I promised a CC2 blog entry, so here we are. Many image files abound. Fair warning: Most of them are pretty freaking large.

Understand that these are all a fair amount of work on my part. The Tharavel map took probably about a week of solidly working on it, some of which was learning how to do things in CC2 I’d never done before. Niriath Henning took most of a week. Littlefang took two solid days of work. Bremberthwaite maybe about half a day, because it’s very small and simple. Utna took a good long time, since it was the first CC2 city I’d ever done.

The complexity of all this comes from the way CC2 works. If you’ve ever used a CAD program, you’ll understand what I’m talking about – CC2 is at heart a simplified CAD program. Unlike say, MS Paint, all the lines you draw are little objects you can move and manipulate. That gives you a great deal of power, at the cost of being harder to work with. *shrug* Further complexity comes from the fact that I’m not making these up, I’m transferring them from already printed material. In the case of, say, Littlefang, that means I don’t know ANY of the angles, and most of the distances are hard to figure, because the map was non-gridded 1 cm = 10 feet, with lots and lots of little 2.5′ and 5′ walls and such. Pain in the ass, figuring all that out, trust me.

There are others I’ve done you may or may not ever see up here. The two remaining castles from the 2nd Edition Castle Guide. The other castle from Dragon #145. One of the castles from the Castles boxed set, a monstrosity that took me something like 6 months to complete, and an exercise that learnt me a whole bunch of stuff about the program. You may or may not ever see the Hagia Astrapia in Araxus, or Thurii’s mage school. They all existed, you’ll understand, but when I built my new comp, I accidentally obliterated about three years’ worth of CC2 work. Ah well. I’ve been wanting to CC2ize most of these for most of a decade (CC2 came out in 1998, for the curious, and I had CC1 before that). They’ll keep.

Now then.

Tharavel

The great work, such as it is. That’s a fairly big chunk of my very own D&D world, Tharavel. Currently under construction for about 3 years, with no sign of slowing down any time soon. *grin* The parts you don’t see…well, let’s just say there’s a whole continent and a half or so of stuff to map someday.

Littlefang, Lower Levels
Littlefang, Level Two
Littlefang, Level Three
Littlefang, Upper Levels

The first of three castles from Dragon Magazine #145, May 1989. My favorite issue of the magazine, simply for the castles. As it happens, Littlefang wasn’t TOO bad to copy. I’d done most of the angle work previously, and understood more or less what I was doing. Still time consuming, but.

Niriath Henning, Sublevel One
Niriath Henning, Ground Level
Niriath Henning, Level Two
Niriath Henning, Level Three
Niriath Henning, Levels Four-Six

This is another Dragon #145 castle, second in the series. It was completed from a half-finished CC2 file I had of it, somehow salvaged from the Great Death of ‘02. There was a lot of little experimental stuff I tried out here, most of which ended up working, and taught me a lot. The aesthetics of the whole thing is one thing I figured out finally that I liked – The FR Atlas-style color scheme, small border, the bit with the compass, and especially the little purple text, which if you click on in the real file, will open up the map files for the rest of the castle.

Bremberthwaite Manor

A tiny little one-map affair from the Castle Guide. Fairly easy, once I figured out how to do the big tower – non-45 degree angles are pretty tough, but once I figured out how they did the cartography for the Castle Guide, it flowed together pretty well. *shrug*

Utna

A city I sort of randomly constructed one day, this was supposed to be the centerpiece of an all-human D&D setting I came up with one weekend. Said setting will likely be folded into Tharavel at some point, but for now, it’s a chance to practice with City Designer 2. For a first try, I figure it works reasonably well.