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Message: <blockquote data-quote="kensanata" data-source="post: 3325953" data-attributes="member: 47845">How To (Kensanata Map)I draw maps on white paper using a pencil (usually 3B). Then I scan them in, and use the Level tool in The Gimp to make sure the white parts are really white and the pencil part is dark enough. I'm aiming to keep the hand-drawn aspect of it, without keeping the light grey pencil stuff. Usually that's enough for me. I prefer black and white maps, as you can see in my <a href="http://flickr.com/photos/kensanata/sets/72157594406870853" target="_blank">map set on Flickr</a>. In my own games, that's what I would use: Black and white maps. Perhaps I'd add labels in red, Tolkien style.But the competition called for a color map... <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /> So printed my black-and-white map, put a white sheet of paper on top of the print-out and added color shades, scanned it, and added it as another layer and changed white to alpha on the ink layer, ie. two layers: ink only, and colors + white.I wanted to use very pale colors to match what I had seen in some <a href="http://www.zumbo.ch/maps/navigate/index.php?cat_nr=3" target="_blank">archives</a>. But it looked very cold & dark. So I played around with the color levels again to get a very green forest. This also turned the ocean magenta, so I did the same trick I had done before, this time using a pencil sharpener to produce little shavings of pencil material on the paper, which I then wiped around using my index finger. Scanned it in, and used it as a separate layer. Now, it was not really possible to make white transparent in this layer, so I returned to my original black-and-white map, connected the edges of the land mass to the edges of the canvas, selected the ocean using the fuzzy selector, inverted the selection and cut it out: This gave me a mask that would blank out the land mass. With it, I managed to get the desired result (and fix the slight mismatches of the color and the ink layer at the edge of the land mass).I decided to add lots of details to provide for more adventure hooks: More swamps, more deltas, rivers running along borders, dots for unnamed cities that seemed to be well placed strategically, some lakes in the north as the player guide mentioned them, and so on. I added mountain ranges where it made sense to separate rivers flowing in different directions, etc. In general, I placed a few mountains, drew the rivers, added more mountains as needed, then started filling in swamps and forests, to get a plausible geography.I added unnamed cities but refrained from adding labels (and producing a "GM" version of the map), because I assumed that on the one hand the world was "known" and thus the city names no secret, and on the other hand many of these cities would never show up in official material, thus I needed to have places where GMs could place their own towns.(Note that the aspect ratio in my maps is a bit different than on the overview page.)<img src="http://farm1.static.flickr.com/55/373678772_2841b38fa8_s.jpg" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " data-size="" style="" /><img src="http://farm1.static.flickr.com/98/375597538_df6ac697dd_s.jpg" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " data-size="" style="" /><img src="http://farm1.static.flickr.com/175/375669446_58a2b253f7_s.jpg" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " data-size="" style="" /><img src="http://farm1.static.flickr.com/43/375677087_60aed66a07_s.jpg" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " data-size="" style="" /><img src="http://farm1.static.flickr.com/127/377496890_81afcf9e8e_s.jpg" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " data-size="" style="" />(See <a href="http://flickr.com/photos/kensanata/tags/waroftheburningsky/" target="_blank">these maps at Flickr</a>.)</blockquote>

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