Latest W.I.P on my morkastompa (name is also W.I.P...)

Most of the body work is done (so many rivets...). I tried using different textures for the plates, and added some stippled sprueglue on a few to give the impression of cast iron.

Still some work left on the arms (gubbins, pistons, wiring, meky-knowwotz), as well as a few details like engines, 2x twin bolters, rockets, other details, as well as a partial interior - the left side skirts lift up, revealing the leg and some more mechanical detail, and the assault ramp opens revealing a partially modelled interior.

Looking forward to get this painted!

I posted my converted Deff Dread a few days ago and finished painting it now. mostly drybrushed metal and yellow contrast over hand-painted white (should have sprayed the white to avoid it going blotch but I'm OK with the result).

I'm happy with the result and looking forward to converting/painting more vehicles. So far I have the following left to paint:

• 2 Wartrakks (1 converted
• 2 buggies
• 3 trukks (1 old, one new and one yet-to be converted from an old one and random bitz
• morkanaut

I forgot how much I used to enjoy converting ork vehicles!

I've been painting my armageddon orks and remembered I had a deffdread in my bitzbox (sans body, which I used for a genestealer cult walker conversion). Looking through the bitzbox I found the body of an aethon heavy sentinel, which was perfect. It only has 2 arms, and the 2 rockets were mounted on a rack on its back instead so it looks a bit like a kill kan, only much bigger!. Looking forward to painting this up to go alongside my bad moons.

one of my favourite spots in my home country

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_St._Angelo

A map from the atlas of my campaign setting, Elyden

One of the largest and most important trade-routes in Elyden, the Nacre Road has dominated life in Southern Sammaea since its origins in 500 RM.

It stretches for over 12,000-miles across Southern Sammaea, linking the city of Hamma in the far west to Bhal Zhariah in the east, passing through the nations of Ammesh, Habot, Phyrr, Maenmist, Northern Simbara, Akanthra, Idaphon, Khar Nadul, Hanna, Qaralam, Shezaliah, and Zhariah, and allows the relatively easy flow of trade from west to east.

The road is named after the now-largely dead nacre trade along the northern shore of the Sea of Ammash and originated in around 500 RM as a route travelled by Mehmuthi nomads, some of whom went on to become merchants, travelling in caravans hauled by great beasts.

Trade along the Road is not uniform and it passes across plains, hills, forests and mountains alike, with some caravans relying on pack-beasts and others using land ships or crawling ambulants. Caravanserais are spaced at deliberate intervals, typically one to two days’ travel apart at most, forming a secondary infrastructure of fortified inns, counting-houses, wells, and Lazanist shrines. Some are little more than enclosed courtyards with cisterns and watchtowers, while others, such as Avenar and Prasinia, have swollen into great cities with enclosed markets, bonded warehouses, and League courts.

Larger cities along the route maintain segregated trade districts where foreign merchants reside under charter, their goods taxed, inspected, and sealed. Entire urban quarters exist solely to service the needs of merchants, including mechanics for vehicle repairs, beast-hospices, rope-makers, scribal offices, and currency exchanges amongst others.

Matted-armoured guards, often called Road Wardens, travel with convoys and are licensed to bear heavy weapons across borders. Ledger-Keepers accompany major caravans, maintaining bonded accounts recognised from Ammesh to Zhariah. Pass-Sealers inspect cargo for contraband at national frontiers, while Oath-Witnesses certify contracts in multiple jurisdictions. In contested regions, entire companies of artillery crews are retained privately to escort landships through unstable territories.

________________________________________________________________________

Map created in Photoshop, with the help using G. Projector.

A tutorial for my method can be found here.

You can find a key to the map here.

This post was originally published a few years ago on my now-defunct website, so I thought I'd update it and add it here so that new fans can see how Elyden has evolved over the last 20-years+

Elyden would slowly emerge from an earlier campaign setting I was writing for my RPG group, called Sola. It was more of a classical setting, based in a city-nation surrounded by hostile nations and wildernesses in a Pangea world. This was probably just over 25-years ago now. I wrote a decent amount of background for some of the regions and named most of them, but it was a bit too generic to really stand out or be interesting. I had a sourcebook of about 300,000 words, most of which was titles to entries with a few bullet points that I jotted down here and there whenever I came up with an idea.

Back in the dim past of the early noughties I was still drawing maps on paper, specifically large cardboard sheets I used to get from a newsagent. I used to love buying those bits of cardboard. I’d unroll them and lay them down on the floor, weighed down at the corners by old books, and look at the blank sheets in wonder. The possibilities were endless. I’d make solo games, drawings, paper crafts and all sorts of other things with them, but my favourite was always maps.

I drew the first map of what would eventually become Elyden on such a piece of cardboard. Here it is, many years later:

Image 1

There’s some questionable features, but on the whole, it’s passable. It was never intended to be a work of art, and was only for my own worldbuilding, to be filled in as needed. Even before I was using Photoshop, I was still working with layers, and made do with what I could - cooking greaseproof paper, cellotaped together and added on top of the map to let me add labels and trade routes to the map, without having to ‘damage’ the map itself:

Image 2

The greaseproof paper is now heavily stained and discoloured but at the time it was almost clear. You may actually recognise some of the names, which I unflinchingly stole for Elyden a few years later: Vaalk, Laaskha, Ahrishen, Almagest, Malan, Parthia (Parthis), Dacia, Temuja, Tethysia. Others I’ve never revisited and honestly can’t say why. Gammater sounds like an interesting name, come to think of it…

Of particular note is this area:

Image 3

Many parts of this, including Khamid, Say (which would evolve into Saua), and the Iapetan Sea, would feature in the region of Elyden known as the Dark Sea and the Arid Triptych.

I abandoned the world of Sola, but thankfully, and rarely, for me, as I'm a compulsive thrower-awayer, never got rid of any of the material I created. I have a bad habit of purging old projects I think are no longer of any interest or use. For some reason I never did so with Sola. It would go on to be somewhat of a boon a few years later.

Between jobs and bored at home I started writing a fantasy story with no plotting or prep or worldbuilding. I came up with everything as I went along, plundering the world of Sola for interesting words completely out of context, planting them firmly into the terra incognita of what would become Elyden. The story revolved around a Firmamentist from Temuja who would be sent west, to the land of the Iron deity, which would go on to become the Undying Machine and god of Korachan. I wrote like a madman, churning out 15,000 - 20,000 words a day of rambling stream of consciousness story for months . The story was contrived, the writing bad, but it sure helped me get my foot in the door of worldbuilding Elyden. All that worldbuilding needed a map, and my big cardboard sheets were waiting for me. And so, sometime around 19-years ago was born the first real map of Elyden:

Image 4

The major coastlines are all there - the Inner Sea in the centre, the Korachani peninsula (albeit much smaller here), and almost all of the nation names, which survived relatively untouched over the next 2-decades. It was a good start, but still needed a lot of work. I started writing the Encyclopaedia Elyden at this point. It wasn’t much more than a document of rapidly increasing bullet points - every fact of the world I came up with went into that document, as an archive of all my work. Over time I’d divide it into sections, by letter, like a real-world encyclopaedia, as it grew.

All that writing needed an updated map, but I was really happy with the general shapes of the coastline so little changed in Elyden 2.0:

Image 5

This map is a LOT closer to the current Inner Sea map than some people may realise. Unsurprising given that the digital world map I based all my atlas maps on Is traced in photoshop over this very photo. Many details are changed - mostly in the expansion of the coastlines of Sammaea in the south and Tethysia in the east, but the coastline of the Inner Sea itself has changed very little. I used this map for a while, but decided that the worldbuilding was growing at such a pace as to require maps that could be edited and updated more readily that physical media could, so I started dabbling in Photoshop. After gorging myself on tutorials at the Cartographersguild (a great resource for budding cartographers), I was able to make my first digital map of the Inner Sea:

Image 6

This map got a LOT more praise than it ever deserved and to be honest I’m pretty embarrassed for sharing this map now. The fonts are horrible, the paper texture is very amateurish, the borders are horrible, but for a first attempt it was decent. Helpful people explained the correct use of rhumb lines on maps, and I was first introduced to the maddening and complex world of projection mapping after making this map, and I would go on to make my first world map - a simple black and white image that later maps would all be based off of.

But I was never happy with the map, and knew I could do better. 14 years ago I took a local course in mastering Photoshop and really put my mind to work following tutorials specifically geared towards cartography, and I was able to put my new skills to use in the revised map of the Inner Sea:

Image 7

This map won me my first cartographers guild award, which I still look at proudly. It is showing its age, but it was the fruit of a long labour, that had cost me quite a lot of time and money. But me being me I was never really happy. The faux-historical fantasy style of cartography was never my favourite, and as I continued worldbuilding I was drawing Elyden inexorably into the future, changingit from a classical fantasy setting into a grimdark steampunk post-industrial world that needed more realistic maps.

That led to exploring different map styles, leading me to the Atlas Style I’ve been working at for the past 10+ years(!).

Though the story of mapping Elyden is something best told elsewhere, suffice it to say, there was a lot of back and forth, revising the black and white world map, fiddling with projections, making sure that everything lines up correctly. It’s something I’m still working on to this day, and which is causing me more headaches than its probably worth (if anyone can donate a Cray that can run photoshop I'll happily accept it!). With all those atlas-style maps, I needed an update to the Inner Sea map, but there was a problem - I couldn't make it until all the nations had received their very own map.

That happened a few years ago, allowing me to make a single giant poster sized map with new labels:

Image 8

This is actually a VERY low-res version of the map, which has been made available in High-res on my Patreon a while ago.

It actually covers less area than the previous Inner Sea maps (I excised the Dark Sea, to concentrate more on the Inner Sea that my life has revolved around so much for the past decade). I’m pleased with the result, though don’t really want to repeat the process ever again. It made me wish I had started working in vector graphics all those years ago instead of raster. It made me want to throw my computer against the wall every time it froze, which it would do multiple times with the addition of each of over 3,000 text layers. But it’s done now, and I've been concentrating on other maps ever since.

Who knows what the Inner Sea will evolve into over the next 20-years?

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Elyden

a community where I can share my work on the world of Elyden and where people can ask questions about the world. For more on Elyden check out www.patreon.com/elyden and www.worldofelyden.com

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Created Nov 16, 2018

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this is a recent map my conworld, Elyden, which I've been working on for some time, in the hopes of someday making a gazetteer for.

________________________________________________________________________

Akanthra: also known as the Sundered State, is an industrialised mercantile power east of the Sea of Krihiek whose wealth rests on control of the Nacre Road and the manufactories that choke its cities in permanent smog. Governed by the Arabigari Hegemonic Council and aligned merchants from the Nacre League, it is commercially formidable and socially stratified: the middle and upper classes profit from constant trade, while a vast underclass sustains heavy industry, agriculture, and military labour with the aid of serapi slave-labour. Along the northern frontier, recurrent serapi incursions from the Hoggotha Isz—met by the immense Hoggothan Lines and a permanent military presence—reinforce a climate of vigilance.

The eponymous sundering is its religion. The appearance of a reborn otherworlder hailed by followers as the god Lazan reborn, split the nation into two antagonistic camps: the Akanthra Ialazana, who advance an eschatological vision centred on the figure (known as the Emissary); and the Akanthra Aegis, who claim to defend orthodoxy and civic stability. Their rivalry has destabilised the heartland of Akantha, leading to a region known as the Riven Meridian, where gang conflict, sabotage, and contested authority disrupt daily life and strain the economy. A tenuous armistice now preserves the flow of trade, but bombings, caravan raids, and mutual suspicion persist.

________________________________________________________________________

Map created in Photoshop, with the help using G. Projector.

A tutorial for my method can be found here.

You can find a key to the map here.

This is available to use as per the CC licence on the image itself

this is a recent map my conworld, Elyden, which I've been working on for some time, in the hopes of someday making a gazetteer for.

________________________________________________________________________

Akanthra: also known as the Sundered State, is an industrialised mercantile power east of the Sea of Krihiek whose wealth rests on control of the Nacre Road and the manufactories that choke its cities in permanent smog. Governed by the Arabigari Hegemonic Council and aligned merchants from the Nacre League, it is commercially formidable and socially stratified: the middle and upper classes profit from constant trade, while a vast underclass sustains heavy industry, agriculture, and military labour with the aid of serapi slave-labour. Along the northern frontier, recurrent serapi incursions from the Hoggotha Isz—met by the immense Hoggothan Lines and a permanent military presence—reinforce a climate of vigilance.

The eponymous sundering is its religion. The appearance of a reborn otherworlder hailed by followers as the god Lazan reborn, split the nation into two antagonistic camps: the Akanthra Ialazana, who advance an eschatological vision centred on the figure (known as the Emissary); and the Akanthra Aegis, who claim to defend orthodoxy and civic stability. Their rivalry has destabilised the heartland of Akantha, leading to a region known as the Riven Meridian, where gang conflict, sabotage, and contested authority disrupt daily life and strain the economy. A tenuous armistice now preserves the flow of trade, but bombings, caravan raids, and mutual suspicion persist.

________________________________________________________________________

Map created in Photoshop, with the help using G. Projector.

A tutorial for my method can be found here.

You can find a key to the map here.

This is available to use as per the CC licence on the image itself

Im really enjoying weathering these!

though him done im going to have to come up with a colour scheme for the cultists themselves...