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Description

Fourth map! This time we’re taking a step away from reality and into pure fantasy with the Shadow Isles.

You can find the animated 'tour' through the full map by clicking here .

Design Principles

‘Where death calls to all but brings no peace.’

Fun fact: the general shape of the Shadow Isles is the only element of my original sketches to make it into the final map.

The driving force behind the design here was ‘cataclysm’. I didn’t know quite what caused it, but I knew the land had been shattered by some monumental event – something on a scale even bigger than Shurima. While I’m not a fan of the Black Mist as a narrative element, I knew that the centre of the isles contained secrets and answers and – as with the Gelid Vortex in the Freljord – clouds allowed me to conceal that place. They also allowed me to add in things like storms and get moody with the colour palette that pops due to the contrast. Even though there’s little music or sound, the Shadow Isles part of the animated map is up there with my favourites for the above reasons (you can see the isles from around 5:05 through to 5:45 in the video).

When working on this region, a voice in the back of my head kept whispering “less is more” every time I started to overwork an area, which became the other main guideline for this map. For example, while marked ruins are named everywhere else on the map, the ones here are nameless by design. I’ve mentioned elsewhere that engaging worlds need uncharted places, unmarked graves, uncertain stories and this place fits that bill more than most. Some things should be left to the audience’s imagination. ‘Scary places’ (just like anything really) also tend to become less so if you overwork them - in this case have labels and icons slapped all over them.

In my humble opinion, you can’t have many of these utterly fantastical types of places on a map before your audience stops buying it. I’m a strong believer in rules in fiction: be they the rules of ‘the Force’, space travel, physics, magic, medicine or the rules of geography. Stories or settings where too many things happen due to sketchy rules or broken rules are the ones that are very easily picked apart and can quickly break immersion (see e.g. the Mass Effect 3 ending furore where they broke half a dozen of their own very well set up rules). However, if you are going to have lands influenced by otherworldly forces on a full colour map then they sure as hell need to sell themselves as such (to distract from that bogus geography)!

Locations and Features:

The cataclysm accounts for the general shattered design of the main islands but also for the mountain range to the west – while the closer lands are the ‘broken crater’, the mountains are meant to give the impression of the outer edge of a shockwave. Heavy constant clouds hang against the mountains and over the Quiet Marsh so we can imagine that the whole area is grey and damp at the best of times. On the very edge of the map, the rain shadow desert leads eventually to Shurima. Just out of frame to the north-west, the Shadowlands are kept relatively safe by the monks of Death’s Sentinel (also out of frame) – the ancient fortress city that watches over the lands of the dead. With the shallower waters and 'trail' of islands, I wanted to give the impression that on the right (or wrong) day, a lost soul would be able to walk from the main land to the islands (obviously not in a single day though).

In terms of names and locations, there was again, very little to go on besides the collective name for the islands and the Twisted Treeline, which probably should have gone on the map to be honest but I wasn’t sure of the lore of it or how large or significant it was or even if it was canon. So I went with a sort of ‘deadly evils’ approach to the islands with the few labels that are on it with one exception: The Spider’s Reach is the domain of Vilemaw, the gigantic arachnid boss creature of the Twisted Treeline (who makes Baron Nashor look like a purple squeaky toy). The interior of the western island is cloaked in black as a nod to Tolkien’s primal spider, Ungoliant, eater of light.

When designing the Quiet Marsh, I actually found Florida the most useful point of reference. The marsh is named literally: things live there – not humans – but things of different kinds, but none of them makes any noise. You know there are creatures all around you – you can feel them – but you can’t hear them. They’re there when the hairs on the back of your neck stand on end and the goose bumps prick up on your arms.

You shouldn’t be there anyway.

Turn around.
Run.

Speaking of which, I did have a reason (the only reason) why anyone travels anywhere remotely near this most twisted of places, but on the advice of a few keen watchers, I’ll probably save it for my own world should I find the time to spin one out as it's a pretty core concept.

While a lot of the isles don’t make a lot of sense by earthly rules of weather, tectonics, geology, etc., the sick looking colour of the water snaking around the islands is actually not one of those. Those magnificently vivid colours can be present via a few phenomena such as mixing of waters, shallows, reefs, certain minerals and sediment but the most vivid colours I found were due to phytoplankton blooms. So riffing off that into the fantasy space, the bright greens and teals became a sort of living magic, the raw essence of life itself – a living thing.

Finally, knowing that this was a place – the main place – where the rules were broken, there is both snow and ice found at the northern tip of the western island and desert across most of the eastern island. Both are the result of the primal, rampant, chaotic magic ravaging the land.

I definitely had a lot of fun in this corner of the world. If I wasn’t more or less done with League of Legends, it would be a fun exercise to draw this same area of the world pre-cataclysm.

As for the official lore, Riot released a map of sorts with the Harrowing one year but there wasn’t a lot to draw from it except that it appeared that they’d moved the Shadow Isles away from their original position on the Pacman Map (north-west of Valoran) to roughly where I have them, in the south-east. Their map made it very difficult to pick the shape or scale (or even number) of the islands and as such there wasn’t much I could change anyway.

Description

Fourth map! This time we’re taking a step away from reality and into pure fantasy with the Shadow Isles.

You can find the animated 'tour' through the full map by clicking here .

Design Principles

‘Where death calls to all but brings no peace.’

Fun fact: the general shape of the Shadow Isles is the only element of my original sketches to make it into the final map.

The driving force behind the design here was ‘cataclysm’. I didn’t know quite what caused it, but I knew the land had been shattered by some monumental event – something on a scale even bigger than Shurima. While I’m not a fan of the Black Mist as a narrative element, I knew that the centre of the isles contained secrets and answers and – as with the Gelid Vortex in the Freljord – clouds allowed me to conceal that place. They also allowed me to add in things like storms and get moody with the colour palette that pops due to the contrast. Even though there’s little music or sound, the Shadow Isles part of the animated map is up there with my favourites for the above reasons (you can see the isles from around 5:05 through to 5:45 in the video).

When working on this region, a voice in the back of my head kept whispering “less is more” every time I started to overwork an area, which became the other main guideline for this map. For example, while marked ruins are named everywhere else on the map, the ones here are nameless by design. I’ve mentioned elsewhere that engaging worlds need uncharted places, unmarked graves, uncertain stories and this place fits that bill more than most. Some things should be left to the audience’s imagination. ‘Scary places’ (just like anything really) also tend to become less so if you overwork them - in this case have labels and icons slapped all over them.

In my humble opinion, you can’t have many of these utterly fantastical types of places on a map before your audience stops buying it. I’m a strong believer in rules in fiction: be they the rules of ‘the Force’, space travel, physics, magic, medicine or the rules of geography. Stories or settings where too many things happen due to sketchy rules or broken rules are the ones that are very easily picked apart and can quickly break immersion (see e.g. the Mass Effect 3 ending furore where they broke half a dozen of their own very well set up rules). However, if you are going to have lands influenced by otherworldly forces on a full colour map then they sure as hell need to sell themselves as such (to distract from that bogus geography)!

Locations and Features:

The cataclysm accounts for the general shattered design of the main islands but also for the mountain range to the west – while the closer lands are the ‘broken crater’, the mountains are meant to give the impression of the outer edge of a shockwave. Heavy constant clouds hang against the mountains and over the Quiet Marsh so we can imagine that the whole area is grey and damp at the best of times. On the very edge of the map, the rain shadow desert leads eventually to Shurima. Just out of frame to the north-west, the Shadowlands are kept relatively safe by the monks of Death’s Sentinel (also out of frame) – the ancient fortress city that watches over the lands of the dead. With the shallower waters and 'trail' of islands, I wanted to give the impression that on the right (or wrong) day, a lost soul would be able to walk from the main land to the islands (obviously not in a single day though).

In terms of names and locations, there was again, very little to go on besides the collective name for the islands and the Twisted Treeline, which probably should have gone on the map to be honest but I wasn’t sure of the lore of it or how large or significant it was or even if it was canon. So I went with a sort of ‘deadly evils’ approach to the islands with the few labels that are on it with one exception: The Spider’s Reach is the domain of Vilemaw, the gigantic arachnid boss creature of the Twisted Treeline (who makes Baron Nashor look like a purple squeaky toy). The interior of the western island is cloaked in black as a nod to Tolkien’s primal spider, Ungoliant, eater of light.

When designing the Quiet Marsh, I actually found Florida the most useful point of reference. The marsh is named literally: things live there – not humans – but things of different kinds, but none of them makes any noise. You know there are creatures all around you – you can feel them – but you can’t hear them. They’re there when the hairs on the back of your neck stand on end and the goose bumps prick up on your arms.

You shouldn’t be there anyway.

Turn around.
Run.

Speaking of which, I did have a reason (the only reason) why anyone travels anywhere remotely near this most twisted of places, but on the advice of a few keen watchers, I’ll probably save it for my own world should I find the time to spin one out as it's a pretty core concept.

While a lot of the isles don’t make a lot of sense by earthly rules of weather, tectonics, geology, etc., the sick looking colour of the water snaking around the islands is actually not one of those. Those magnificently vivid colours can be present via a few phenomena such as mixing of waters, shallows, reefs, certain minerals and sediment but the most vivid colours I found were due to phytoplankton blooms. So riffing off that into the fantasy space, the bright greens and teals became a sort of living magic, the raw essence of life itself – a living thing.

Finally, knowing that this was a place – the main place – where the rules were broken, there is both snow and ice found at the northern tip of the western island and desert across most of the eastern island. Both are the result of the primal, rampant, chaotic magic ravaging the land.

I definitely had a lot of fun in this corner of the world. If I wasn’t more or less done with League of Legends, it would be a fun exercise to draw this same area of the world pre-cataclysm.

As for the official lore, Riot released a map of sorts with the Harrowing one year but there wasn’t a lot to draw from it except that it appeared that they’d moved the Shadow Isles away from their original position on the Pacman Map (north-west of Valoran) to roughly where I have them, in the south-east. Their map made it very difficult to pick the shape or scale (or even number) of the islands and as such there wasn’t much I could change anyway.