Map Project: South America (Gathering Source Materials)

[Hotrod]

EDIT: My latest work in progress

Fellow Rifts fans, I'm trying my hand at another Rifts map. This time, I'm taking on the South American continent, or rather the remnants thereof.

While I love the hand-drawn maps in South America 1 and 2, and they do a great job of showing where the various political powers are, it's sometimes hard to match up the terrain, climate, magical features, cities, and political boundaries of the various source maps. I hope to provide all that and more in this map. My goal is to make an image that's useful to GMs and players as a map, and appealing as a Rifts fan on an artistic level.

Rather than creating my own terrain from scratch as I do in my maps for Palladium Fantasy, I'll be using real-world height map data obtained from orbital radar scans, and then adjust the image to reflect the changes depicted in the published canon maps of South America, much like I did with my British Isles map. This will require some extensive work, especially in the Amazon River basin/Land of a Thousand Islands.

So far, I've pulled height map data taken from orbital radar scans of the Earth, superimposed a source map from South America 1, and adjusted the canon map to roughly match the outline of the real-world map (the bottom half of the canon map was way off to the west of the real-life locations, so I separated this part and skewed it eastward).

I have two things to do now:

The first is to work at refining the coastal shape of my height map to match up with the canon map. The canon map has some significant disparities with the height map that I need to resolve; unlike my British Isles map, these discrepancies seem a bit too pronounced to adjust my height map to the canon map, so I'll be adjusting the canon map to the height map first, then rework the coastlines. My hope is to do very little land sculpting with the height map, though I may have to do some.

The second is to do a thorough reading of both South America Rifts books and reacquaint myself with the physical, supernatural, and political geography of this continent.

[Rifter11]

EDIT: My latest work in progress

Fellow Rifts fans, I'm trying my hand at another Rifts map. This time, I'm taking on the South American continent, or rather the remnants thereof.

While I love the hand-drawn maps in South America 1 and 2, and they do a great job of showing where the various political powers are, it's sometimes hard to match up the terrain, climate, magical features, cities, and political boundaries of the various source maps. I hope to provide all that and more in this map. My goal is to make an image that's useful to GMs and players as a map, and appealing as a Rifts fan on an artistic level.

Rather than creating my own terrain from scratch as I do in my maps for Palladium Fantasy, I'll be using real-world height map data obtained from orbital radar scans, and then adjust the image to reflect the changes depicted in the published canon maps of South America, much like I did with my British Isles map. This will require some extensive work, especially in the Amazon River basin/Land of a Thousand Islands.

So far, I've pulled height map data taken from orbital radar scans of the Earth, superimposed a source map from South America 1, and adjusted the canon map to roughly match the outline of the real-world map (the bottom half of the canon map was way off to the west of the real-life locations, so I separated this part and skewed it eastward).

I have two things to do now:

The first is to work at refining the coastal shape of my height map to match up with the canon map. The canon map has some significant disparities with the height map that I need to resolve; unlike my British Isles map, these discrepancies seem a bit too pronounced to adjust my height map to the canon map, so I'll be adjusting the canon map to the height map first, then rework the coastlines. My hope is to do very little land sculpting with the height map, though I may have to do some.

The second is to do a thorough reading of both South America Rifts books and reacquaint myself with the physical, supernatural, and political geography of this continent.

Looking forward to seeing what you come up with!

[ShadowLogan]

The second is to do a thorough reading of both South America Rifts books and reacquaint myself with the physical, supernatural, and political geography of this continent.

You might also want to checkout the Underseas (WB7) book to account for the factions that on maps are shown to control/interact with the South American (and other continent) coastlines. For example the Naut'Yll have a city 60miles off the coast by the Mouth of the Amazon River (pg145). Some other factions might also have South American references worth considering depending on how much of the coastline you want to cover (and other information).

[Hotrod]

The second is to do a thorough reading of both South America Rifts books and reacquaint myself with the physical, supernatural, and political geography of this continent.

You might also want to checkout the Underseas (WB7) book to account for the factions that on maps are shown to control/interact with the South American (and other continent) coastlines. For example the Naut'Yll have a city 60miles off the coast by the Mouth of the Amazon River (pg145). Some other factions might also have South American references worth considering depending on how much of the coastline you want to cover (and other information).

Nice! Thanks for the reference!