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Hal's game world map

Halivar

First Post
Here's a game world map I designed in the GIMP for an upcoming campaign. It's huge, and took a while to make. I ended up having to learn how to do path stroking for the roads, and had to make custome brushes to do the shallow water gradients. This is the first map I've made in the GIMP, so let me know if you like it.

EDIT: Alas, I had to shrink it by 300px width to play nice with the filesize limit.
 

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Here's another map I did for a pirate setting that went defunct (everyone in the group moved away). I made it using tea-stained paper and a brush pen.
 

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I used the GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program). It's an open-source (free as in beer) photoshop clone, though it lacks some of PS's utility. Still, it's pretty nice for those who don't have $500 to throw away.

Medaria is about 10 layers in all. The actual coastline was handdrawn and scanned in.
 


Amazing, any advice for someonetrying to do something similiar? In fact I have no clue what to do at all.

But both your maps are very cool.
 



Looks very nice for a first attempt!

Just a few comments:

- You should probably add a legend. I assume the heavy red lines are borders, and the thin brownish lines are roads? I would make borders a dashed black line, so you can draw then on top of rivers where need be (such as the Berugh R.) I would also recommend drawing the rivers as a sharp rather than a fuzzy line. Look through some atlases for inspiration.

- Borders and roads typically don't follow smooth arcs like on your map. That would be fine for a more abstracted, "back of the envelope" map, but it clashes with the realism of the rest of your map. Again, real-world atlases can provide good examples (do try to avoid some of the more modern straight-line borders and freeways though). The Ruol-Eragar and Eragar-Prool roads seem rather strange in the way they hug the border. Major cities are typically not near a border, and major roads don't follow borders, because borders are typically very unstable areas.

- Major cities typically have a river flowing through them . Your Beladia and Lords are very noticeable exceptions, with no running water for miles around.

- Try to avoid Y-shaped road intersections. For example, unless there's a valley or other geographical feature North of Lords to force travelers to Riddyn and Carudd to travel in the same direction for a significant distance, you would not likely see such a feature (and if you did, there'd probably be a trade settlement developing there).
 

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