• Welcome to the Fantasy Writing Forums. Register Now to join us!

Anybody care to share their map?

What the heck. Here's the map I made for Esper Shift, an RPG I'm running:

mapofkana.jpg


Not the entire map, though - the continent has three other regions and the map will expand as the players discover more of it.
 

Mindfire

Istar
Update! This is map version, what? Am I at 6.0 by now? Whatever. Anyway, this one actually has the whole earth, not just the northern 3/4s of it. It's not actually on parchment btw, that's a crude pixlr effect. lol

 

Telcontar

Staff
Moderator
Randonia.jpg

I've been studying this tutorial from the Cartographers Guild for a couple days now, and today I finally got the chance to try it out (it required downloading some plugins for GIMP before I could mimic some of the functions this guy uses).

The tutorial taught me a ton. I made some mistakes going through it, and ended up with a map that has much less detail and where the underwater and on-land detail doesn't seem to match up (the underwater stuff I followed much more closely, and it ended up pretty good). I learned a lot once I decided to just depart from the tutorial and finish it up in a different way, but I'm not likely to try and make this look any better.

It was a valuable learning experience. The map style portrayed in this tutorial is damn near perfect to my eyes, and I'm really looking to master it. For a first attempt, this wasn't bad. If I were to change the coastline to match, it might almost be its own style.
 

Helleaven

Minstrel
I've been studying this tutorial from the Cartographers Guild for a couple days now, and today I finally got the chance to try it out (it required downloading some plugins for GIMP before I could mimic some of the functions this guy uses).

The tutorial taught me a ton. I made some mistakes going through it, and ended up with a map that has much less detail and where the underwater and on-land detail doesn't seem to match up (the underwater stuff I followed much more closely, and it ended up pretty good). I learned a lot once I decided to just depart from the tutorial and finish it up in a different way, but I'm not likely to try and make this look any better.

It was a valuable learning experience. The map style portrayed in this tutorial is damn near perfect to my eyes, and I'm really looking to master it. For a first attempt, this wasn't bad. If I were to change the coastline to match, it might almost be its own style.

I have worked so hard on this tutorial, yet I couldn't do anything!!! Spending many hours for nothing made me so nervous that I have never tried again.

Where did you find those plug-ins, I wonder? Maybe I will try once again if I can use them.
 

Telcontar

Staff
Moderator
I have worked so hard on this tutorial, yet I couldn't do anything!!! Spending many hours for nothing made me so nervous that I have never tried again.

Where did you find those plug-ins, I wonder? Maybe I will try once again if I can use them.

Plug-in is here.

Once I understood the general technique of creating elevation effects by "revealing" a layer through a layer mask, and then bevel/embossing the result, I began to see the method behind the madness. Layer opacity, revealing through a mask, and bevel/emboss... those are the real lessons I got from this tutorial. Of course, now I want to put them back together in the exact way that Tear does, cuz I love his end results so much.
 

Dan

Scribe
My map (Hadrene)

Hi guys,

Thought I'd post my map that I am currently working on, it's revision 17 of my first version, I figure I'll go through a dozen more revisions, and move onto improved versions as I accumalate more research, and better ideas. So it's still an incredibly heavy work-in-progress piece (It has no elevation, mountains, forests/ woodland, major landmarks, city names, towns, places, province lines, or anything else other than the 'old' rough province areas).

This is the land of Hadrene, its been home to ancient tribes, and clans for tens-of-thousands of years, and home to a dozen great Kingdoms for hundreds. Its troubled history has been down to the many rivers which breakup the landscape, along with it's great mountain ranges, making it extremely difficult for any one group of people to assert control over all parts for any great period of time.

The map does not reflect the post-war effects of years 555 - 566, nor the disintegration of power that occurred afterwards up until year 654, all of the provinces names are of those that existed before the war. Places like Astensa, Oaken Tor, Nicht Stane (Home to a number of small Clan provinces), and a few others gradually are broken up as the kingdom crumbles away, and small petty lords rise up to carve out greater provinces / kingdoms for themselves.

Of course I will be hoping to go a stage further and to place individual villages, towns, and major cities on the map, along with names which are, for the most part, derived from folk tales, legends, and histories of the local areas.

I am currently working on my first piece of writing which is a back story of chronicles, tales, and poems of the Hadrene Kingdom creation, and the subsequent years when one ruling Household ruled over the entire landscape. (This covers the years 555 - 654. I hope to write a few more covering the past in detail too).

Link to Google Drive (Can't link as image)

I also have another section of the map, simply called The Great Continent, it has an outline, but nothing more than that. This will be an area that will take me considerable time to build up, I'd imagine several months worth of research, ideas, and story plots will come and go before I have this area as detailed as Hadrene.

Link to Google Drive

If anyone is interested I used MyPaint to construct the maps, with a mixture of mouse (For the outlines), and a tablet for other various parts.

(Sorry for the extremely long post, I'd write more on my creation process but I think I've waffled on enough).
 
Last edited:
Wow, 30 pages of posts and only a handful of maps up in the gallery? I posted my world map there, so please check it out if you are so inclined. Thank you!
 
Awesome map PrincessaMiranda! I thought of going elliptical but decided in the end to go for the deformed rectangular version that cannot accurately cover a globe.
 

PrincessaMiranda

Troubadour
Mine took 3 months -_-

Although I have a 4 foot by 4 foot pencil drawn version as a souvenir! That counts for something, right? Oh, it doesn't? Shucks.

Well, that is probably why it looks so good. I also have a much larger version, but it is very different because I drew it when I was nine years old. But it was good, considering.
 

Taro

Minstrel
very nicely done there Princess :) wish i could do maps, dont have time or my darwing tablet; even though i cannot draw if my life depended on it :) maybe once i get some time i might get something on to here :)
 
Top