Mesoamerican City Gates (34x22) (Patreon)

Hey hey, people. This week's map is May's belated wildcard, which is based on a bit of confusion over one of the theme entries last month! But it turned out nice, so that's good. It's a mesoamerican-inspired city wall surrounded by floating gardens - chinampas! These are large mats held together by woven reed walls around the edges and tall, thin willow trees whose roots cling to the dirt but whose branches are thin enough to let light through onto the vegetation.

Now, strictly speaking, Aztec cities did not have walls, and the reason might be relevant to your campaign at some time in the future. See, protracted sieges requires a substantial supply line, which requires goods transport, but the only porters the Aztecs had were more humans - because they didn't have beasts of burden. No horses, no sheep, no grazing, means your porters have to bring food for themselves too. It's the rocket equation, but for army logistics.

The result was that nobody in Mexico could field large armies for the time periods that it took to run a siege, which meant that high walls weren't nearly as effective as a good army. Tenochtitlan wasn't defenseless anyways; it had the causeways (pictured in this map) which could be used as staged defensive barriers, and of course, it was in the middle of a lake.

But that doesn't make for a good map and there's a good chance that your fantasy world has pack animals mixed in with your fantasy Aztec-lookalikes anyways, so frankly, there's no reason they wouldn't have walls.

Variants

• Supporter: Supporter variants today are the walls during the day, night, and the rain. Also included are versions with the drawbridge raised, if the local conquistadors - cough, party - aren't welcome.
• Enthusiast: The Enthusiast variants include one with the chinampas stripped away, leaving a somewhat more fortified city, and a desert conversion with a Babylon-inspired paint job.
• Benefactor: The overflow variant this time is a set of drought maps, with the river from the Babylon map dried up. I had planned more, but, well, see the notes...

Both the drawbridge and drawbridge-less maps are attached above as free watermarked maps!

Technical Details

• Resolution: 4,760 x 3,080
• Map Size: 34x22 tiles
• Grid Size: 140ppi

Downloads

Supporter: Mesoamerican City Gates 

Enthusiast: Mesoamerican City Gates 

Benefactor: Mesoamerican City Gates (RAW FILES)

Downloads include all content from the previous tiers. (If you don't know what the raw files are, you don't need them.)

Notes

I ... screwed up while drawing yesterday. I duplicated some of the layer groups so that I could modify the duplicates, and then I, thinking I had duplicated the entire .kra file (as I had done in the past for some operations), deleted the original groups. Those groups happened to contain all of the shader and lighting effects for the floating gardens/aztec variants. I had a couple of other ideas, but that kinda stopped me cold from executing them.

I tried to recover them, but I had already painted over most of the new ones and exhausted my undo limit, and my habit of saving every few strokes actually worked against me here because the .kra file had been overwritten several times by then.

So, yeah, my bad. Fortunately, I had already exported the set of maps I had done so far.

Also, I have hidden a gondola in the floating garden maps. Try to find it, if you'd like.