Cassedega – Built on the Ruined Remains of Ankeshel

This sunken city map was created for Open Design for their Pathfinder supplement Sunken Empires. I was asked to create a city in two halves – one above the sea and one below – built on top of the ruins of an ancient city that had been sunken beneath the waves and recently re-appeared. Nothing like a challenge…

The original city was vastly technologically superior and huge so the current city only needed to occupy some fraction of the ruins. I was told that the ancients used the golden ratio in their work and liked spirals. From that (and a very comprehensive art brief) I created the original city layout:

Once that was done, I turned the walls to rubble and totally destroyed large areas of the city. On top of the ruins I built the new cities, creating buildings in the rubble and filling out the districts. This was done in black and white (the original art brief) which ended up looking like this:

The guys at OD decided that they’d like to have it in colour too, so a little more work resulted in the map at the top of the post. I did a short Q&A on the development of the map over on the KQ website. You can find that here.

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