Release the Kraken on Joseph's Inlet (Patreon)

Every month that we keep funding remains over the $400 mark I sift through my back catalog and bring up a selection of maps that you vote on as to which will be released under the free commercial-use license. This month we start by releasing the Kraken on good old Joseph’s Inlet!

Joseph’s Inlet is a small unwalled city built around a moderate-sized keep on a hill overlooking the sea. At heart, the town is drawn around few features that I wanted for a few stories / adventures.

Some fantasy novel I had read in the past year had a section of town down by the river with a large retaining wall blocking the houses from the river front. You can see that wall (with two streets with stairs that break through the wall) along the river front. Boats moor along this area, and the town watch keeps up regular patrols here (particularly at night) to keep the transient population from causing too much trouble with the locals (or vice versa in some cases, keeping the boat crews from falling victim to local cutpurses and con men).

There are also two markets in town where vendors set up stalls and tents to sell goods – one on the plateau east of the keep, and the other (larger market) almost due south of the keep.

Across the river to the west we also have another small keep – home to an adventurer, a mercenary crew, or maybe a major trader’s base of operations.

Everything else? Well, that’s up to you!

Joseph’s Inlet was drawn using a Sakura Micron 005 pen on 8-quad graph paper. It was scanned, contrast-enhanced, and had a bit of post-production (screentones for the water) done in Photoshop. It was also the very first city map I drew at full-page size in a very long time when it was released back in 2014. Up to that point, most of the cities on the blog had been drawn in a small notebook.

You can download the map of the city (updated and upgraded from the 2014 release) from the blog with and without screens at https://rpgcharacters.wordpress.com/2017/06/28/release-the-kraken-on-josephs-inlet/