Welcome to Yalarad

• Yalarad is a fantasy game world created for Dungeons and Dragons campaigns but applicable to any fantasy role-playing system

• The first version of the place was created somewhere around 1980

• The second version was created between 1982-88 but was lost

• This third version was first drawn somewhere around 1990

• The third iteration of Yalarad started with an overview map…

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Scale

• It is a large place, I wanted a setting that would take a lifetime to explore and which was large enough to legitimately have all different climate and vegetation types

• This has resulted in a continent that is approximately the size of North America

• Canada, including the Arctic territories fits easily inside Yalarad

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Political & City Maps

• Once you have a land mass you need to populate it or your campaign will be rather boring

• My goal was to create a place that was teeming with cultures and peoples… all the classic fantasy RPG races made popular in Tolkien’s works

• To this end I developed country and city distributions…

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Early Political Map

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Early City and Road Map

Scale Change Maps

• I was reasonably happy with the world so far, but I had a craving for a deeper level of detail, a way to flesh out my creation and make it come to life

• At some point I came up with the idea of drawing a larger hex grid on the standard paper, this would allow me to blow up the maps at a consistent ratio

• I chose 7:1

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7:1 Scale Change Maps

Results

• The drawing of the scale change maps was a giant undertaking

• Every coastline, mountain, hill, river, and lake was drawn by hand

• 48 maps were needed to cover off the detailed areas of the continent map and each map took a solid 8 hours of drawing with calligraphy pens

• This is only somewhere around 360-400 hours of work but was conducted sporadically and took 10 years

The Problem

• These maps were detailed, but they were just the raw geography, they lacked the detail needed to conduct a campaign

• Cities, roads, political boundaries; all of these things were missing

• So, for another 10 years I ignored them and conducted only sporadic experiments to see if I could get the details I wanted on the stark black ink drawings

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City Experiment

Inspiration

• During the intervening years I met my wife, had two children, and continued building a career but never stopped playing D&D

• And never stopped wanting to find a way to bring my scale change maps to life

• Then during the winter holidays of 2014 everything came together: I had time, I had discovered a free graphics editing program with layers (Paint.net), and I decided to try “just one”

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I’m in Trouble

• I liked the result

• It took 6 hours to retrace the land mass, add the cities and roads, and label everything

• I knew other maps would be faster or slower but would probably average 6 hours each

• That was going to be another 280-300 hours

• But I had some time so I dove in

• Thanks to the head start I got over the holidays, a few weeks later I was done…

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That is the Scale Change

• The rest of this deck is low resolution versions of the maps to provide the details for players or anyone who is interested

• This work remains my own and is under copyright

• By posting it here I am allowing for personal use only, no commercial use is permitted

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1-1

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1-2

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1-3

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1-4

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2-1

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2-2

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2-3

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2-4

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2-5

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3-1

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3-2

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3-3

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3-4

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3-5

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3-6

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4-1

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4-2

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4-3

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4-4

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4-5

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4-6

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4-7

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5-1

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5-2

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5-3

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5-4

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5-5

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5-6

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5-7

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6-1

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6-2

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6-3

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6-4

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6-5

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6-6

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6-7

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7-1

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7-2

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7-3

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7-4

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7-5

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7-6

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7-7

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8-2

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8-3

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8-4

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8-6

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More Information on Yalarad

Website: http://yalarad.com/Email: brad.einarsen@gmail.com