There should be a city map of Daggermark


Lost Omens Campaign Setting General Discussion


Hi there my name is Mads, I have played Role-playing games (tabletop) for years but I’m new, when it comes to the blogging thing. But I recently ran into a problem I couldn’t solve myself so therefore im posting this.

The reason why I post this thread is because lately I have been thinking a lot of dragging my role-playing group through some adventures in the River Kingdoms and as I sad down and prepared some of the inc adventures I realized that I had no city map of Daggermark. And no matter how hard I tried I simply could not find a city map of Daggermark. There was none in Cities of Golarion, None in Guide to the river Kingdoms ect.
So my question to you ppl is. Does such city map even exist and in that case in which book/pdf ?

Paizo Employee Creative Director

We have not yet done a map of Daggermark—nor are there plans to do one anytime soon. At a population of about 27,000 people, though, it's only a little bit larger than the cities featured in "Cities of Golarion." You could, in theory, use any of those maps as a stand-in for Daggermark if you wanted.

Grand Lodge

I think the poster map of Vigil is the best fit. It's a great map and geographically looks like it would fit as Daggermark.

It's a walled city on a river, ready for invasion.

The only thing is that, like almost all of Paizo's great maps, it doesn't look like "that many" people could live there. Vigil is supposed to have a population of about 10K, that many people could not live in that town.

For it to be Daggermark it'd certainly have to have a smaller population than 27K.

But it's a great map, perfect for Daggermark if you can cut down the population.

Paizo Employee Creative Director

W E Ray wrote:

I think the poster map of Vigil is the best fit. It's a great map and geographically looks like it would fit as Daggermark.

It's a walled city on a river, ready for invasion.

The only thing is that, like almost all of Paizo's great maps, it doesn't look like "that many" people could live there. Vigil is supposed to have a population of about 10K, that many people could not live in that town.

For it to be Daggermark it'd certainly have to have a smaller population than 27K.

But it's a great map, perfect for Daggermark if you can cut down the population.

Getting our city maps to accurately reflect the city's population is one of my great crusades, and we're not quite at the place yet where I'm satisfied with the maps overall. I think we've got the mid-size and smaller city map down fine, but once you get to cities larger than Korvosa... it starts getting progressively tricky. Especially when you get to cities like Absalom, that supposedly have over 300,000 people living in it. A city that big drawn to fit the same size of paper that a city with 15,000 people living in it simply won't look the same if done correctly—you won't be able to see individual houses, for one thing. Alas, the individual house method seems to be the only one folks are interested in building for cities.

We experimented with a more realistic real-world more artistic method of generating a medieval city map for Westcrown, but the overall reaction to it was unfortunate—people seemed to rather want maps that LOOKED more accurate while at the same time being far LESS accurate.

It's frustrating.

Sovereign Court

I'm sorry to hear that this issue is frustrating for you, James. :(

Personally, I really like the maps with individual houses, like the one for Korvosa. Even if the buildings are not drawn to scale, or if there are too few buildings, I find that looking at such a map creates the illusion that we're looking at an accurate map.

I love being able to tell the players: "you enter the blue house here at the corner of this street and that street".

I never actually take out a ruler to see if the house's size makes sense or if there should be 15 houses instead of 5 on that street block.

But I'm sure there are people who are much more bothered by such mathematical necessities. :)

Paizo Employee Creative Director

Moonbeam wrote:

I'm sorry to hear that this issue is frustrating for you, James. :(

Personally, I really like the maps with individual houses, like the one for Korvosa. Even if the buildings are not drawn to scale, or if there are too few buildings, I find that looking at such a map creates the illusion that we're looking at an accurate map.

I love being able to tell the players: "you enter the blue house here at the corner of this street and that street".

I never actually take out a ruler to see if the house's size makes sense or if there should be 15 houses instead of 5 on that street block.

But I'm sure there are people who are much more bothered by such mathematical necessities. :)

Problem is, if you see a map with individual houses drawn on it, there's really no other logical way to interpret that information OTHER than "oh, that's a house."

The map of Korvosa's a great example to start with. On that 4-panel map, an inch equals about 210 feet, with 1/32 of an inch being about 14 feet. So if you measure the typical tiny square house on that map, you see that the house is about 15 feet square... MAYBE 20 feet square if you're generous.The typical narrow street is about 25 feet wide, while the major streets are more like 50 feet wide. The biggest ships in the river are about 100 feet long. Now... a city filled with as many 15 foot square houses as Korvosa is kind of silly—if I had the power, I'd redraw that map with the average building size being something more like 30 feet to a side, but still... that's close enough that it doesn't really bother me.

OKAY. Now look at the full-page map of Absalom we printed in "Guide to Absalom." That map too shows what appears to be individual buildings, but if you go through the same steps I just did for the 4-times-as-physically-big map of Korvosa... you'll see that the map of Absalom, while it LOOKS like it's trying to accurately show specific buildings... is pretty messed up.


Personally, I would use the medieval sketch for the overall map and take the quarters of the city as building by building maps.

Though-- if there's time to make it, I tend to prefer the engraved map style, like John Norden's map of London in 1593. The map shows individual buildings, but isn't excruciatingly fine-detailed - most of the buildings look similar and are roughly drawn. This sort of thing would be a good quality map in Golarion, and work both as a handout and for strategic details for the GM.

London's population c.1600 was 200,000 people. That's nearly double that of Westcrown and 2/3rds of Absalom. Hence a working map could be made.


Pathfinder Adventure, Adventure Path, Lost Omens Subscriber
James Jacobs wrote:

We experimented with a more realistic real-world more artistic method of generating a medieval city map for Westcrown, but the overall reaction to it was unfortunate—people seemed to rather want maps that LOOKED more accurate while at the same time being far LESS accurate.

It's frustrating.

Which is a shame. I love the more period looking artistic maps. Stuff like this old Map of Rome or Map of Venice. Browse around that site for many more excellent historical city maps. With high-res versions.

Since a city of any size larger than Sandpoint is going to be an abstraction, I much prefer one that also doubles as illustrations of the landmarks. If you look at ancient maps, you'll find it is much more important where that clocktower is in relation to a well known fountain or church than how many houses are on a block.


Pathfinder Adventure, Adventure Path, Lost Omens Subscriber
Jeff de luna wrote:
Though-- if there's time to make it, I tend to prefer the engraved map style, like John Norden's map of London in 1593. The map shows individual buildings, but isn't excruciatingly fine-detailed - most of the buildings look similar and are roughly drawn.

That's exactly the style they used for the Westcrown map. Those little houses in the historic map are not an exact count on a block. If you try and compare it with this 1752 map you start to notice all sorts of little details that are different. Of course, since we can't go back there to double check, it is really hard to find out what it would have really looked like had we had satellite maps of ancient London.

Sovereign Court

James Jacobs wrote:
OKAY. Now look at the full-page map of Absalom we printed in "Guide to Absalom." That map too shows what appears to be individual buildings, but if you go through the same steps I just did for the 4-times-as-physically-big map of Korvosa... you'll see that the map of Absalom, while it LOOKS like it's trying to accurately show specific buildings... is pretty messed up.

I believe I understand what you're saying. Perhaps I could better explain my point of view like this: in the Council of Thieves map, it seems the approach was to purposefully avoid a too-detailed map, to avoid inconsistencies, so the result was a more "artistic" map, which didn't show details.

When faced with the numbers you present, I would then consider even a map like Korvosa's to be "artistic", i.e. not representing the exact number of buildings, or size of buildings. But from a purely visual point of view, it creates an illusion of realism; until I actually take out my ruler and measure things, do some math and realize that distances don't make sense.

But if I purposefully don't do that and just appreciate the map for its artistic look, I personally much prefer the map of Korvosa than the one of Westcrown. I feel I get a much clearer picture of what each district of the city looks like with such a map.

Sovereign Court

This being said, I realize that not everyone will have that point of view, and that you James will be the unfortunate recipient of all the "the sizes of buildings in map XYZ don't make sense!" complaints.

I feel for you. I agree there's no easy solution.


deinol wrote:
Jeff de luna wrote:
Though-- if there's time to make it, I tend to prefer the engraved map style, like John Norden's map of London in 1593. The map shows individual buildings, but isn't excruciatingly fine-detailed - most of the buildings look similar and are roughly drawn.
That's exactly the style they used for the Westcrown map. Those little houses in the historic map are not an exact count on a block. If you try and compare it with this 1752 map you start to notice all sorts of little details that are different. Of course, since we can't go back there to double check, it is really hard to find out what it would have really looked like had we had satellite maps of ancient London.

Right. And satellite-like maps are misleading in a fantasy setting. Sure, a caster or a flying scribe could make a satellite-style map, but the time and cost would not be repaid in publishing and selling it. People know how to get around because they've memorized the lay of the land, not glanced at a map. Maps need to reflect the PoV of the makers and users.

I'm going to glance at the CoT map again...

Why didn't people like the Westcrown map? Perhaps the map needed a different mix of detail. The color scheme doesn't resemble a medieval map so much as a modern version of one (particularly the water). The absence of text and the rendering of the forest areas as blobs also didn't appeal to me. I like the little trees and the sideways view on Norden's map - the effect is naive - but also reflects that a ground level observer things of the trunks of trees and the ground level appearance of buildings as more significant than roofs and the tops of the trees. The careful penmanship and the little crop-marks also suggest a human perspective, as do the ropeworks (I think) in Smithfield and the towers of the churches.
In other words, a map needs to be engrossing. It needs to suggest a living city with industry, faith, agriculture, and activity. If the Westcrown map had fields, individual trees, a different coloring - was even monochrome - and had a fair amount of small labeling - it would seem more authentic.

But I expect some major disagreement here. Art is in the observer's eye, after all.


Pathfinder Adventure, Adventure Path, Lost Omens Subscriber

I think the biggest problem with the original map of Westcrown is that it doesn't have nearly enough interesting sites on it. There's the one big statute of a guy holding up a sword which makes me want to know more about that spot. But the rest of the map doesn't have nearly that much character. Statues and fountains and castles and temples really need to stand out bigger on that kind of map.


deinol wrote:
I think the biggest problem with the original map of Westcrown is that it doesn't have nearly enough interesting sites on it. There's the one big statute of a guy holding up a sword which makes me want to know more about that spot. But the rest of the map doesn't have nearly that much character. Statues and fountains and castles and temples really need to stand out bigger on that kind of map.

+1

and they don't really have to be in scale (Norden's details are maybe double scale)-- or even detailed in the adventure. They just need to suggest... history, busy cities, art. Westcrown needs little bridges, squares, fountains/wells (as Deinol suggests), markets, quays, little boats, trading ships, little seagulls, ornate decoration on the edges (like the great title page for the Six Trials), etc.


I just picked up a copy of Green Ronin's A Song of Fire and Ice Campaign Guide, and inside there is a beautiful two-page spread map of King's Landing, which IMO does a fantastic job of capturing the spread of a fantasy city and is pretty to boot.

Grand Lodge

Westcrown's map looked ugly, wrong colors, one house represented a whole neighborhood, streets were crooked and thousands of feet wide. It had no grand structures, for example look at the ancient map of Rome. Or look at the satelite map of Venice of how should a city block look like from a distance where individual houses are specks, the secret is in the tiny details.

Grand Lodge

Don't get us wrong -- we LOVE the Paizo maps, best ever done. But yeah, Westcrown, Sandpoint, Katapesh, Riddleport, Alahster -- you really gotta cut out lots and lots of people from the published population.

Why don't you see if Lazaretti or someone would mind spending some time on Google Earth just working on "inspiration"?

The thing that makes that so cool is that for giant cities you can zoom out your Paizo maps and it still looks good. Also, your countryside or wilderness areas (especially rivers) will look better.

I'd love to actually see a Paizo regional map that looks more like what we see looking at a few hundred square miles on Google Earth.

Paizo Employee Creative Director

W E Ray wrote:

Don't get us wrong -- we LOVE the Paizo maps, best ever done. But yeah, Westcrown, Sandpoint, Katapesh, Riddleport, Alahster -- you really gotta cut out lots and lots of people from the published population.

Why don't you see if Lazaretti or someone would mind spending some time on Google Earth just working on "inspiration"?

The thing that makes that so cool is that for giant cities you can zoom out your Paizo maps and it still looks good. Also, your countryside or wilderness areas (especially rivers) will look better.

I'd love to actually see a Paizo regional map that looks more like what we see looking at a few hundred square miles on Google Earth.

Actually, Sandpoint and several other maps DO have the right number of buildings. It's a lot easier to do that for a city of only a few thousand. Westcrown has about 100,000 though, so that should require different styles of mapping.


Pathfinder Battles Case Subscriber; Pathfinder Maps, Pathfinder Accessories, Starfinder Society Subscriber; Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Charter Superscriber
James Jacobs wrote:
W E Ray wrote:

Don't get us wrong -- we LOVE the Paizo maps, best ever done. But yeah, Westcrown, Sandpoint, Katapesh, Riddleport, Alahster -- you really gotta cut out lots and lots of people from the published population.

Why don't you see if Lazaretti or someone would mind spending some time on Google Earth just working on "inspiration"?

The thing that makes that so cool is that for giant cities you can zoom out your Paizo maps and it still looks good. Also, your countryside or wilderness areas (especially rivers) will look better.

I'd love to actually see a Paizo regional map that looks more like what we see looking at a few hundred square miles on Google Earth.

Actually, Sandpoint and several other maps DO have the right number of buildings. It's a lot easier to do that for a city of only a few thousand. Westcrown has about 100,000 though, so that should require different styles of mapping.

I agree with W.E. Ray that it would be nice to have that scale (Google Golarion) (this would be complete with drunks asleep in front of temples and horse carts on fire). However, when I am driving through Portland, Sacramento, etc. the maps I want do not have individual houses on them. However, when I am hiking north of Flagstaff, I want my Topo maps showing everything.

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