Scenario Design

Making Extreme Mountains and Kewl Waterfalls

(Part II)

by Talon-Thorn

Now that we have our starting layout, I'll show you how to make tall mountains. Start by placing mountain tiles on the top ridge of the raised hexagons. You can use larger mountains, but for this example, I'm just going to use the smallest tile.

Once you've placed the mountains, use the rocks tile (I'm using the third one which places the most rocks) to add a rough, "mountainy" look to the sides of the elevated hexagons.

That's it! You're done.

Kewl Waterfalls

Next, let's add some waterfalls. I'm going to show you how to make one waterfall, but I'm going to add three to this map. Note the first picture below where I've placed some red "x"'s. The lower two are slightly raised bumps on the map. The uppermost "x" marks some terrain which is raised, but you can't see this from the poor quality of the picture.

Before I begin, I'm going to remove that high peak, as it will get in the way of making my first waterfall. To do this, I'll select "water" terrain and click once on the map just a short way from the peak. You can see the results in the second picture below, which shows the now-reduced peak as well as the hexagon (highlighted in red at the bottom of the picture) where I clicked on the map.

Now, with the view cleared, I can begin making the waterfall by clearing the top of the bottommost "x" (of the three red "x"'s), by using the "Strong currents" tile (see picture below). I've also cleared out a few tiles around the location, so that I can make a stream. For these hexagons, I've deleted the "strong current" tile, but left one of the "strong current" tiles at the bottom of the waterfall for effects. Next, I'll add "swamp" terrain (second picture below) so that the stream will have a nice border to it (instead of the sandy coastline which "grass" terrain paint-overs tend to leave behind).

To complete the waterfall, I put a bridge on the bump hexagon. I then repeated the process on the nearby bump, and also made a stream running from the red "x" toward the top of the map. For the upper waterfall, I was able to get the effects without adding a bridge, since there was a ridge of raised water there. (The bumps leave a shadded back-side to the bump, making the water look funny...the bridges on the lower two bumps hide this dark side of the water bump).

After adding some rocks and decorating the landscape with some trees and flowers, plus adding a road between the bridges, I've created the following picture:

If you run into problems making your tall mountains or waterfalls, or you think this primer needs some extra work to make the process clearer or easier, send me a message to TalonThorn1@yahoo.com. And by all means, send your map art to be exhibited in the Map Maker's Gallery!

(For discussion on this topic, feel free to post in this thread in our Scenario Design Forum. )