harrowgate
1 · What I want to see here
Harrowgate is a crossroads town that people left without packing. You come in from the north, off the station road, and the first thing you see is the square: bare earth worn through the grass, wide enough that the emptiness is the point. A well sits in the middle of it and a stone figure still stands at the north end. Houses face the square on all four sides - the ones along the north still have their roofs; the two behind them, up the slope, have gone under the moss. Nothing moves. The road south leaves between two broken pillars that used to be a gate. Up the west road, further out than you would expect, is the burying ground.
2 · How to show it
- Left, not destroyed: the buildings are whole and overgrown. No rubble fields, no burnt shells - those would say war, and this is abandonment.
- Worn through: the square and the roads are bare earth rather than paving. The earth IS the evidence that people used to walk here.
- Nothing moves: no people, no smoke, no animals. The emptiness is carried by a large open square with almost nothing standing in it.
- Time passing: moss-domed houses set back behind roofed ones, dead trees mixed through the living ones, stumps where somebody was cutting wood.
- Used to be a gate: two broken pillars with nothing between them.
- A bowl you pass through: woods close in east and west, so the roads are the only way in or out and the square is the only open ground.
3 · What it needs
- a well - the thing the square is built around
- a standing figure at the north end, as the landmark that survived
- houses in two states: roofed, and gone under moss
- two broken pillars, apart, flanking the south road
- five or so graves close together, well outside the town
- bare earth that has a rim where it meets grass
- dead trees
- living trees
- stumps
- boulders
- Not in the pack: A town clock. The premise wants one at the north end of the square and the Ninja Adventure pack has none, so a stone statue stands in for it. Noted rather than drawn: a hand-made sprite beside a coherent pack reads as a mistake even when it is drawn well.
- Not in the pack: A cart left mid-road, and doors standing open. Neither exists in the pack; "left in a hurry" is carried by the empty square instead.
4 · The arrangement
A crossroads town in a bowl. The north-south road crosses the east-west one in an open square; everything faces the square; building density falls off with distance from it and the woods take over at the edges. The burying ground is outside the town entirely, up the west road.
5 · What that means in (x, y)
40 x 30 squares, which is 640 x 480 pixels - four screens of a 320x240 game. The square runs cols 10-29 by rows 10-20, about a sixth of the map: big enough to read as a space, small enough not to be a field. The roads are three squares wide, and the square has to be visibly WIDER than the road running through it or it is not a square at all - the first attempt made the east-west road the full width of the map at the same rows as the square, and the square disappeared into it. It reads as a place now because the earth bulges out to twenty squares and narrows back to three. The north road drifts a column as it comes down so it is not a ruled line. Buildings sit with their bottom row against the earth, because the front of every one of these sprites is its bottom edge - that is what puts a door on a road - and they are set in short terraces of two and three at uneven spacing rather than evenly around the rim. The burying ground is at cols 1-8, rows 22-26: off the west road, far enough out that you would have to mean to go there.
Reference: https://www.rpgmakerweb.com/blog/mapping-towns
7 · What it looks like
Read this against the paragraph at the top. That comparison is the only check that catches a map which is perfectly valid and is of nowhere.
6 · What was actually written
The same two grids as flat colour — earth, grass, and a block for every footprint. Anything in the render that is not here, the translation invented.
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What is in it
| 10 | tree_pine | tree living conifer large |
| 8 | tree_green | tree living broadleaf large |
| 8 | trees_dead | tree dead pair large |
| 6 | tree_small | tree living small |
| 6 | tree_dead_small | tree dead small |
| 5 | hut_stone | building ruin stone doorway |
| 5 | grave | prop grave stone cross |
| 4 | house_stone | building ruin stone doorway |
| 4 | hut_clay | building ruin clay doorway |
| 3 | stump | prop stump |
| 3 | boulder | prop rock large |
| 2 | house_moss | building ruin overgrown window |
| 2 | barn_ivy | building ruin wood doorway |
| 2 | pillar | prop pillar stone ruin |
| 1 | statue | prop statue stone landmark |
| 1 | well | prop well stone landmark |