Tiffany MunroThe Nexus: 8K Science-Fiction Megacity Map for a TTRPG
The Nexus began with a wonderfully dangerous sentence for a cartographer: “I like your City of Empyrean Souls and the Free City of Bayonne. Can we do something between those?”
The commission was for a personal TTRPG setting being used with Agents of Edgewatch, and the client wanted a very large digital map that could survive people zooming shamelessly into it during play. We settled on 8000 × 5000 pixels, with the visual density of Bayonne but fewer labels, the dramatic landmarks of the City of Souls, and enough internal structure that individual roads, blocks and districts still make sense close up.
The colour scheme became part of the geography. The Nexus itself sits amid crimson pollution fog, with harsher colour around the central city, more subdued northern Elven urban territory, Dwarven settlements to the south, and gold-scaled mountains. The client also needed the large city-state labels on a removable layer because some sessions take place in the shanty settlements around the walls. It is a small production detail, but exactly the sort that turns a pretty map into a game prop that can actually be used.
I also made a night treatment. The goal was not to turn the city into one giant neon rectangle, but to give it the busy glow of an inhabited megacity while preserving the building detail underneath. The client specifically wanted a version suitable for online play, a low-resolution labelled copy for Discord and social use, and a high-resolution clean version for the game itself.
This is one of those pieces where the final image looks exuberant, but the underlying problem was practical: how do you make an enormous fictional city readable at several zoom levels and still let it feel strange? I am very happy with where this one landed.
I developed quite a lot of processes to make this one happen, but in short, and you can see this if you pay close attention now that I’ve told you, I made a way to “draw with blocks of buildings”… after putting the building rooftops down, I made a shadow layer under them, and then repeated this to create the effect of numerous levels of cyberpunk city all sprawling on top of each other. I manually painted some unique hero locations for major points of interest as well.
Looking for a custom map?
I create custom fantasy maps, science-fiction maps, book maps, regional cartography, and world-building artwork for games, books, and personal settings. If you have a world that has escaped the notebook and now demands geography, contact me for a quote.
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