“Cleared/Mix” (which i like to call “plains” for simplicity) is the default style for land areas on the Faerun map. Only some of the smallest islands avoid using this style, though arguably it is still present below the native terrain of e.g. the frozen isles of the Sea of Moving Ice. Visually, plains are made up of two main elements: the beige background with its faint darker-colored blots and the randomly placed dots covering the area. “Grasslands” use the same style with a light green tint.

Background Blots

Let’s start from the simple land style with smoothed path outlines and a coastline (i.e. the results of the oceans - deep dive post). Plains are filled with a light beige (#fbefdf) background color, with the other two features displayed on top.

One problem that I have so far brushed aside is that of map continuity between the editions of D&D (thanks to everyone contributing to the reddit discussion). While there are always some changes due to in-world events and the passing of realmtime, some editions introduced unexplained geographic shifts. Third edition is especially notable, as it reduced the map size and reshaped landmasses, presumably to make the continent less boring by bringing interesting places closer together (and more compact for editing/printing). Ignoring the cataclysmic changed of 4E, 5E reshaped the realms back to their second edition form, but not necessary to the same size. Instead of retreading topics that have already been discussed, I’ll redirect you to some excellent blog posts about the map history by the authors of ninelizardsblog and spriggan’s den.

Since I am a player of D&D 3.5e this introduces a dilemma. Should I create a map that only serves the community of an older edition or adopt the more canoical correct map layout?

Let’s start from the bottom with the “oceans” style, which contains all large bodies of water. From a visual perspective, this style is relatively simple and made up of four different elements that we need to replicate with SVG styles: Dark blue deep sea, transitioning over a lighter blue Continental shelf to an even brighter area of coastal waters before reaching the solid blue shoreline.

Deep sea

The lowest layer of the map, geographically and also in the svg. It can be represented by a solid blue (#c2d6ed) background area.

To start, we can group the different area types shown on the map based on similarities of their drawing styles. The legend of the map is a helpful indicator which styles need to be covered (though it does not include every style present on the map).

Oceans

Oceans form the bottom layer of the map and are fortunately not a very coomplicated style. They start at a solid blue coastline, being light blue very close to the coast, slightly darker blue on a continental shelf and dark blue in the deep sea. Coastal water regions can be generated based on the outline path of the continent, but the continental shelf will require a separate path due to it’s varying distance from the coastline. Fortunately, the gradient from coastal to shelf waters is wide, so it can be approximated with a coarser path and then smoothed over.

Plains and Grasslands

Plains (or “Cleared Land” in the legend) are the beige-colored default style for land masses on the map. Visually, it is a mix of random dark-beige blots on a beige background and some random tiny dots. Both of these effects can be generated by applying turbulence/fractal noise filters of svg objects. While the random dots could also be created as svg objects, using a variation of the “starry sky” effect is more space efficient.

Grasslands are a slight color variation of plains with a wide and smooth color transition. The effect can be generated by adding a color overlay with blurred edges.

Swamps, Marshes and Moors

Swamps and marshes feature a single colored backgroud, while moors have a random 2-color pattern similar to the ones found in the plains style. What unites these styles are the double outlines with random breaks. While this could be solved with two offset outline paths with dashed-lines, ideally we would want a filter to generate the effect on purely the original area path. Similarily, we have to find a way to randomly generate the grass bushles in the swamp and marsh styles.

I have decided that a small blog is a better way to keep track of progress than the repo’s wiki page. So, welcome to my hobby project to create a vector map of Faerun (possibly extended to Toril) during the time of D&D 3.5e (~1376 DR). The idea is to approximate the iconic drawing style of the official 2001 map using a combination of svg path generation scripts and filters and then apply them on an svg map, containing only the outlines of geographic regions/features.

Ideally this should have the following benefits:

• Simple Editing: Changing existing features of the map or adding new ones can be done in an SVG editor.
• Small Filesize: With some clever encoding of the visual map style even high detail maps should keep a small filesize.
• High Quality Zoom: SVG enables creation of detail maps without getting pixelated results.
• Merging of Different Sources: Detail maps of specific regions exist and the vector format should aid in the combination of different map sources.
• GeoJson, TopoJson output: Vector data can be used in online map interfaces like Open Layers