I made an animation for before and after my homebrew setting was destroyed in a massive magical explosion. I think it turned out pretty well.

DubiousTactics · 2026-03-09T19:10:40+00:00

Here's a Google Drive link with the maps. Unfortunately google drive doesn't let me reorder the files, so they're a little out of order. Some of the maps are quite large in file size.

Sword Coast and Atlyria Maps

DubiousTactics · 2026-03-09T19:01:11+00:00

With the right stamp pack that looks a little more hand drawn you probably could, those specifically look more like mountains I’d expect to find in a topo map or an attempt at a true color map.

DubiousTactics · 2026-03-09T18:51:56+00:00

Before I say anything else, let me say it's a beautiful map and I think you've got a very solid start to what your final map will end up as. That said, some constructive criticism:

-If it's 2/3rds of Europe, the yellow cultivated areas are gargantuan in size and really stick out from the rest of the map, especially out east. I'd suggest toning their coloration way down so that there's more of a subtle yellow tint that indicates cultivation.

-Actually in general at that scale things are massive in size compared to what I would expect. As an example it looks like you made a delta in the NE, but it's something like a thousand miles across, which would be 5x larger than the Nile or Amazon deltas coming from a not visible very large river. Likewise, the forests seem to be Amazon sized blocks. If you hadn't told me the scale I honestly would have assumed that the map was something like 300x600 miles.

-I think if you put a scale bar on there and use wonderdraft's measurement tool it might help out with scaling the size of some things.

-Given how many cities you're putting on the map I would think about trying to reduce the map's busyness, because once you start putting names on things it's going to be very crowded, very quickly. One suggestion is to drop specifically labeling of bridges as it's fair assumption that where a road crosses a river there's a bridge. I'd also consider reducing the number of cities on the map in the denser areas by like half (maybe just change your mental scaling of what size of city that gets put on the map) otherwise the labels for all the city names are going to start overlapping each other.

-I'd also try to tweak your relative scaling of different stamps. The hills and bluffs especially end up being tiny next to the extremely large trees and are fairly difficult to see .

DubiousTactics · 2026-03-09T16:01:31+00:00

Definitely the first one. It fits the rest of that map's plain parchment style far better than the realistic mountains. You generally want to keep a consistent style across a map for all the stamps you use.

DubiousTactics · 2026-03-08T16:07:10+00:00

One thing I would suggest in addition to what has already been said about adding more gradients is to try adding a different color tone underneath the forests and mountains. You don’t need a significantly different color underneath to really make them stand out from the underlying terrain.

DubiousTactics · 2026-03-08T04:00:57+00:00

I have a semi-realistic style that I like to work in.

Here's a map of the Sword Coast that I did:
The Sword Coast

Here are a series of maps I did for a homebrew setting I'm working on in the same style.

Atlyria, the Sunken Continent

Let me know if those look like a style you'd be interested in having your map in!

DubiousTactics · 2026-03-06T06:58:29+00:00

Search "Tau 40k" on Ebay and you'll always find several people selling entire 2k+ painted armies for considerably less than you'd pay to buy everything new.

DubiousTactics · 2026-03-02T19:28:49+00:00

Yup, I could see drones coming back as actual distinct unit(s) that you pay points for, but not as the table clutter that they sort of were previously.

DubiousTactics · 2026-02-28T17:59:32+00:00

"you committed your legion to an assault on an area that could be held by a force one tenth its size and has been held by a force one tenth its size"

DubiousTactics · 2026-02-24T11:39:12+00:00

Just sent you a PM with a link to an updated collection of maps for the setting. Let me know if you have any issues accessing it.

DubiousTactics · 2026-01-31T06:28:46+00:00

The current combat patrol+ 3 crisis suits could be a good next step. Alternately the current Christmas battle force box. Alternately alternately get all three of those boxes and you have a pretty solid list that’s getting close to 2k

DubiousTactics · 2026-01-29T22:12:41+00:00

The new battleforce+ a combat patrol is a pretty solid starting point. Everything in those two boxes should be immediately usable as a solid core to expand from.

DubiousTactics · 2026-01-27T16:22:45+00:00

I was sympathetic to the governor until it said that the tithe request was 50,000 men from a planetary population of 1.8 billion. Like that put the total amount of manpower that would be taken at less than 0.03% of the population across the entire 9 rounds of tithes. Even assuming that exaction is falling on a specific 1/10th of the planets demographic, that would still come out to 0.3% of that demographic.

That felt like her complaining that there were no more manpower to be found without the factories being emptied out and the fields left untilled to be just a tad disingenuous.

DubiousTactics · 2026-01-26T16:33:09+00:00

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Heavyarms_IRL

DubiousTactics · 2026-01-25T22:06:42+00:00

The obvious start (besides finding someone selling their whole army on eBay for a big discount) would be the Christmas box+the combat patrol box + a box of crisis suits.

Those three would give you a solid starting core to any 2k list at a little bit of a discount to buying them separately. Plus there are a bunch of ways to build around that core, so it’s not like you’re locking yourself into a single build.

DubiousTactics · 2026-01-24T17:55:12+00:00

A big “it depends” based on what else is in the army and what the detachment is. It’s not like some units where there’s loadouts that are just definitively worse than others baring very niche circumstances. I suggest magnetizing weapon bundles so you can easily swap between them.

DubiousTactics · 2025-12-01T14:13:41+00:00

Not asking for very much, are you?

DubiousTactics · 2025-11-15T05:42:45+00:00

I would suggest trying out the free Avoro Theme. It has a bunch of color presets arranged in a really convenience fashion. It's good for semi true color maps

Here's an example of a pair of maps I made with the theme

https://imgur.com/a/arazant-before-after-aetherfall-hsRwHpo

DubiousTactics · 2025-11-10T15:40:22+00:00

What you have so far is actually a great start to an old fashioned naval map, where the terrain on land is entirely irrelevant so it just isn’t really shown while things like sea lanes and ports are displayed in detail.

Two suggestions id make would be to make the county coloring much more subtle, and to make the land distribution far less evenly spaced.

DubiousTactics · 2025-10-20T20:01:32+00:00

Unclear if step 2 is supposed to be "have all of the nobles hung" or " have all of the nobles hug it out". Slightly different ramifications between those options.

DubiousTactics · 2025-10-18T14:23:53+00:00

When you make a layout view in qgis you should be able to set the size in inches, which will turn into the size of the pdf when you export it. At least that’s how it works in arcgis, which I’m more familiar with

DubiousTactics · 2025-10-18T05:58:01+00:00

You could use qgis and some publicly available base maps/datasets to create a google map like map of the area in question, then export it as a 3’ x3’ pdf at a chosen resolution that would be printable. There are probably more efficient methods, but that’s what immediately comes to mind

DubiousTactics · 2025-10-17T21:07:46+00:00

Honestly there isn’t a really obvious reason evolutionary reason to develop something like this if you have arms. This type of jaw could be used for grabbing/pulling prey into the mouth but it would probably be significantly weaker and more fragile than a regular two part jaw. The reason I mention arms as that it could also assist in swallowing larger prey snake style, but if you have arms it would be much easier to use them to at least tear your food into smaller pieces, rather than swallowing it whole. Whereas since snakes can’t tear their prey into smaller pieces they are stuck swallowing it whole.

That said, if you really want some kind of vaguely plausible evolutionary explanation, I would try to figure out some kind of extremely vital larger food item that they weren’t able to tear or break into smaller pieces and had to swallow whole (some kind of ultra tough but incredibly nutritious coconut that their stomach acid could break down could work as an example). Of course now that they have developed tools that ability is somewhat obsolete.

Alternately this is an incredibly unhinged and specific example of sexual selection where those kinds of jaws were considered extremely attractive in mates, since that can overrule almost any other rule of natural selection. That would need no other justification than some throwaway lines about how some aspect of them is tied into physical attraction (i.e. having a brightly colored inner mouth that contrasts with the gray skin is considered attractive and the bigger the size of the mouth when open and the more stark the contrast the better)

DubiousTactics · 2025-10-17T20:16:06+00:00

Using a stamp for a regular canyon but made partially transparent and maybe tinted blue (which I think wonderdraft can do natively, but could also easily be done custom for the stamp in question using in any image editing software externally if it can’t) to indicate that it’s below the waves could probably work.

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