Cassedega – Built on the Ruined Remains of AnkeshelThis sunken city map was created for Open Design for their Pathfinder supplement Sunken Empires (pdf here). 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.
This is commercial work so it is rights reserved.
That map just blows me away, its so much cooler than any standard city map. The use of the Ratio combined with the ruined nature really helps suspend disbelief that this is not a real place.
Jon,
This is exactly the kind of work I’ve been looking for for my historically-inspired campaign. I want to find (mega)dungeons where the layers intermingle in this way. Sometimes the new inhabitants will find and expand on what previous inhabitants have done and sometimes they will build unknowingly over the top.
I’m also interested how natural disasters might close off or cover up previously inhabited levels only to be (partially) rediscovered and reused later.
Thank you for this work.
Rob
Can you point us to more work you’ve done like this?
If you like sunken cities and post apocalyptic ruins then I’d recommend the book this map was created for. It’s called Sunken Empires and it details how to run games in locations like this. Now this map is the only half sunken city map in the book, but you’ll get a higher resolution version in the pdf itself.
As for my other work, I’d recommend having a look at my Paizo Store, or the RPGNow equivalent, where you’ll find map packs of a number of different locations – some of which might fit your needs. The stores get new contributions regularly, and I’ll announce here when they do so keep an eye on the blog for those announcements.
It’s been more than ten years since you posted this, so I don’t know if/when you’ll see the comment.
However, in 2009 my dad and I took a trip to the ruins of Selinunte, a Greek city-state on the southwestern coast of Sicily. The city had been Greek, then conquered by the Carthaginians, then conquered by the Romans, and ruled by the Romans for a long period before an earthquake made the site uninhabitable.
The ruins were most puzzling, though — and they still haunt me. In other ruined cities like Akragas/Agrigento, we’d seen a foursquare city grid. Here in Selinunte there was a semi-random city grid, half-made of 3-way intersections and half-made of 4-way intersections, with houses built higgledy-piggledy across the streets here and there, conforming to one grid in one part of the city and to a different grid in other places. Puzzling out an interpretive sign in Italian, with interpretive diagrams, it became clear what had happened.
The 3-way intersection system was the remains of the Carthaginian street system. When they took the city and installed their own citizens and colonists, they didn’t simply take the city wall and temples and convert them to the defense of their city and the worship of their gods; no, the Carthaginians imposed their street grid on the houses, and demolished Greek and Roman houses to eliminate their street grid and establish one more similar to those seen in North Africa today — a central marketplace, with zigzag streets leading from the center to the city walls. When the Romans reconquered the city, they partially re-established their own street grid, on a slightly different square pattern than the original 4-way rectangular grid that the Greeks had first created. However, in both the Greek and Carthaginian cities, there were public buildings that were simply too large or too useful (temples mostly) to consider knocking down to conform to the new/preferred street grid… and so parts of the old street grid remained. The same might have been true of the water supply system and/or sewers, but the archaeology notes didn’t explain that.
This was the first time I’d seen evidence that ancient conquests of cities didn’t simply mean moving the people; it meant re-designing the architecture and urban fabric to reflect the political, economic, and social priorities of the conquering civilization.
I don’t know if this information will ever be useful to you in map-making, but it is a potentially useful hook for adventuring in an RPG campaign — the PCs are given a map of the old city grid to help them navigate the city… and discover, once over the wall, that the city no longer resembles that plan in any way.
In any case, this map reminded me of that a great deal, and I hope it proves useful to you in some future project.
That’s a great story. I grew up around layers of history (there was a bronze age fort on the top of the hill behind our house). It’s strange to me when there *isn’t* layers of history. Thanks for the comment (and yes, it took me a while to see it)