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[Anius Talewise]

Over a year ago, I used Dwarf Fortress to generate a large map to use as a homebrew campaign setting for the Pathfinder RPG (its related to dnd 3.5)

This is the original map:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Then I started drawing over the map in photoshop:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

I ignored DF's civilizations and substituted my own, and as I drew the map I tried to respect the biomes as faithfully as I could (but I ignore blessed and cursed biomes).

I stopped working on this for over a year, but then recently picked it up again.

I learned some new things about df's world generation as I did this, for example that the Hills are not a biome in and of itself, but are in fact savannah, grassland or shrubland, and are shown as hills on the world map because of their high drainage. Since all information about the DF world except for the map itself was lost a long time ago, I will have to make these up myself.

Since the largest DF map has an area about the size of the state of Maine (if we assume a playable tile is 5 feet to a side), that makes the world quite small, and it also has the quirk of being a flat square. I rolled with this by deciding it is a fenced-in artificial world created and managed by lovecraftian monstrosities for unknowable purposes, seeded from a natural home planet, like a sort of petri dish. Incidentally, the cosmic horror narrative happens to echo DF players creating and destroying DF worlds for arbitrary purposes at their own whims.

This map project is very time consuming and inefficient and I am not likely to do it this way again (at least, not unless I find a more efficient way to do it), but while I work on it it is fun and interesting.