Seegrad

Thanks to Zompist’s recommendation, I downloaded Townscaper and have quickly become enamored of its simplicity: place a block, a building is made, and how it looks will depend on the blocks around it. One of the little joys is figuring out slowly what patterns of blocks will create stairs, strange rooflines, towers, columns and arches, etc. On Reddit, one user has even found a way to create islands floating in the air.

But I’ve also used Townscaper for some light worldbuilding by taking a screenshot of a built-out place and labeling it as a map. I think my results have been very effective!

The subject of my Townscaper cartography: Seegrad, a maritime city-state located somewhere between London and Novgorod and sometime between the past and the present. I avoided specifics in order to preserve a certain cartoonish charm. I used three colors–white, grey, tan–with lighter colors above darker for a cohesive look throughout. The coats-of-arms are made by piecing together elements from arms found on Wikimedia Commons.

(The name of the city was originally Seagard, but after learning George R.R. Martin has already used the name, I changed English sea to German See and Germanic gard to Slavic grad.)

I am going to make one or two other maps–the next one being a Spanish colonial city.