All kinds of maps

[WhatGravitas]

There are many sources, and many do the maps on their own, but a little bit of inspiration is always good, so where did get your city/world/encounter/dungeon maps from?

Currently I'm searching a good map for a big sea port city (pop. ca 14,000)... so any comments/sources are appreciated...

 

[The Hound]

Personally, I have never sketched out more than the most important areas of a town or city (main square, area around the Inn, market, etc.) and left the rest as big white areas that say things like "residential section", "rough section of town" etc., then make up stuff on the fly if players want to go into those areas.

For maps of port cities you might try Googling for historical maps of real port cities like
New York (used to by New Amsterdam), London, Boston, Alexandria, etc. My guess is that any port city from pre industrial times - ancient times to the early 19th centruy - would have pretty much the same major features (docks, warehouse area, markets, red light district...).

 

[Talic]

For our world/regional maps, I'm normally the cartographer, so I usually take an interresting landmass from a real map and use that as the basic shape. From there, I toss up landforms, water bodies, and cities where I feel. For our current campaign, I traced out Europe as best I could from memory, inverted it, and scattered new terrain onto it. We'd been playing with it for over a year before anyone in the group realized it was Europe.

We rarely deal with city maps, but for encounters and dungeons, it's usually just slapped together as needed ahead of timeby the DM on graph paper.