Looking for a city map

[CraigM]

My Yrth party have made it back to the river, and they're about to cruise downstream to Hadaton.

Banestorm has good cultural hooks for Hadaton, and I've got an adventure planned around that. Hadaton is Cardiel's Belfast. It's an obvious spot for a sectarian tension based plot.

But there isn't any canonical physical detail for the city.

Per RAW, Megalos City is 400,000 people and Tredroy is 200,000. I've decided that Hadaton should be about 50,000; substantial but not huge by Ytarrian standards. Magically-enhanced sewerage makes that population density less unpleasant than it would be in a medieval Earth city.

Anyway: I could use a map. Does anyone know of a freely available online map for a medieval city of about that size?

[ericbsmith]

It's not free, but 0One Games has a really good map set called The Great City. It has an overview map which divides the city into six Wards. Each Ward has a more detailed map, and then various city locals also have extra maps. The individual maps are pretty cheap ($1.65 and $1.95 each; the cheaper ones don't have a Hex grid in the PDF, but if you have a little patience you can extract the maps as an image and drop a Hex overlay on them).

[Blind Mapmaker]

Not quite medieval, but about in the right size category, here's an early 17th century map of Cologne:

https://www.sanderusmaps.com/detail.cfm?c=9175

here with colour:

http://mapy.mzk.cz/mzk03/001/058/041/2619317710/

With all the magical enhancements and such you could probably assume that adds up to another TL in city planning and I don't think there have been any canonical city maps of Yrth. So it might be fitting. 50,000 would be pretty dang large for any medieval city, being in the league of Venice and such. It should be all right for the second largest city of a big kingdom though.

Unfortunately, cartography only really takes off with the Age of Exploration and even then you are far more likely to find prospects instead of actual maps. Maybe trawling the fantasy map-making sites will be more rewarding?

[CraigM]

Originally Posted by Blind Mapmaker

Not quite medieval, but about in the right size category, here's an early 17th century map of Cologne:

https://www.sanderusmaps.com/detail.cfm?c=9175

here with colour:

http://mapy.mzk.cz/mzk03/001/058/041/2619317710/

Perfect! It has the river in the right position and everything. :)

Any idea which bit was the slummier part of town?

For what I have planned, I need a Muslim ghetto neighbourhood bordering on a working-class Catholic neighbourhood, with the high status folks off in a third area.

[Blind Mapmaker]

Originally Posted by CraigM

Perfect! It has the river in the right position and everything. :)

Yeah, I thought that fit really well if you didn't need a seaport.

Any idea which bit was the slummier part of town?

For what I have planned, I need a Muslim ghetto neighbourhood bordering on a working-class Catholic neighbourhood, with the high status folks off in a third area.

It won't be a completely separate ghetto, but consider the area on the waterfront next to the open area where it says "Hew marckt" (Hay Market). You can take the area with the very small houses above the Hay Market and - depending on how much you need - one or two blocks to the right. I would make the Catholic working-class neighbourhood the area below the Hay Market, but alternatively you can include that into the Muslim area and use that up to the big left-right road and use put the poorer Catholics south of that up to the old city wall.

The posher Catholics should definitely be in the west with the huge cathedral - the fact that it's yet unfinished meshes well with Cardiel's history.

Take all of this with a grain of salt. I have no idea where the seedier districts of medieval Cologne were. It's just that markets are not always the most high-class districts, especially when they are the places of executions like in the Hay Market here. An alternative would be putting the Muslims to the East. It looks a bit poorer too with lots of small densely spaced houses trailing off into orchards (olive trees obviously).

Edit: Also take care that the up on the map is actually east. Your players might spot the "Oriens" and take exception.

[fredtheobviouspseudonym]

remember that in pre-industrial cities the river was the sewer.

So living downstream would be less popular than upstream. Just for the smell, as folks in those days had little idea of the health consequences of sewage.

So . . .