Recreating a Map Style: Skies of Fire

As part of a series of posts on creating and using city icons, I've recreated the icon style used on the Skies of Fire map:

This map can be seen in its entirety here.  In the next part of the posts on city icons, I'll be placing these style icons on a map, so I thought I'd recreate the Skies of Fire style map in Dragons Abound.

To start, this excerpt shows the base colors for sea and land:

Interestingly, the sea is actually tinted slightly red.  Although there's a grunge texture laid on top of the map, there's no other mottling of the land or the sea, any 3D effects, or any pattern in the sea, so I'll turn those features off.   I can somewhat recreate the grunge texture with a grain filter, although I'm not going to spend too much time on tweaking that.  Normally there is also a forest color, but on this map there are no forests shown.  I don't know whether that's because there are no forests or they're just not shown, but at any rate I will turn off forests in this style.  The pattern of ocean lines is similar to one of my ocean decorations.  Setting these things gets me to here (reference map on top; my map below):

There are a few differences.  The coastline on my map is much thicker, and the ocean lines in my map are based on the ocean color, where they're based on the coastline color on the reference map.  Adjusting the width of the coastline is trivial, but it doesn't look like I have any option to manually set the color of the ocean decoration lines.  Adding that isn't too hard, although interestingly enough I find an error that's been lurking in that code for some time.  Fixing those things gets me to this:

Which is close enough for the basic colors and the ocean scheme.

There aren't many rivers on the reference map, but as it happens their style (black lines with water color in-between) matches the default river style for my maps.  That leaves mountains:

The mountains on the reference map are fairly broad, have rounded peaks and contour hatching in black for shading.  The unshaded parts of the mountains are the background color and don't have snow indicated.  Ridge lines (from the peak along the shadow line) are not drawn, just indicated by the shadow line.  The mountain icons themselves are fairly small in relationship to other map elements.  These can all be set by parameter in Dragons Abound to give this (Dragons Abound mountains on the right side):

Dragons Abound doesn't mark peaks as was done with "Alvent" here but otherwise it's not a bad match.

The Skies of Fire map marks country borders with a color around the country border.  Dragons Abound has a similar option.  There's not much to be done here other than to turn on that option:

There's quite a bit of labeling on the reference map.  I'm not entirely sure what font is being used:

It's probably IM French Canon, although the version used on the Skies of Fire map seems to have some internal glyph details that my version lacks.  Small caps is used for all labels except cities and rivers.  Ocean and coastal labels are in a dark rust color.  The larger labels have black outlines filled with brown, and the capital cities are underlined.  Underlining is the only element here I haven't done before.  It's added using the CSS (or SVG) “text-decoration" style.  Here's what those styles look like in Dragons Abound:

I don't much like the way the underlining looks; it's too heavy and clunky.  However, there doesn't seem to be a lot of control over this in CSS/SVG, and I'm not interested enough to implement my own underlining.  The reference map also stretches out region labels and turns them to fit their regions.  This is something I haven't yet implemented in Dragons Abound.

That's about it for capturing this map style.  Here's the side-by-side comparison:

Reference map to the right; Dragons Abound to the left.  One of the most obvious differences is the red city icons in the reference map, so let me add those in.  I implemented them fairly early in my series on city icons:

Dragons Abound version on the left; original on the right.

Here is a full-size map in the Skies of Fire style (click through to see full size):

To my eye, the icons are a little too intrusive on this map; that might be because of the regional scale of this map.

You might want to compare this to the map at the end of this posting.