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Making of: Ferelden Map

The Making of: Ferelden Map

Where lies Ferelden?

This map was made for the Dragon Age module Heart of fiery Depths which was planned by the Raventeam, but could never be created due to uncountable system crashes caused by the Microsoft SQL-Server 2005, which was required to run the toolset.
This is no tutorial how to make a map, it's only a short overview about how my first map for the module was made.

It's not easy to create a module when you have not very much game informations. The first problem I encountered was that I didn't know how the continent of Thedas or the kingdom Ferelden looks like. With the book The Stolen Throne by David Gaider I then got the first map of Ferelden. Now I could plan the next steps of the characters and I decided to make a real map with my cartographer program, where I can add several details of my mod.
This is just a simple and short description, it shows in small steps how a map is being created.

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The Making of...

First I scanned in the picture from the book and imported it into my cartographer program. With this template as background I could draw the landmass, simply following the contours from the picture. On the next layer I added some contours for the different terrain, which serves as the underground for mountains and I added also a meadow for the fruitful lands of the Bannorn.
Image: Making of Ferelden-Map 1

To make sure that the map will be the same as the original template, I hid all the land-layers. Now I could draw all the inland seas and rivers. This step has driven me a bit crazy because all those rivers are single lines and each one was added in a single step with a start- and an endpoint, in this way the Korcari Wilds region was not only fun to make...
Image: Making of Ferelden-Map 2

But all things can only get worse, so the next step were the mountains and forests. Except the larger part that shows the Brecilian Forest all mountains and all trees are single symbols. So on the second evening I added all those mountains onto the template, I added the hills and forests and then decided to have a break and sleep a bit.
Image: Making of Ferelden-Map 3

Now that the worse part of this map was done, I only had to add a few more things now. The sea was still missing and there were no cities on the map yet. So I added them, but not without having a look into the Bioware Dragon Age forums to find out where the hell Ostagar is laying. It seems that in this first map I placed it a bit wrong and it is an old fortress-ruin, not a city. So I have to correct some details in the near future.
Image: Making of Ferelden-Map 4

However, only some names were left to add now. So I drew a few small lines and added the text along those lines. Each city got it's name and also the mountains, rivers and other things which were labeled in the template. For the final touch I then added some effects like Blur, Glow, Edge Fade and others, including my copyright.
Now the map is finished until I'll add some new contents, when Bioware gives us more details about the game's map and some special places of the kingdom Ferelden.
Image: Making of Ferelden-Map 5

Update:
I changed some details now to make my map compatible to the original worldmap. Some of the story points are added and the new map is downloadable in my Download section instead of the old one (see link in the side navigation under related articles).

Image: New finished Map of Ferelden

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