Mapping Gumption

file under: adventures in urban planning

A key location in the world of Mystery Flesh Pit National Park is the nearby (fictional) city of Gumption. I decided to make the nearest city to the park fictional for the creative freedom it would allow me in crafting the world, and I’ve been satisfied with that decision. 

I’ve attempted to characterize Gumption as somewhat average and unremarkable in service of the story’s believability, positioning it as just another small/medium town in Texas. However, as the entire Mystery Flesh Pit world has grown in scope, how I present Gumption has needed to increase in detail.

This cartoon-like “caricature” map from a few years ago fulfilled this need for the time, depicting the city as heavily tourism-dependent and capturing the overall tone I wanted for Gumption.

However, for an application like the upcoming ttRPG, this simple depiction would not suffice. A more thorough image of the city would be needed to give players and GMs a wide latitude in creating and playing adventures within this world.

To guide the development of this undertaking, I established the following list of considerations: 

• A peak population size of ±100,000 in the year 2000.
• A regional airport capable of accepting dozens of commercial passenger flights a day.
• Rail access for logistics of running the park, as well as sizable industrial areas for storage and movement of equipment/goods/etc.
• Highway access running through the town to aid in early tourism growth.
• Gumption’s nature as a boomtown meant that growth in the 1980s and 1990s would be rapid, with disproportionate levels of wealth concentration. This would lead to development of luxury amenities such as leisure and retail options and overall residential growth away from industrial areas.
• A “revitalized” downtown section that would need to closely match the existing cartoon caricature map.

Because much of Gumption is meant to be a generic west Texas city, I began by researching several real cities that share characteristics with my listed considerations.

Instead of re-inventing the wheel, I collected aerial images of real-world airports and lakes to act as guides for the final map. 

I cut and re-positioned sections of these cities and features into a digital collage that would act as a guide for the map. By using real-world imagery, I could be sure that the overall density and open space distribution would seem natural and convincing.

Satisfied with the layout, the task of visual representation can be addressed. I decided to adopt a style similar to National Park Service maps for the city map in the interest of visual consistency with other maps that will be in the ttRPG book, as well as their clarity and my own familiarity with the NPS’s style guide, shown below: 

Of course, as nice as this official style guide is, even the NPS itself does not rigorously adhere to it with all of the maps it publishes:

Instead, I used the style guide as well as urban/city focused NPS maps as loose guidelines.

I began the illustration of the final map by tracing and cleaning up the street grid from the collage, delineating major Highway roads as well as picking out Arterial roads. This is definitely more art than science, and I owe my having looked at hundreds of city maps to build up a visual sense of what looks “right”. Cities like this are built up over time, so it won’t be a completely uniform grid.

While the overall lake shape was traced from the collage, I did take care to imagine that it was part of a modified river system that has been dammed, and included smaller lakes northwest of it to be incorporated into city parks.

The red highlighted area is the historic downtown district, which needed to share the same number of streets as the existing caricature/cartoon map.

Next, I added street names, points of interest, and demarcated where the industrial zones would be. Like deciding which streets would be included from the collage, this is a process of adding/subtracting elements and place names until it feels “right”. Too many places would clutter the map, but I wanted it to feel thorough and complete. Lots of time was spent iterating to get to the final number.

A fun element of naming places is the ability to incorporate other elements of the world to make it feel more connected and lived in, such as “Whitmer Park” alluding to the Whitmer family which originally owned the land upon which the Mystery Flesh Pit was discovered.

The final step is mostly visual polish, such as adding in key building shapes, the airport, a map scale and legend, as well as shading in green spaces. (the full resolution map is attached for zooming-in) 

I wouldn’t consider this a “tutorial”, but I thought it would be worthwhile to break down my process a bit. Please let me know if you would like to see more of this sort of “process” content in the future