Downloadable PDF Guide to Novia

Hi folks!

How about a nice, voluminous PDF “Guide to Novia”? Something to have open on the ol’ iPad whilst exploring? Something that comprises the collected knowledge of the experts?

Here is something which I created for my own use and now make available to all.

What is it?
A massive compilation of all the information given by the developers in 260+ updates about the regions of Novia:
“Herein are found sagely observations & useful insights from such renown figures as Sorcerous Steve, Sea Wolf, “Vas Corp Por” Koleski, “Scottie” Jones, Earl Greyhot, mysterious Arabella and not forgetting our Sovereign, Lord British himself!”
All complied, reordered and reworded where necessary to create one cohesive tome!

* Please excuse the British English(!)

OK, but are there any pictures?
Loads!
It started as just a giant text document in Pages but then massive enthusiasm overcame me and I decided to present it as an old illustrated book with lots of simulated fine-pen hand drawings. All this is presented to the best of my Photoshop knowledge. I might do a separate post about the convoluted method of achieving that...

Is it compact?
No, it weighs-in at a very healthy 26mb! To achieve some effects it was necessary to save the PDF in high-quality format. No compromises here folks.

Download it here:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1n_3SW0XCEA4AB0u6swBV3uaryD_c3nrI/view?usp=sharing
(Google Drive document)

Here are some low-resolution previews of various selected pages:

 

Wow! beautifully done.
Thank you for this!

 

Greetings @Greyhaven This look amazing. I am about to go thru it now and was wondering how often you will update it and how do we get notices on updates? Is there anyway I can help you with this over the long run? Are you going to add Player own Towns to your book as well?

Thank you for spending the time and I look forward to hearing from you. My in game name is same as here.

 

Yikes, that is one impressive feat.

 

A work of art and love.
I salute you.
Impressive.

 

Excellent work there very nice

 

One of the finest works I have ever seen in this community, thank you @Greyhaven!

@Scottie will love this.

 

This is awesome. Will def share to all the new peeps I meet!

 

Very nicely done. I have been working on ingame versions much like this only without pictures. But very nicely done. I am doing mine by regions. Not alphabetically. But very well done indeed. Thanks so much

 

Amazing piece of work, @Greyhaven!

| I might do a separate post about the convoluted method of achieving that...

Sounds very intriguing, please do tell!

 

I love this! Great work here!

 

This is gorgeous thank you for your hard work.

 

WOW, very impressive. Thank you so much for taking the time to make this.

 

Wow! Holy crap! @Lord British ONBE candidate here...

Many thanks! *bow*

 

This is a beautiful piece of work. Well done!

 

What kind words - thanks guys!

Is your heart & mind ready for "the method"??

Here it is:
How to make a screenshot look (a bit) like a fine-pen sketch drawing...
Photoshop or Photoshop Elements (Expert)

AERIE

1) Choose a favourite official screenshot

2) Select All and paste another copy on a new layer. You now have a top version and a
background version.



3) Create the colour wash: Switch off the new top layer and apply Filter > Noise >
Median on the background version. I had Radius set to 10 to make sure the blobs of
colour were big enough.



4) Create the pen sketch: Switch on the top layer and adjust Levels/Brightness &
contrast to make it a punchy as possible - No big deal on this Aerie picture but
definitely required for the Desolis example (see below).

5) Ensuring black is set as foreground colour, apply the pen filter - Filter > Sketch
> Graphic pen. The stroke length set to maximum (15)
Adjust Light/Dark balance in the filter dialogue box so that most of the image's is
shown (usually between 40-60%)



6) Blur the layer

7) Adjust the opacity of the top layer down to 60-70% so that the colour wash layer
shows through.

8) Before flattening or saving as JPG you can do some touching up - for this example
some pen lines were removed from the sky



That might be OK for even rectangular images on a white page, but for a sketched look
I made the picture edges (naturally) uneven so I had to bring each picture into a
pre-prepared page template. This uses the "Full left page" version.



9) Bring picture into the template. Resize & crop to fit (left).

10) Use the erasor with a hard-edged brush and trace by hand around the edges of the
pen parts of the picture. Doesn't matter if it's wobbly - that's the point(!)

11) Use the erasor with a soft-edged brush and trace by hand around edges of the sky
to give it that blurred colour-wash look.

12) Lower opacity of the picture layer to 80% to take the bite out of the black pen
and letting a bit of background page tone through. The ink has dried & faded a bit! (Right)

That's it! The picture can be flattened, saved and brought into the Publisher document.



The background image was made from a plain book image found on Google. I had to
flatten out the pages a bit because I did not want curved pictures (or text)! I also
added the clasps from a photograph of another book, then pasted it all onto a blurred
background image with a drop shadow effect.


DESOLIS

This illustrates the importance of making the picture high-contrast & "punchy" before
the pen filter is applied.

Original Picture:



Dark & atmospheric! Applying the filter straight away just makes an indistinct mess with little discernible detail:



Looks like an old CRT TV that is not tuned-in very well!
Adjust Levels/Brightness & contrast to really bring out the detail. Doesn't matter
about the weird colours as they will be lost from the top layer.



Here the Graphic pen filter has worked much better.



Cropped and in position:



This illustrates the basic method. In some instances a picture can be awkward in that some parts may be sharp (forgrounds for example) and other parts very light (mountains in the background). In which case two top layers are required and perfected individually (but I've already gone on too long...)

 

It's very interesting. Thanks so much. Maybe a little geeky j/k but who of us is not a bit in some ways. I know I can go on and on about some game thing which I love to do sometimes and who understands well this community is who.

My sister asked me about launch day out of politeness and trying to be interested in what I was interested in but I could tell she was lost and didn't get my passion for it. At least she tried.

What you created here @Greyhaven is really awesome. Thanks for sharing it with us.

 

wow nicely done

Thank you for sharing

 

OK, this is awesome! Man, that's a ton of work you had to put in to make those pictures look so good. Great job man!

 

This is a magnificent guide @Greyhaven! May we share it on social and in the weekly update?