Dragon Rock: Size matters...

i am in the process of sifting through my collection of roleplaying
material, looking for any city maps useful for cannibalizing.

i don´t have a problem with the asteroid being 2 miles broad and 10 miles
long, but i don´t think the _whole_ available area should  be populated,
that is, taken up by buildings, places and streets. that would make a city
that´s just too large for any reasonably detailed map.

even with the scale tsr uses normally uses for city maps (see "Forgotten
Realms Adventures" for sample maps), a complete map of an 10 mile long
urban area would not be feasable (...at least not for _my_ cartographing
skills).

what alternatives do we have?
i propose the following:

- we place the districts wide apart from each other, with several miles
between them, effectively drawing the "master-map" of the "asteroid
landscape" and a set of maps with one for each district.

- port "facilities" of the larger businesses could be small villages, set
apart from the surrounding city by several hundred meters of wood (or
behind small hills).

- an extensive halfling village in the hills.

- the area between the quarters might be extensive estates (each of the 12
merchant clans, for example) or used for agriculture (lessening DR´s
dependence on food imports and refreshing air).

- the forest of the elfen embassy could take up lots of space.


that concept would make dragon rock a whole lot more attraktive, changing
it´s charakter at many areas of the rock from "urban" (dirty, noisy,
cramped) to "countryside" (lots of free spaces, cleaner, birds in trees and
hedges).
that´s quite different from the dragon rock i´ve imagined so far, and i´m
still looking for ways to keep the asteroid 10 miles long AND have a
cramped city, or at least one that´s cramped _and_ small enough permit map-
drawing. one way would be finding things that take up huge amounts of the
space:

placing the three compounds that take up most space on the "blunt end"
would go a long way toward reducing the available space.

- one ofthe blunt ends is taken up by the "government hill" compound. i´d
place the woods with the elven embassy either on the other side, taking up
the other blunt end, or beside government hill, so that both take up
roughly half of the asteroids lenght on one side.

- the third large compound would be the 12 merchant-estates. i toy with the
idea of placing them on one complete side, making the rough equivalent to
brals underside (there´s no fortress there, but it´s not a public area
either). otherwise, they could be liberally sprinkled all ofer the surface,
claiming the same amount of space but making the otherwise cramped urban
character of DR a bit more rural.


ideas?

Tauster