NiceMarmot

I've been getting a bunch of questions recently about how to make maps similar to the ones I've been doing for the Kaliphlin Guild. I've been writing answers in PMs, and felt I should probably share this information more broadly. Plus others can chip in too if they want. I realize this is slightly off-topic, since it doesn't directly concern LEGO, but the maps seem to be a fairly key part of Historica now, and people may want to create fantasy (or historical) maps to build stories and context around their MOCs outside of Historica even. Mods, feel free to move the post if it doesn't belong here. I am not writing a tutorial on how to use your image editing program; I assume you already know that, or at least can figure it out yourself. Note that these are not easy programs to learn or use. However they have a ton of capabilities, and if you want a cool map, well, you're going to have to get your hands dirty. I imagine that I'll be editing this a bit, adding to it, and organizing it better, but here goes: Googling & Links Googling definitely helped me figure out a lot of the techniques. There is a ton of information on fantasy mapmaking and cartography online. There are also lots of example maps and images, which I found very helpful when trying to determine how I wanted a geographic feature to look. GIMP's online tutorials aren't bad, once you figure out what tool you're trying to use. One site that seemed to come up a lot was www.cartographersguild.com, which is a community for fantasy mapmakers. Their forums have all sorts of information. Online maps, such as Google Maps, Mapquest, and Bing, are useful to help you see how geographic features look. Want to make your fjords look realistic? Well, zip over to Norway and see how they look. Tools I'm using GIMP. I don't have a copy of PhotoShop, and decided that the $250 or whatever it costs would be better spent on LEGO! GIMP is fine, and it's free. Not sure if there's a version for Windows, but there is one for Mac and Linux. I'm sure PhotoShop is better than GIMP, and I've heard that PhotoShop is definitely easier to use. I used to use it many years ago, and liked it a lot, so I wouldn't switch from it if you have it. Seashore is dumbed down version of GIMP for the Mac. I think it's great for simple photo editing. I tried to use it for mapmaking, but quickly discovered that it is too dumbed-down for what I wanted to do. If you wanted to make a really quick and simple map, it's probably OK. Key Concepts Here are some of my key learnings on mapmaking: Keeping everything in separate layers is key - it helps organize and manage everything, and allows you to create and edit features without messing up other features. More on this later. You gotta get the right brush for the job. See Brushes below. Don't use too many colors. Keep it simple. Keep it fairly clean -- don't clutter up the map too much. I've tried that and it doesn't look good, and I had to wipe out a bunch of stuff. It has to make sense geographically. Zoom in a bit for working on details, but make sure you zoom out to 100% / actual size every now and then to make sure it looks good. Check each feature to see how it looks. Redo it if it's doesn't look right. Yes, it takes more time, but it really makes the map look much better. Do things in order. What order is a bit up to you, but in general, do the larger features first. See below. Learn how to select parts of the image properly. Learn how to select using the polygonal or lasso select tools. Learn how to use the 'magic' (or similar color) selection tool. Learn how to add to or subtract from a selection, and how to take the intersection of two selections. Small touches and details help - the compass rose, a few sea monsters, the "shore gradients" (see below) Learn a few keyboard shortcuts, such as for the Undo, Paintbrush tool, Eraser tool, etc. Then you can use one hand to hit the keys while your primary hand draws with the mouse. Otherwise you'll forever be moving the mouse from the image over to the menus and toolbox palettes and back again. Undo is your friend. You're going to use the Undo feature. A lot. It's OK. Feel free to try things and experiment. You can always undo and try again. Order of Work I generally work in this order: shoreline, rivers, mountains, hills, forests, swamps & deserts, cities, roads, shore gradients and ocean tinting, and finally text labels. You want to lay down the big stuff first, and work down to the details later. I could also see doing the mountains first, then putting in the rivers, and then the shoreline, if that makes sense to you. Or shoreline first, then mountains and hills, then rivers. Making Sense Geographically Well this seems obvious, but I've seen a lot of example maps with just wacky stuff on them. If your map doesn't look real, in a geographic sense, it won't look right to the viewer. Here are some examples: Rivers that flow uphill, like into the mountains. You might find this hard to believe, but rivers actually flow downhill, from the mountains to the sea. In rare cases, they end up in a salt lake in the desert with no outlet. Otherwise, they all end up in the sea. Mountains that completely surround a flat space in the middle. So where does all the rainfall go? If the mountains truly surrounded the flat space, there'd be a lake there because the rainfall couldn't get out. I know you want a nice valley protected on all sides by impassable mountains, but there has to be river flowing out of it somewhere. It's ok; it can flow through an impassable gorge or something. Rivers that separate and rejoin too much, or crossing over each other. In general, rivers fork going upstream only, and merge going downstream. When a river separates and rejoins, that's an island in the river; and they're usually fairly small. Rivers certainly don't join and separate into a web of interconnected rivers (exception: some bayous and deltas are like this, but they are very, very interconnected, and it's going to take a lot of work to map that). Climatic issues, e.g., swamps in the middle of deserts, jungles right next to deserts, palm forests next to coniferous forests, snow in the tropics, jungles in the arctic, etc. Sometimes these may work, but usually it just looks wrong. Working in Layers I think working in image editors is all about Layers. I put everything into separate layers, so that they don't interfere with each other. So the land outline in one layer, rivers and lakes in another, roads and cities in another, mountains in another, etc. Make sure you have the Layers dialog visible on your screen so you can easily pick which layer you're working on. At first, this is a bit confusing, as I was forgetting which layer I was on, and put a river on the mountains layer or something. But after a while it becomes second nature to check and switch layers before doing something. You can hide and show layers as necessary to reduce clutter while working. You can also move layers up and down; stuff in the upper layers will hide the lower layers below them. In my maps, the layers are as follows, starting at the bottom: a white background layer, the land outline / shoreline, the 'shore gradients', mountains and hills, forests, deserts, rivers & lakes, ocean tinting, 'other', cities & roads, decorations, and then all the text labels are on top. 'Other' includes features that don't fit anywhere else, like swamps, cliffs, etc. Brushes Brushes are specialized, (usually) small image files that tell the image editor what texture to use to apply the color you're painting with. For the shorelines, I've been using 5 pixel wide fuzzy circle brush, shrunk down to about 75-80% of normal size. I tried the Pencil brush, but it was too hard-edged; I wanted a mostly solid, dark line, but with little bit of fuzziness on the sides. Similar for rivers, but slightly narrower. For forests, swamps, and mountains I used custom brushes. Your image editor comes with some standard painting brushes already, in a bunch of sizes, such as normal brushes, pencil brushes, airbrushes, etc. These are good for lines, like rivers and shorelines. However, for a lot of other things, custom brushes are your friend for mapmaking. I created some brushes myself, such as for various trees and the swamps, which isn't too hard once you figure out what you're doing. GIMP's online tutorial for creating brushes wasn't too bad, as long you're just doing simple ones. I imagine creating PS brushes can't be too hard either once you figure it out. I also found a set of brushes that someone had done based on the symbols on Tolkien maps. I think the guy had done both GIMP and PS versions; I believe this is the link (http://calthyechild.deviantart.com/art/Tolkien-style-Map-Brushes-138796530) but if not you can probably google them. I ended up modifying the mountain brushes from this set a bit and using them, and also used the hills brushes and a few others. Creating or modifying a brush is really pretty simple; it's basically a grayscale image file itself. Couple of learnings here: 1) make the brush bigger than you think you need; you can always shrink it if necessary, but enlarging it will not look good; and 2) usually less detail is better in a brush, the simpler ones tend to look better. GIMP also allows you to create "brush pipes"; these are brushes that have multiple images in them. I've created these for forests and mountains, so that it will randomly pick from several different images each time it uses the brush. That way the forest doesn't have all the exact same type of tree. I'd be happy to send my GIMP brush files to anyone who wants them. There are plenty of brush files online too, and (in GIMP at least) it's easy to convert images and icons found online to brushes. Try googling "<xyz> map symbol" or "<xyz> map icon", where <xyz> is whatever geographical feature you're trying to produce. Transparency When creating an image, make sure you've enabled transparency, so that each layers starts off as transparent. In GIMP, under Advanced Options in the New image dialog, your Color Space is RGB and Fill With is set to Transparency. Then you'll start off with a blank, transparent image, and each new layer will be transparent by default. Plus when you erase, the erased area in the active layer will be made transparent. Various Geographic Features At a very high level, here's how I do each piece: Shoreline Paintbrush tool, freehand, black, 5 pixel wide fuzzy-circle brush scaled down to about 75-80%. Do it in short segments, probably no more than an inch or two on the monitor at a time, so that if you mess up you can easily hit Undo and won't lose too much. Do the main shoreline first and then go put in islands. Rivers Paintbrush tool, freehand, dark blue, 5 pixel wide fuzzy-circle brush scaled down to about 65% or so. Remember that rivers tend to curve a lot. It's important to get the right scale of curves, which depends on the gradient of the river. Look at real world maps to get a feel for it. Flatlands have big, loopy curves. Steeper land has shorter, more jagged curves. I think that realistic rivers are hard, and I tend to hit Undo a zillion times when doing them until I finally get it right. Remember that rivers will somewhat define where your hills and mountains go, and vice versa. Mountains Paintbrush tool, custom mountains brushes, dark brown. Start with the northernmost mountains in a range first, so that you can lay more southernly ones slightly over them if you want them closely packed. Remember that big mountains dwindle into smaller mountains which dwindle into hills. Check out this tutorial. Hills Paintbrush tool, custom hills brushes, dark brown. These are pretty easy if you have a good brush. Topmost/northernmost ones first, like mountains, so you can overlay if necessary. Forests Paintbrush tool, custom forest brushes, dark green for coniferous, medium green for broadleaf, and lighter green for palms. Recently I've created two sets of brushes: one with the full tree, and one with just the tops (the leaves). I use the just-leaves brush for the entire forest except for the southern edges, and then use the full tree brush for the southern/bottom edges. That gives it a bit of a looking-down-from-on-high look, where you would mostly see just the tree tops but not the trunks, except for those closest to you. Swamps Paintbrush tool, custom swamp brush, olive green. Fairly simple to do. Swamp brushes are easy to construct, and there are tons of examples on the Internet. Deserts Fill tool, light brown. For deserts, I used the pencil tool to put a bunch of random dots down, then created a Pattern from those dots, and then when I need a desert, I select the desert area, and fill it with the Pattern I created. Cities Paintbrush tool, regular circle brush (11 or 13 pixels), magenta. Just plop a circle of color down. Roads Paintbrush tool, 3 pixel regular circle brush (or fuzzy-circle brush), magenta. In GIMP set the brush spacing to 180-200%. This will only apply the brush every 180-200% of the brush width, thus leaving nearly a full brush width's gap of empty space in between two applications of the brush. So you end up with a nice dotted line of magenta circles. Text Labels Text tool, very dark red. Not too hard to do. Pick good, readable fonts. Try out various sizes to make sure they're still readable. If you're putting a label in the middle of a forest or mountains or something, you may need to create a layer under it and paint with your background color around the text a bit, so that the text is on your background color and stands out from the forest or mountains or whatever. GIMP has a Path tool that allows you to build a curved path out of B-Splines and then fit the text to it. I've used it a bit, but it's a bit of a pain. Usually I find it just easier to rotate the text a bit to parallel a river or shoreline or something. Shore Gradients Regarding "shore gradients" -- these are the faint blue lines that look like depth lines in your oceans. They look really cool, and are very easy to make. Here's how you do it: Figure out what color you're going to use -- a medium greyish blue seems to work well, and determine the right brush -- I use a 3 pixel wide airbrush (I think) Make your Shoreline layer active and use the 'magic selection' tool (or whatever it's called in your image editor; it selects all contiguous area with similar colors) to select all the ocean outside the shoreline Change your active layer to the Shore Gradients layer (but make sure the selection doesn't change) Shrink the selection by about 8-10 pixels (in GIMP there's a menu option for this). See what looks good for the first gradient. I've been using 10 pixels recently, but if your shore had a lot of crannies and islands you might want to only shrink in 8 pixels. Don't let it shrink from the image border, only from the selected shoreline. Stroke the selection with the color and brush identified in the first step. At least that's what GIMP calls it; I imagine PhotoShop has a similar capability. It paints the border of the selection with a selected brush and color Check it out to make sure it looks good. If it doesn't, undo it, modify, and do it again. The first time, you might have to do this a bunch to get the right brush, color, distance from the shoreline, etc. Shrink the selection again, by 5 pixels Stroke the selection again Shrink the selection again, by 8 pixels, and stroke again Keep doing this until you decide it looks good or you run out of room. Each time add the previous shrinkage to the last shrinkage, so it should go 5, 8, 13, 21, ... (recognize that? It's the Fibonacci sequence, and for some reason it looks right here) That seems complex, but it really isn't at all, and it looks very cool. And drawing those gradients by hand would be a huge pain. Tracing If you're starting from a scanned image (for instance of a hand-drawn map), you'll have some special issues if you want to trace it or merge it into a new background. Paste this image into your map image as a new layer, just above the background layer. You've got a couple of options then: 1) you can erase this layer's background, making those areas transparent and letting the background layer show through, or 2) you can add new layers on top, and trace the scanned image's features in the new layer by hand (or in a more advanced way, by using selections and paths). If you're taking a scanned image and just erasing a background and making a few minor modifications, I might use option #1. Otherwise, for anything more serious, you're probably better off using option #2, and just using the scanned image layer as a guide for tracing its features into your new map layers. In this case, I'd duplicate the scanned image layer, and make the duplicate layer much lighter and lower contrast using Colors > Brightness - Contrast option. This will make it easier to trace; otherwise it will be hard to see your tracing over the scanned image layer. Make the original scanned image layer non-visible, so only the lighter, low contrast version is visible. Now you're ready to trace it into your new map layers above it. Then when you're done you just make this low contract image layer non-visible. Custom Brushes Revisted You may want to use some of the brushes that I use. Some of them I created; others I downloaded; there are tons on the Internet. They should work with both GIMP and PhotoShop (I think). You may have to rename their extensions for them to work in PS; don't really know. The .gbr files are the brushes. The .gih files are "brush pipes." Brush pipes are collections of brushes that GIMP will then apply in some sort of order or randomly. Mine are all random. I use them to produce forests and mountains with randomly selected brushes for a varied look. (The forest one works better than the mountains one.) Search for "GIMP brush pipe" if you want to know more; there are lots of tutorials out there, and you can use brush pipes to do some pretty cool stuff, but it can get complex. Here's fairly comprehensive tutorial on brushes. I haven't read the whole thing, but it looks more detailed than anything else I've seen out there. Note that in GIMP there are two different types of brushes, and it's not easy to tell which is which without opening up the brush as if you were going to edit it. If the brush image is a grayscale image, then the white parts of the brush act as transparent (nothing is painted), and the grey or black parts of the brush image are the brush and will paint in whatever your foreground color is currently (in varying shades according to the darkness of each pixel in the brush). If the brush is an RGB image, it will paint exactly as it appears in the brush editor, including any background you may have in it. It will not paint using your current foreground color. Many of the brushes you might download from the Internet are saved as RGB images. You can edit them in GIMP and convert them to greyscale images if you want. I believe that image pipes are only available using this RGB mode, but can't remember exactly. To install the brushes, unzip them and put them into whatever directory the photo editor expects them. On my Mac, GIMP looks under my home directory, in the subdirectory Library/Application Support/Gimp/brushes. Then in GIMP, you need to open the brushes dialog or palette and click the refresh button. Good luck! Whew! Well, that's a lot. I'll add more later. Hope that helps, and let me know if you have other questions, NiceMarmot/Gex

Here's the remaining detailed map of Siccus, the northeastern section. Note the new waterfalls, two new lakes, a canyon on the Lick of Salt river, and a lot more islands in the fjords and Goolag Archipelago. Also added a few towns in logical spots. I envisage much of the eastern coast to be cliffs, and the eastern coast and lower slopes of the Rakath mountains to be heavily forested, but didn't have time to put those in, plus there's not a lot of room on the map for those things. Northeast Siccus (Kaliphlin Guild)

Yes, ZCerberus, that's exactly what I meant by recessing the windows in an arch. Either round arches like your photo or the PoP arches, which are really Persian/Middle-Eastern looking. And I really like those small white domes ; don't think I've ever seen them before -- going to have to get some. Too bad they're so $$. Or you could use the PoP dome pieces , which are less expensive but you need four. That's a great look, but it does use up a ton of headlight bricks!

Wow. Looks very cool, and if you're a noob, you're still a lot better at LDD than I am. Love the color scheme too. Here are some ideas. Feel free to discard. You might want to make the ground level a bit higher. Looks like it's six bricks high, which is not very high for palace. Making it higher will give you more room for ornamentation and so forth I have recently played around with recessing those arched windows in a larger arch, and it looks good. Might help make the exterior more ornate. I usually build the parapet a brick or two higher. Looks like you've got one solid brick layer, with a castellated layer above it. Since one brick is probably about 1.25 to 1.5 feet high, that makes for a parapet of 2.5 to 3 feet, which is pretty low, and hard to hide behind (you'd have to duck down to cover yourself). For a castle I usually do two full brick layers plus two castellated layers for full protection. For a palace, which might not need such strong defenses, perhaps one full brick layer, one castellated layer, and then put two cheese wedges on top of each castellation? That makes it a bit higher, plus more stylized. Have you considered a small tower in the center of the top level sticking up several levels? Might look good. Consider breaking up the smoothness of the outside wall a bit. Maybe make the tan layer at the bottom stick out one stud. Or using inverted 2x2 slopes every four studs in the tan layer just below the white flooring to make the parapet stick out one stud from the walls below. Good luck! And looking forward to seeing more iterations!

Great post, ZCerberus! Hear, hear! I whole-heartedly agree. I certainly welcome constructive criticism and feedback, and I hope everyone else does too. It has definitely helped me become a better builder since I emerged from my dark ages a year not even knowing what SNOT was. I hope people don't feel shy about giving good feedback on MOCs -- I think builders want to hear suggestions and ideas for improving their builds and learning new techniques. DC's incredibly detailed guide has helped a lot, as have a lot of the fabulous MOCs in this forum. I have really learned a lot from looking carefully at people's MOCs and thinking 'How in the world did they do that?' Although sometimes I wish people would take clearer and more detailed photos of particularly interesting parts of their builds, usually the builder is quite good about explaining how they did something if you ask, so feel free to reach out and ask questions. Perhaps it would be helpful if we had some building guides on specific subtopics (and not just limited to DC's style)? For instance, I always have trouble with roofs, so I'd love to see a guide with everything one wanted to know about building roofs in all sorts of various styles. The other thing that has helped me a lot is setting higher goals for myself and then stretching to reach them. When building now, I try to think early about how to make something even more realistic or interesting than I think I can, and then figure out the techniques to do it. Surprisingly, I find the limiting factor is more often time than bricks. That said, I don't think I've stretched very far at all yet, certainly not by the standards of this forum. So, looking forward to a lot more advanced building over the next year!

Wow! Simply amazing. Once again, I am also astounded by the number of 1x1 round plates and 1x1 bricks with studs on the side you have! They must have cost a fortune to accumulate that many.

Sounds good to me. So lose the volcano at the northeastern end of Peregrinus? I'll put the reservoir in; I'll check your brick map photos for the exact location. And I'll put the cliff face in too.

OK, now I'm convinced that you Avalonians are obsessed with torture! This is like the fifth torture chamber you all have MOCed. I don't think Mitgardia or Kaliphlin have any, and I'm sure Nocturnus doesn't have half as many as Avalonia. Have the Drow infiltrated the fair Western Elysian lands? Is there some subterranean channel of corrupting dark magic running under Avalonia? Shouldn't you all be MOCing green meadows with flowers and fairies running around or something? As a wise little creature told me once: "Don't give in to hate. That leads to the Dark Side... This is a dangerous time for you, when you will be tempted by the Dark Side." And remember: "Your feeble skills are no match for the power of the Dark Side!"

Here's the western Siccus detail map! Added a few more towns and features, but mostly will wait for people to tell me what's there as they build it. Dugal/SkaForHire, I hope that I added enough islands around the Inland Sea. Let me know and I can always change it. And good luck to anyone trying to navigate all those islands without a local pilot... Western Siccus (Kaliphlin Guild) Only one more to go!

Great spot! The fishing is excellent in the lake! Plus that's a great spot for shipping stone down the River Zenagi. I will update the map accordingly. Would you like to name the lake, by the way? But you can separate glued magnets. There was a post on it somewhere... After soaking them in 160 degrees Fahrenheit water for 15 minutes, you can gently separate them from the base, prying apart with an ordinary dinner knife. I've done it quite a few times. The only downside is that it does leave a bit of glue residue on the backs of the legs, so they're certainly not in 'new' condition anymore. Here's the link: http://thebrickblogger.com/2011/01/lego-glued-magnet-removal/ BTW, in the US at least, the Pharoah's Quest Skeleton Mummy Battlepack 853176 is quite a deal right now -- for $3.48 you get two regular mummies, one flying mummy, a sarcophagus, two scorpions, some gems, and a snake. There's some serious Kaliphlin mummy army building potential there!

Brickmaestro - I really like the use of curved pieces in this. I've got to get more of those. If you want to pick a location for this watchtower, I'll put a link to it from the Kaliphlin maps up on Flickr.

Peppermint_M - Welcome aboard! Very glad to have you with us! Kcaj - Thanks for the idea on how to create names! That will come in handy. Already used it a bit (see below). Damaximus - Kuchomwa Islands sounds good, although I'll give Erudhalion/Gabe first shot at naming them, since he's targeting some builds for them. For the SE desert, I was thinking of keeping the word 'desert' in the name, so Jangwa Tupu might be a bit redundant. Hitting Google Translate for ideas; how about the Nyika Tupu Desert? (Empty Wasteland Desert) Has a nice sound to it. Ghuba-ya Biashara for the bay sounds great. Erudhalion - I love your brick map, and actually did use it when putting together the map so I could position that one volcano correctly. Although now I notice that I missed the volcano in the southwest corner of Peregrinus; should I put that in too? And I can add a volcano on the island; should I remove the one in NE Peregrinus or leave it there in addition to the one on the island? I'll put some forest on the NW side of Peregrinus, and I'll probably put some on the east side of the Rakath mountains too. Chairman Jones - There certainly are bandit encampments in the hills. To guard against them, we probably need more watchtowers! I think the land around the river is mostly fertile; the bread-basket of the east, I believe. That probably makes Ras-el-Akhen a big port for shipping out grain and rice that is barged downriver. I'm picturing Ras-el-Akhen as having a New Orleans feel; when someone settles there they can define it more thoroughly. However, there are probably some chasms and canyons farther north on the river, towards Qarkyr. And I was picturing the Lick of Salt running through many canyons. Dextrus - Have a great trip and holiday! Dugal - Thanks for the very thorough description of Eastgate! I'm editing together a description of our cities and will give to Dextrus to put into the first Kaliphlin post for reference. Plus I took your advice about islands and added quite a few to the South-East Siccus map. If you want, we can go nuts with islands when I get to the detail map of the West.

Wow, those are some ambitious plans! Looking forward to seeing some serious building in Mpya Stedor. I think the plans are great, but you might want to check the scale of the map -- from east to west that little bay is about six miles across!

And here's north central Siccus, including Petraea, QueensCross, and the Oil Road. I added a few desert oases, Au'ban Dran and Mophet; they're about 2 and 4 days travel from Petraea. Lots of desert in this map! North Central Kaliphlin

Joined, added a few watchtower pics, as well as the various maps of Kaliphlin.

Here's the detail map of South-East Siccus, including Berigora and Peregrinus, the Akhenaten Delta, and the new city of Mpya Stedor. Lots of empty space on this one, and lots of unnamed features. These are in the Kaliphlin group on Flickr now, and I've started adding notes to link them together, so you can get from the main map to the detail maps easily, as well as adding links on the detail maps to various MOCs if I know where they are. Let me know if you want your MOC to be linked to a particular location on the map (but check first to see if I've already linked it). Southeast Siccus Badlands (Kaliphlin Guild) All of these detail maps are approximately 8 pixels to the mile. So Mpya Stedor to the crossroads by the Qar-Akhen River is about 100 miles, or 3 to 4 days journey by horse on a good road. DaMaximus -- can you come up with a good name for the very large bay near Mpya Stedor? We're also going to need a good name for the main desert in this detail map, if anyone wants to suggest something.

Excellent choice of location for Mpya Stedor! That's a beautiful large bay. You'll be well-placed as a trading center for southeast Kaliphlin. I'll get it on the next map of that area.

Well, I'm no guildleader, but Kaliphlin would be glad to have you join us, Lord Damaximus!

I'm on a business trip this week, so no access to LEGO, but I have been able to do a little mapmaking. Here's the first draft of a detail map of South Central Siccus, from the Akhenaten Delta to Stone Town. The map is 213 miles across and 124 miles north-south. South Central Siccus (Kaliphlin Guild) I think I might have made some of the fonts a bit too small for Flickr's resizing. Will make them a bit bigger. I've deliberately left the area around Stone Town blank so that Basiliscus can do whatever he wants there. If anyone else wants to set up shop anywhere on here, let me know and I'll put stuff on the map for you. The south coast of Gorr is a nice tropical area. The mainland coast in the upper left is unclaimed and has some good harbors.

Petraea is definitely in the middle of the desert at an oasis. I'm guessing that Queens Cross, Qarkyr, Stone Town, and Messahmuk all have pretty dry climates, even though some of them are on a river or ocean. Not sure what Barqa is like; we need someone to lay claim to it. We definitely need another city or two in the desert (besides Lost Vega)... I'll work on positioning them; they'd probably have to be near some water or oasis. Where the Oil Road almost touches the Arkbri River would be a good spot, as shipping from Petraea to Barqa could be transferred to barges at that spot for faster shipment. Also where the road north of Qarkyr crosses the Lick of Salt is another good spot. Then we could also place one or two along the Oil Road at various oases. Now we just need names. Anyone got any favorite desert oasis names? Wow! That was fast. Looks great. And it definitely fits right in.

I don't have a lot of black, red, or orange, so I probably will not do a Nocturnus embassy/consulate. Not sure I have a preference between Avalonia and Mitgardia at this point. For Avalonia, I've got a lot of tree leaves and vegetation, but don't have a lot of those 1x1 grey or brown round plates that Derfel favors. I suppose I'll probably start building first, and then see where it fits when I'm halfway through. Doesn't really make sense for everyone to build an embassy in the capitals -- we'd end up with duplicates. Should some people build consulates and trade delegations in cities outside the capital? If so, it might help if each guild posted a list of their major cities, along with their characteristics or history or something, so the other guilds can tailor their builds to particular locations. I can look at the map of Mitgardia and pick a city, but I won't know anything about it except for its name. Without knowing anything about the city, it's pretty hard to customize the build much. So for any members of other guilds who are interested, here are the major cities of Kaliphlin. We can create more if you need them. Better descriptions to follow. Petraea (capital) - desert, oasis Barqa - big port Qarkyr - surrounded by mountains Queens Cross - where the Petraea-Cedrica road crosses the Arkbri River; big river port and trading center Stone Town - port Eastgate - port Berigora - port Na Ghitan - port, in the Spice Islands Ras-el-Akhen - port, on a river near the sea, surrounded for the most part by swamps Messahmuk - port on a bay on South Central coast, low mountains around it, wine trading center, not a rich city, but not the worst cesspit either, a bit past its prime and fading, Mediterranean climate so some plants and trees I'll fill out the description for Messahmuk more, since that's where I've placed Gex. It's not on the main map because there wasn't room, but I'll put it on the relevant detail map. If others want to fill out the descriptions of the other cities, we can the list into the first post for reference.

Welcome! Excellent choice in guilds!

And thanks to you all for organizing the Guilds of Historica! Before this I was an occasional EB poster and occasional MOCer. Now I'm checking EB every few hours, and have posted four MOCs since this began, more than I've posted in the year since I joined. It's been a lot of fun, and tremendously motivating. I'm really looking forward to some free time after Christmas to do a few free-builds, start on an embassy or consulate, and also to hit the after-Christmas sales and stock up on sets on clearance. I think the Guilds have been a huge success, probably way more than I would have anticipated. It will probably be a bit of a challenge to maintain the enthusiasm, but I think we can do it.

Looks like you all are starting to turn out some great MOCs for Albion. It's starting to come together, and I can see how it will have a fairly cohesive look once done! Here's an idea for you all; not sure how hard it would be to do, but might be worth a try: I think everyone making an MOC of a building along the streets of Albion should take three photos in as close the same vantage points as they can - one absolutely straight on, one oblique from the right, and one oblique from the left. Then when (most) of the MOCs are done, someone can stitch together the photos in the order in which the buildings are, to create a full view of a city block! You'd have to have the pictures all taken from approximately the same level (ground level is probably easiest). And the same background too (white or off-white is probably best, although this can be edited). The lighting will be different, but that's probably alright. It would probably help if a common resolution was agreed on ahead of time too (e.g., 1280x1024 with the average one-plot building taking up 80% of the photo width, or something like that), but that might not be essential as long as everyone took photos of fairly high resolution. The straight-on picture is probably the most important. The oblique photos would be nice because they could be stitched together into a view looking down the street. But that's more work because everyone would have to take their photo from approximately the same angle (I guess directly diagonal from the corner would be easiest), and it would be more work to stitch them together as you'd have to start at the end of the block with a shrunken photo and place gradually larger photos partially on top of it as you came up the street. Might be worth a try, and the end result could be really great!

Wow! I count twenty watchtowers from Kaliphlin Guildmembers! That's great for a guild with only 26 members (as listed on the first post). Can't wait for the next challenge. It's killing me to not know what the subject is. I imagine things will quiet down a bit for a week or so over the holidays. I'm on a business trip this week again, so no access to LEGO I will try to fire up GIMP and work on those detailed maps I've been planning to do for a while... Next week, I suppose many of us will be building all the new sets we're getting for the holidays (or giving to our kids so we can play with them ). I'm giving my son an MVR and a SW MF too, so we'll definitely be having some fun. Should we try to organize a mini-build or two for the guild over the next week or so while we're waiting for the next challenge? Some sort of small vignette or something? I think I'll try to do a few small town and trading scenes if I have time once I get back. Or maybe take that new MVR and make it a bit more Kaliphlin-like. Not sure what I mean by that, but I'll figure something out. BTW, Prince of Persia 7570 Ostrich Race is on sale from Amazon for $9.99. That's 50% off, and this appears to be pretty decent little Kaliphlin-oriented set -- 3 Persian minifigs, 2 ostriches, a scorpion, a bunch of weapons, and some tan, reddish brown, and grey parts.