network, startown etc.

The second is a street map at roughly the level of detail of the Duskvol map in the Blades In the Dark handbook. the individual tiles seen in the posting above will be roughly the grain of the tiles in the map, roughly corresponding to an A4 or 6x9" page.

The third will be more detailed maps of individual areas where this is needed. The process will preserve the street structures in a form that can be refined to a more detailed map, so bits can be pulled out and used to construct these maps at pretty much any time in the future.

While I named every street on the Tataouine map, this one will be far too big to do that with. Street naming is really only relevant when you're doing adventure level maps.

That's the plan, anyway. We'll see how well it works.

Transport.png
 
And now, a little about what I'm planning to do.

At this point we have the structural elements of the original city picked out. This bit is doing a sort of satellite city called Moseli. It's conurbated to the main city of Vetawa, but it's something of a separate entity, dominated by the starport. Moseli starport was the largest starport in the region until another one was built on the other side of Vetawa.

Now, Moseli starport is somewhat in decline as most of the big-money business has gone to Banzai (working title) starport elsewhere. However, all the capital investment is paid off, landing fees a re cheap and it's become a mecca for free traders and other riffraff that they don't want in the nice, clean, new starport anyway.

Moseli startown will fill most of the right hand side of the map.

In the top right of Surabaya (where the map comes from originally) there is actually swamp land and fish farms. This is where the starport itself will go. Below this area is a large residential tract, which will get co-opted for startown, The CBD is to the left of this and will get co-opted as part seedy downtown Moseli and part startown.

Note that there is also a separate Vetawa CBD and downtown, which will be the subject of another mapping exercise at some point. My cunning plan is not to go into much detail about the bit in between, which saves having to zip together maps of Surabaya and Jakarta in a way that looks convincing.

After this, the process of mapping will be to fill out some high level stuff for the starport and diddle the transport links a bit. Then is goes down into detail, doing tile-by-tile pull-tidy-frig work to make street maps. Placeholders for features will go on another guide layer, and get filled out as we further down into detail.

Individual tiles will be separate layer hierarchies (AI allows layers to sit in hierarchical structures). This allows entire tiles to be switched on and off while working on another tile, allowing the map to scale arbitrarily large in a single file. Illustrator should support this without having to drop back to attempts to do it with actual GIS software.

Rundown on software

Maperitive is free http://maperitive.net/
For illustration software, you could use Adobe Illustrator, Corel Draw or Inkscape. Of those, Inkscape is free although a bit slow on Windows for architectural reasons. Native 64 bit builds might be faster but I haven't tried it recently. Older versions of Corel Draw can be gotten for reasonable prices off Ebay. Adobe Illustrator CC is rental only.
 
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Cogitation about the starport

Here I've done a bit of a zoom in and I'm trying to think of a starport that has grown by aggregation - when more pads were needed a slum clearance was undertaken and they were built on an ad-hoc basis. What I'm aiming for is a starport interlaced with industry that has grown organically around it. The smaller pads are a bit over 100m in internal diameter, and the graphics show an outline of a large concrete berm around the pad. The larger pads are a bit bigger. There is a 1km scale visible on the map.

This notion, of course, glosses over the ungodly racket that a rocket (or any reaction drive) of several hundred plus tons thrust makes when it's taking off. While NASA's Kennedy facility places the pads miles from anything else, the Soyuz launch facilities are a bit more compact (see below). Also, the setting postulates technology that doesn't require highly flammable chemical rocket fuels for reaction mass so a crash-and-burn on takeoff or landing isn't quite as spectacular as with today's rockets.

Starport1.png

The effect I'm aiming for is something a bit like Mos Eisley with pads interspersed throughout the city. Also, while the pads are designed to support tail standers or vectored thrust reaction drive based VTOL systems the majority of contemporary spacecraft in the 'verse have CG units that are much less anti-social than honking great fusion rockets.

Not sure the concept passes the smell test, though. I shall continue to mull over it.

Soyuz_launch_site_pillars.jpg
 
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Take 2 - More space around the pads and spread out in chunks

Zoom back to see a larger part of the city and the pads distributed over a wide area, on larger reserves with more space around the pads. More airport-ish and less smelly.

Starport2.png
 
Take 3 - This one might work

This layout focuses the startown in the 4 tiles I've indicated on the map. To the west is the sea port and warehousing, to the southwest is downtown Moseli and to the south we can put in the Aferasi quarter. To the east we can have industrial and warehouse districts.


Starport3.png
 
Step 4: Getting some streets in

After some faffing about, I managed to find a way to clip lines to a clipping mask. In this case it's fairly manual but not unmanageably slow. The actual clipping operators seem to only work with filled shapes. Now we have a region with some raw - but editable - streets in it. The important part here is that we actually want to be able to preserve the street vectors. This facilitates making high and low resolution maps from the same vector data.

FirstRegion.png
 
And a bit more ...

Next step is to tidy up. We've done the slum clearance and installed the starport facilities; now we think a little about how the streets adapted to the presence of the starport.

Essentially the next step is to tidy up the streets and put in some where one might expect given the changes in the geography.

SneakPreview.png
 
Tweaked streets

I spent a bit of time tidying up some of the streets. There's still a bit of work to do at the south side of the four main tiles but a tale of woe involving broken air con in our hotel room and a choice between a downgraded replacement or a smoking room means I don't have a desk to work at tonight. Oy Vey!

I've also added a metro loop in, going around the main starport complexes. Vetawa and Moseli should have some infrastructure - better than Jakarta but not too good!

TweakedStreets.png
 
Cutting out blocks and scaling

Turns out I had the city at a slightly too small scale - I've scaled it up by a factor of x2. This means streets will be 6 points wide at A4 tile size, room to put labels at 5pt or so, which is still fairly legible in a sans-serif font.

Now, I've got the streets do drop out the blocks so we have individual polygons for each block. This lets us pull out individual tiles or make bigger maps at lower detail.

Blocks.png
 
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Isolating a single tile

In the step above we have a series of global layers for a large scale map - 1:20,000 or greater. This gives us a map that we can put high level features on - about the same level of abstraction as the Duskvol map in Blades In The Dark. Maps at this scale are useful for showing the relative locations of major neighbourhoods and large features such as starport landing pads.

We can (and maybe at some point will) do a map at a higher level of abstraction showing stuff at the level of the major urban areas, waterways, transport networks. This is a different project and I'll tackle it later.

Now, I've pulled out a single tile - this is an A4 page with bleeds at about 1:5,000 scale - depicting an area approximately 1km x 1.5km. This lets you show individual streets and the location of individual buildings. These tiles would form a geomorph pack for the city and will be the unit at which we accumulate detail on the map. They could also be stitched together with cropping and tiling into larger maps that could be rendered on a large format printer. Must...resist...

SingleTile1.png
 
Building in tiles

The tiling is working fine after a bit of frigging. Each tile is A4 sized and has a 10mm bleed allowing them to be printed on a page with bleed (think of the London A-Z street maps for example). This process is quite heavy on layers and uses a hierarchy in the layers. The tiles are sitting under a root called Tiles and the global high-level stuff is sitting under a hierarchy called global. Each tile has a relatively straightforward layer structure, although this could also evolve over time; the intention is to be able to add layers for other items - subterranean features, starport detail, overhead walk ways, DM information and so forth (i.e. the map becomes a part of an evolving city document). These can all sit on the same map files.

Other parts of the document would include encounter tables for each region, some sort of random generator for businesses or other items found. The maps will have points of interest noted - various background material such as bars or other places a bunch of riffraff might hang out, locations germane to adventures, HQs or other points of interest and so forth. Really, the same sort of stuff you would expect to see on any city map for a RPG.

I find naming the streets quite therapeutic. The names are coming from the big list of names file here and another file that has a list of names of authors, actors, characters and various other items of significance from sci-fi and fantasy media. This second list is much less mature. I'm slotting in the names as easter eggs here and there. Some of my earlier efforts were populated 100% from these names but that's too much.

You can see the start of some facilities being added. These will accumulate over time. For reasons of time and utility it doesn't make sense to try marking up every single building in the city, but adding some specific items and laying them out so one can put the labels directly on the map lets people find the main bits easily. Random tables for generating other content can supplement the fixed items.

SeveralTiles.png
 
Tiles

After a fair amount of sodding about, I've split the map into tiles - or at least the portions that I want to frig with in the short term. I'll probably add a few more to the left side, for some posher bits of town.

A minor niggle I've just realised is that the tiles are 1:1.414 (ISO a series are 1:sqrt (2) proportions). However, many of the book formats I might produce these in aren't that aspect ratio - 6x9 is 1:1.5, and 8.5:11 is 1:1.29. DTRPG does't actually support A4. However, the tiles have a 1cm margin on all sides, so there is a bit of flex in what formats they can be printed in.

I won't use all of the tiles straight away - there are more than 60 of them and I will add a few more later. However, one can now switch the tiles on and off, allowing portions of the map to be worked on


Tiles.png
 
Progress ...

The power of nibbling. I've taken to just spending an hour here and there filling in the names and taking my laptop on the train to work, although it's a bit jiggly for using graphics software. This is about half the tiles for the first phase, which will be enough tiles for a minimum viable product consisting of the posh bits to the north (Shuttleworth, Cixin, Asher field), Sirtis in the NW with the big enclosed water body (Part of me feels this should have a marina), the seedy bits in the middle and the industrial bits to the south.

Thus far there are about 900 named streets, suggesting the first phase will wind up with about 2,000 or so. After that, there will be a third pass, putting in various features like major buildings, shops and sites of interest from my embryonic features list.

Once that's done I'll produce a gazetteer, encounter tables for various regions and start to drill into locations for particular adventures. From there it will be driven by adventures and any other ideas. Hopefully, after a few iterations of that it will start to feel lived in.

Progress2.png
 
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A little find - Another OSM downloader/renderer.


Here are a couple of raw street data sets I downloaded from it. Note that most of the Chinese OSM data doesn't have English translations so to search for it you have to translate your search terms into Chinese. The Jakarta data is just for Jakarta; the whole greater Jakarta region is a conurbation of five cities - Jakarta, Tangerang, Bekasi, Depok and Bogor.

As yet, working out the scale is an unsolved problem Maperative at least gave you a current scale for the zoom, although it doesn't appear to allow you to set the bounds by coordinates and zoom level. This data set doesn't give you a scale at all. I think the only way to do this would be to find known points on the map and measure the distance between them.

The data set also just does streets, although getting geography out of OSM isn't terribly hard - much less effort than the streets as there is much less of it. Marrying it up to the streets still requires the scaling problem to be solved. In the worst case one might be able to do it by eyeballing the data.

The images below are from the data sets downloaded to SVG files and imported into Adobe Illustrator and then taken as screenshots.

Jakarta


JakartaRaw.png

ShenzenShenzenRaw.png
 
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I have a conundrum

After spendng a month or so chipping away at my city, I've found I have an issue.

The idea is to structure the final document as a gazetteer with a page containing a map tile, with the facing page having little blurbs about the major features of that tile. Specific locations can get drilled down as and when. To this end I've done it as A4 tiles - 297x210mm.

This is a ratio of 1:Sqrt (2), which has the strength that different sizes maintain the same aspect ratio. i.e. A1, A2, A3 and A4 are all exactly the same shape, whereas 8.5x5.5, 8.5x11 and 11x17 are not the same shape - you can't blow something up between the sizes and get the same aspect ratio.

Unfortunately, it looks like A4 is not an option for all formats that can be printed by DTRPG should I want to make a bound version (in particular hard cover ones which will lie flatter than perfect bound). While I can print and spiral bind off my printer, it won't bleed to the edge of an A4 sheet.

It gets better still. Some of the formats available (e.g. 6x9") are 1:1.5 in ratio, 8.5x11 is about 1:1.3. It seems I can't make a universal tiling scheme that tiles exactly right for a variety of print formats. Bummer.

Oh, my first world problems. What to do?
 
Partial solution

I went to merge the tiles to re-tile the map, but then tried starting from the street map itself. Actually cutting the streets out of the blocks is straightforward, but the streets and other features were still a bit messy. I went to tidy up some of the streets and found this was much quicker than diddling the cut out blocks, so I've mad a tidy street map.

Although this process took a couple of weeks of nibbling in my spare time, it was actually a manageable effort, and would be my preferred approach for doing this a second time. I've now cleaned up most of the streets in an area of about 150 square kilometers.

Also, Adobe Illustrator will quite happily wrangle a map this size on an ordinary laptop, so my scalability worries have turned out to be unfounded. It may still be necessary to tile the map, although in that case the tiles could be much, much larger. However, I doubt I'd ever bother with a single contiguous area big enough to worry about that, given that what I have now started out life as about 15% or 20% of the second largest city in Indonesia. The two maps I did above definitely did start to herniate Illustrator, though. If I was to try and do something with either of those I would have to find some tiling scheme.

An epiphany and a change in strategy

I've never had any plans to do detailed maps of the entire area, just suburbs of particular interest. However, I had a little epiphany. Originally I had in mind that I would make a subset of the city with contiguous tiles and put all the stuff I wanted into that subset. To this end, I had started to name the streets in a series of tiles (you can see this below). However, it has now occurred to me that the interesting bits don't actually have to be contiguous and the bits in between are essentially boring and not much from a role playing perspective.

Therefore, I've broadened out my city build and I'll scatter the bits I want to do over the whole area I have mapped out.

Named_Streets.png

Fig. 1 Named streets and original tiles

Tidied_Streets.png

Fig. 2. Tidied up streets and some features added and cleaned up. Note that I haven't dropped the streets out to created the blocks at this point.


StreetsTest1.png

Fig. 3 Test of dropping out the streets. Looks much tidier now.
 
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Where to from here?

I've got the water ways tidied up and most of the streets in the eastern portion of the city named. Taking stock of where I am, there are still plenty of tasks to do:
  • To the right of the map is some waste land, waterfront and what will become fish farms. There are some streets that I haven't named there, and I'll get around to doing that, but it's not urgent.
  • Tidying up the streets has moved some of them. I'm currently tidying up the names and doing a more careful alignment. The result should look pretty tidy.
  • Some of the suburbs - in particular the industrial stuff - will move to the left hand side of the map, and I'll street it up. The interesting bits won't be contiguous.
  • There are a few more metro rail lines to put in.
  • Putting in some background fluff - a few dozen major features per tile.
  • Demarcating the individual suburbs
  • Building encounter tables for the suburbs
  • Designing and jacquaying the starport fields
  • Developing the rest of the factions and key NPCs.
Alien races

The setting has about 10 alien races (that I've actually sketched out to any degree), of which three will have significant minority populations in the city and some of the others will have occasional incidence. One has their own population centre on the map, the Aferasi Quarter. The factions and features for this aren't fleshed out yet beyond a few one note entries.

An offshore island

This is an artificial island extension to the starport. I'll get around to doing it at some point.

The rest of the city

I won't bother to do the whole city like this, although there are probably another two sections I will do in detail. One is a downtown area (more gangs) and one is a CBD area for some corporate shenanigans. London rooftops viewed from the cheese grater are quite fascinating. I've got some ideas for B&E type heist adventures. These sections are really aimed at doing cyberpunk style high-tech low-life adventures and things where a party of adventurers get caught up in this scene.

The other bit I'll do at some point is at least one posh, semi rural or surburban bit. The basic concept I have in mind is heist or raid adventures in posh mansions (think something like the climactic scenes in Beverly Hills Cop). Possibly high-tech burglary adventures to nick stuff or similar.

These can get glued together at some point with a more high level map of the city or region.

Probably I won't do it all at once, as it's a project that could cover a year or more if done in one's spare time (hopefully the other maps would be quite a lot quicker than this one as I don't have to make the same mistakes). This city map is enough to do the backdrop for a Blades In The Dark hybrid game.
 
Suburbs

So, after doing a bunch of street level stuff I decided I needed to go and do some higher-level re-planning. After a bit of examination - and looking around the original city (Surabaya) on Google maps I've got an initial cut of chopping the city up into districts. I also decided to put a large central starport in, converting the other ports to legacy fields, some in use, some derelict.


Burbs.png
 
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Tidying up a bit

Here's a PDF of the city map so far. It's got suburbs marked in, railways tidied up and most of the streets except for the industrial bits to the west cleaned up. Will tackle those later.

Downloadable PDF
 
Starting to fill in some detail

Here's a section of the map with some background details filled in - mostly pubs, restaurants and coffee shops plus some retail and other facilities. For each 8.5x11 tile I'm aiming for about 30-50 (i.e. enough for one page of short descriptive blurbs on the facing page) background fluff items. This should start to give a sense of what the final map tiles will look like.

I may go back to colour as POD colour isn't all that much more expensive than B&W. At the moment I have a B&W A3 laser.

The railway and starport fields are still placeholders.

Shuttleworth.png

I have to say it's looking quite good when I print it. Going back over and tidying up the streets made a huge difference.
 
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A little segue

Needed to add some context so went on a little segue filling out the star map for the setting - or at least a first draft of it, so i did rough drafts of a few sectors around the region I'm centering on.

This is a rough layout done with Indesign and filling in the sectors. They're eps files converted from SVG generated by a utility I wrote. This process is buggy because of an issue rendering ligatures - at some point I'll have to write an EPS renderer.

The setting is a sort of pocket empires type arrangement based around a collapsing empire and stuff breaking of from it - there's more to it but that's the basics. It's big enough to have plenty of elbow room as a sandbox but it doesn't really need to be any bigger than that. We don't need a gigantic third-imperium style meta-setting, just enough room for a sandbox to run comfortably.

The setting has four major regions plus an axis for future expansion. There is the neutral zone, aimed at scum-and-villainy type adventures, a core region for high-tech lowlife, a 'marches' region for battles against enemies and a void region for a space exploration campaign. With a bit of luck I can ultimately stitch them together without it looking too obvious. Although the marches is in very early planning stages I've got two enemy tropes - one empire of christian space nazis and one 'evil lizard men'. The former is intended to be a region you can do adventures in - i.e. even though it's an evil empire it's heavily jacquayed. The second is just something to shoot at, think buggers or romulans.

The total scope is a few hundred inhabited systems - big enough to have elbow room, small enough to be practical to build.



Visualise_Sector.png
 
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Nobby I am so envious of your skill. I thought I was doing good to freehand the outline of an island kingdom on paper and then scan it to digital and then you do this! Amazing!
 
Nobby I am so envious of your skill. I thought I was doing good to freehand the outline of an island kingdom on paper and then scan it to digital and then you do this! Amazing!
This did come from existing openstreetmap data, although it needed a lot of tidying up and the process has taken a long time with lots of nibbling to get through the work. Tidying up the streets wasn't that bad actually; it turned out to be appreciably less painful than I thought it would be. Some of it involved grafting bits from other maps onto the data and adding stuff in by hand.

Even the big list of names was less work than I thought it would be. It took an evening to search the interwebs and compile a list of around 12,800 names. Since then I've gotten additional names in different languages so I have more than 15,000 now. This didn't take all that long to do.

It took a bit of frigging to get maperative to download useful data sets. Unfortunately it insists in holding the whole kaboodle in memory so it's limited in the complexity it can handle at once. You can't just download a whole city and then dump out the bits you want.

This has been a learning experience - I think the next one will be quicker but there's still quite a bit of legwork. This is definitely one of those 10% inspiration, 90% perspiration things.
 
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So, here's an A3 tile showing the major features, with the exception of the starport itself, which I haven't gotten around to yet. There are CG pads, a sample of buildings, streets and alleys cut in. Not 100% sure about the alleys, maybe they should be a bit sparser.

Also, I've gotten clipping masks to work, so I can drop tiles of arbitrary sizes and orientations. It also looks like the clipping masks might be smart to enough to eliminate shapes with no intersection at all, which will be a good thing for electronic editions of map tiles.

Still having crashing bug problem with Distiller on Windows 10, although it seems to work fine on Win7. I think I will have to spin up a Windows 7 VM to run it. This was rendered to PDF by printing to a postscript file and then converting to PDF with PDFCreator, which uses Ghostscript in the back-end.
 

Attachments

  • VetawaOSM-2.pdf
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My problem with maps is that I can never seem to stop fiddling with them, even the ones with the most basic requirements. I've just done a small hex map for a star sector I'm writing up and now I see yours with some of the hexes filled with colour, I'm thinking I wonder what that would look like on mine :hmmm:
 
My problem with maps is that I can never seem to stop fiddling with them, even the ones with the most basic requirements. I've just done a small hex map for a star sector I'm writing up and now I see yours with some of the hexes filled with colour, I'm thinking I wonder what that would look like on mine :hmmm:
I'm not convinced that's a bad thing. Why not evolve maps? If you have them in an electronic format you can make revisions as you add or modify stuff for new adventures. My plans for this city are to get up a draft to support a sort of Peaky-Blinders-in-Space campaign (a Blades in The Dark/Scum and Villainy hybrid). This will inevitably generate stuff for the city - factions, locations and so forth. The map can easily go through some revisions.

As long as the revisions are adding new stuff or are happening in support of gaming, why not?
 
As long as the revisions are adding new stuff or are happening in support of gaming, why not?

In my case I'm not sure its adding anything, other than the urge to make further changes :trigger:. I'm definitely a fan of maps evolving over time. New discoveries added or even the same map redrawn from a different perspective, for example competing powers that produce maps of the same region they occupy are likely to show themselves at the centre of the map or the largest icon on the map.
 
In my case I'm not sure its adding anything, other than the urge to make further changes :trigger:. I'm definitely a fan of maps evolving over time. New discoveries added or even the same map redrawn from a different perspective, for example competing powers that produce maps of the same region they occupy are likely to show themselves at the centre of the map or the largest icon on the map.
The colour coding is there as a visualisation tool to show affiliations. The map above is a screenshot of a rough sketch of the whole of known space for planning. It's not final artwork for the star atlas.
 
Starting to look lived in now

There's quite a bit more for this section (about 1/4 of the total Startown area) but it's starting to look like it's actually got stuff in it.

LivedIn.png
 
Adding the first starport field

A little bit of homework here - looking at the Kennedy space centre pads and airports to get a start on what facilities to put in. This is Shuttleworth field - one of the individual fields that make up the starport. It has two old, more-or-less abandoned wet pads rated for reaction drives up to 1,500t thrust. These aren't used much any more because ships rocking large reaction drives are very, very noisy. There are pads elsewhere still in use but I havent' done that field yet.

There are 8 pads rated for CG-equipped ships or reaction drives up to 200t thust, plus an apron. I've started on the terminal and admin buildings.

WIPStarport.png
 
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A little segue into the big picture

With the first couple of neighbourhoods and one of the starport fields drafted, I parked this for a while and did some planning. This went over some of the basic layout of the setting. Then I sketched out four campaign arcs plus some smaller arcs for the Neutral Zone region. This sort of proved the concept, as it were. It's demonstrated some campaigns I could run in the setting and what their content might look like. They're in a mess of cryptic OneNote documents at the moment so I won't cut and paste them here. However, in synopsis, some campaign arcs could be:
  • Smuggler arc - continuing on from the statues PbP game here.
  • Peaky Blinders arc - Blades In The Dark hybrid in the vetawa city.
  • Void exploration arc - To go boldly where nobody has been in a while, finding spacegoing aliens, more indiana jones stuff with old civilisations and some nefarious goings on on the part of the Union. As this is not Star Trek we have no imperative to split our infinitives.
  • Pirate hunter arc - I came up with four decent antagonists and did sketch plans for two of them.
Some other ideas were a few bounty hunting adventures, some wandering adventurer space westerns, a sort of international rescue mini campaign, lifting some ideas from Sector General (for those who know your '60s vintage space opera) and featuring an ambulance ship with the tail number T18.5 (for those who know their ICD10 codes). Finally, a sort of busybodies in a yacht arc, featuring a converted lifeboat called the Star Vixen, named after the yacht that was the inspiraton for the Dulcibella from Riddle of The Sands.

There are two other major regions and I put a small amount of thought into those but haven't gotten as far as attempting to sketch out campaign arcs beyond half a dozen basic concepts. These are for another time as the Neutral Zone is a big enough (probably too big) project already.

Now I've satisfied myself that I can make the setting into something playable for a reasonably decent standard of playable. Still working on whether I can make it interesting and fun. I still feel I'm searching for a wow factor.

This has distracted me a little from my PbP game, so I should really put more time into that for a while.
 
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