Creative Director
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There'll be lots of city maps in the upcoming Linnorm Kingdom book as well. I've always WANTED to include a lot of city maps in these style books... but the unfortunate fact is that a lot of great writers aren't so great at drawing maps. Wes is a rare creature—great at writing AND great at maps.
Going forward, though, I'll be pulling some stunts and tricks to make sure that even when we use authors on these types of books who aren't great city mappers that we'll still have city maps. In theory, and I hope!
Yay! Thanks! Glad folks got a kick out of them. I'm pretty OCD when it comes to making maps, insisting on drawing out nearly every house and building before I write about the city. Turns out after you spend a half dozen hours face down in a city, penciling in every house, castle, slum, park, and bit of geography you get tons of ideas for who lives where, how the city works, what places stand out as landmarks, and what adventures might go on where.
I got most of the geography down for Ustalav's cities on a few cross country plane trips last year. That's generally where I start, building the terrain first. The geography has a huge impact on the look and feel of a city. Cesca, for example, is a village of industrious folks that rolls acorss several hills, the home of the mayor, a ruined fortress, and temples occupying the highest points and suggesting whats important to the people living there. Karcau, however, is a larger city, built on a river delta. It's meant to feel swampier and more decadent, with the larger scale, larger buildings, lots of tiny islands, and intrusive swampy trees making it feel more elaborate (I was really going for kind of a New Orleans vibe with this one). Lepidstadt is really my favorite in here though, as I wanted it to feel like a city built by secret masters - kind of like Washington D.C. So, I built a few symbols into the street and building layout. Folks who read up on the Esoteric Order of the Palatine Eye might find Pharasma's Spiral, the All-Seeing Eye, and the Golden Scarab in the map. Then Caliphas feels big, old, and dirty; Tamrivena with its walls and forts feels like a police state, and then Thrushmoor is meant to feel like Providence or some other puritanical New England community.
The other maps are just my pet projects. I've spent a lot of time musing on the Saffron House - the setting of some sick "Pidgeons from Hell" style plot in my mind. Feldgrau is born from research on World War I trench warfare, and stands out in Ustalav as its a breed of horror I don't know that I'd call gothic, and is definitely more modern feeling than most of the ghost stories and cursed bloodlines you find in other counties (type the name in wikipedia for a bit of insight into my thoughts on this). The last big one is the side view of Bastardhall, which is kind of my most pet pet location in Golarion and where I run one adventure of an ongoing campaign at Paizocon every year. I've got big plans for this place and the screwed up mystery going on in and underneath it.
So yeah. I really dug mapping these places and, as always, Lazz did a great job making them actual pieces of art. (Not to mention, adding lots of maps is a great way to make a book feel more art heavy without running the art budget into the ground with tons of expensive new half-page illos!) Since folks seem interested, I'll put my original sketches of these locations up on my Facebook here soon (I left my workbook at the office and can't be bothered to walk all the way there :P), and will post here when I do. Until then, I just put up my giant sized sketches of some of the other cities I've mapped: Westcrown, Zirnakaynin, and Dis (I can't find Magnimar right now - where the devil did I put that! - but I'll put that up too when I can).
Again though! Super glad you got a kick out of them!
I want to add my +1 here. The city descriptions with the map layout setup really makes this a user friendly book
You have NO idea how hard it is being a book's author and copy fitter. It was really important to me that the book get build on spreads (the two pages you see when a book is open). While we can generally fit about 1,400 to 1,500 words per spread (with art), sometimes that doesn't quite work or one overwrites anyway. So that meant I had to be my own hatchet man on several sections, and that a few details or turns of phrase got left on the cutting room floor. That's standard to the job, and easy when it's not your book, but everyone tends to be a bit more precious with their own stuff. That content is lost to the ethers now, and it's not coming back, but somewhere out there there's the platonic ideal of Rule of Fear with a digression about fashions in Karcau, the opera Countess Venachdalia is writing to star in, and a bunch of other 5 to 50 word bits of "not quite ready for prime time" content. In the end, though - and I know I'm biased - I think the book turned out looking great. And now that other people are seeing it, I'm ecstatic to have that impression confirmed! :)
I too want to add my kudos to the throng. I love Rule of Fear. Loved it! It is probably one of my favorite of your setting books thus far, and that's a tall order on how I've enjoyed nearly all of them. The maps absolutely did it for me.
I'm not a great cartographer, not terrible, but not definitely not great. That said, maps are one of the things I think got me interested in RPGs to begin with. That and monsters.
I plan on taking a stab at mapping Janderhoff soon (unless I discover an actual official map is going to be released be I get around to it.) Primarily to supplement my Curse of the Crimson Throne game that I have just started running. If I come up with a decent effort I'll post it in those forums.
But as for you folks here at Paizo.
Thank you!