4 replies to this topic

[Schley]

Here's a map I just finished for Wizards of the Coast's D&D campaign setting Forgotten Realms. It was published recently in their online PDF magazine Dragon and seems to be a hit with the fans so I thought I'd get you guys' take on it.

The area is fairly well known from the game supplements and novels that WotC publishes so I wanted to do it justice with a fairly detailed map. I tried to keep it from becoming too busy though and kept my pallet rather soft.

One note; there is no icon key since the map accompanies a fairly detailed article discussing the cities, ruins, and other points of interest depicted. I assumed that since the icons were using a standard convention for the property an explanatory sidebar wasn't needed. I've since come to think that I was wrong and so for future regional maps I think I'll include a fairly unobtrusive and simple one somewhere out of the way.

The entire project was produced in Photoshop CS3 with a Wacom tablet and took about 4 working days to complete. Let me know what you think.

Mike

Attached Files

•  Sarifal_Small.jpg   391.99K   161 downloads

[DaveB]

I love the style and colors!

Except for the text and point symbols I would've thought it was hand-drawn with pen and ink and paint. Did you have some sort of "base map" to draw from or on top of to get the shapes and positions correct?

I'll admit it, I'm a sucker for these kinds of maps.

[François Goulet]

As always, I'm a fan of yours.

Of course, without the legend, it's a little harder to understand, but I love the style and colors...

Greeeeaaaat job!

[MapMedia]

Really cool Mike - whatever the game is, you made a neat place to play it.
The thing that struck me was the scale - the length of Gwyneth is ~120 miles, which is more than the distance from Sacramento to San Francisco, which changes ecoregions and passes a few small mountain ranges, etc. I was just thinking the distance might feel more realistic if it was 50 miles instead of 100. 2 cents

The legend would be useful - as I wanted to know why the red placenames were in the same class as the black island names, but were supposed to mean something more.

Greta joB!

[Schley]

The legend would be useful - as I wanted to know why the red placenames were in the same class as the black island names, but were supposed to mean something more.

Actually, The red text indicates major island names. I used the same point size for the kingdom name Sarifal since it was the focus of the map and article. I was afraid that any larger and it would start to crowd out the artwork.

The text class conventions I'm working with are a bit idiosyncratic but they seems to work. The size of the text generally reflects the importance or size of the feature tagged. All the natural geographic feature tags are in italics and are assigned a color related to their context. Blue for water features, brown for hills and mountains, etc. Geographic tags are also all typed on a curve and set off the horizontal. The only man-made features that follow these conventions are roads, paths, and tunnels.

All of the political/place names are in non-italicized black and set to the horizontal.