Building Campaign Maps with Google and GIMP 4

Cities, Rivers and Mountains

   As I showed in the previous post in this series,  I've added a layer which I've added a layer named "Player_Knowledge" to the xcf file.  On this layer, I'll site the large towns and geographic features that the players will know about when they arrive.

     The first question I need to answer is - what do they know about?  For my primary source of information, I'm going to use Strabo's Geographica (See Appendix N) Book 7, Chapters 5 (Illyria and Pannonia) and Chapter 7 (Epirus).  Fortunately, the footnotes embedded in the translation give the modern names for the cities and features, well modern as of 150 years ago.  Anything that I can't google, I'll use Smith's Dictionary of Greek and Roman Geography (Appendix N)  to find an intermediate place name.

Throwing it into a table we end up with.

Strabo	Modern	Notes
River Drilo	Drin
Lissa (Lissus)	Leshe	Also known as Alesso.  Large town.
Acrolissa		Not a town, but a reference to the citadel  at Lissus.  I'll use that piece of information and declare that it's a legionary or at least an auxiliary fort protecting the area against the Illyrian tribes.
Epidamnus	Durres	By Strabo's time the Romans had started calling it 'Dyrrachium' after the promontory, as the Greek name had inauspicious overtone in Latin. Small City.
River Aspus	Seman
River Aous	Vjose	Apollonia is situated about a mile from it.
Apollonia	Destroyed	The only remains of Apollonia are part of the Temple of Apollo on the hill. Small city.
Mons Candavia	Shebenik	Searching Smith's, it's located on the road from Epidamnus to Lychnidus.  The biggest mountain along the way is Shebenik.
Lychnidus	Ohrid	Over the border into Macedonia. Small town.
Pylon	Unknown	As this marks a Roman boundary, I'm ruling that it hasn't been determined at this point.  Determining the boundary may become part of the campaign.
Mons Ceraun	Mal i Kanalit	Derived from the Greek 'Thunder Split Mountain' - sounds like an adventure location to me.
Oricum	Orikum	Small town.
Panormus (harbor)	The Pasha's Harbor	The harbor for Oricum
Onchesmus	Sarande	Had to chase this one through Smith's to 'Forty Saints' to Sarande. Large Town
Cassiopae	Kassiopi	Actually on the coast of the island of Corfu. Looking at the map, it's just off the southern boundary, so I'll skip it.

By using the Modern names, I was able to place the cities and towns on the map.  I had said that the names showed up as mini-layers in GIMP.  I have since found that I can 'Merge Down' the mini-layers  into the lower level, so I now have them all in the Player_Knowledge layer. The gray line represents a known major road.

That pretty well wraps up adding the historical elements onto the basic map.  I still need to generate smaller towns and villages, as well a do overlays for encounter areas, mask the interior so I can save off a view for my players, with out them knowing which valley they need to go up to get across the mountains.  I'm also toying with laying out  the areas for the different tribes, but haven't decided on that step yet.