I’m managed very little in the way of writing these last few weeks. In fact I’ve managed very little anything these last few weeks but the one thing I have managed to work on is my campaign settings map.

There has been a few questions asked over the last month or so about the scale of the main map that we’re working from. Each hex was anything from 250 to 500 miles point to point depending on who you talked to. I decided to go with 250 for my own maps on the basis that if its the later the distance between the islands would have been too great. If the setting goes with a 500 mile scale I’ll just keep developing the setting but I guess I won’t be taking part in the collaborative side of things.

Anyway there’s been a few changes and improvements on the map so far. I’ve messed about with the mountains and hills a little, added a bit of colour to offset the blanket green it seemed to have, worked out where the major rivers were, named the islands and placed the towns and villages on the map.

click for bigger picture

For those that are interested the names are all of Scots Gaelic origin although I cannot vouch that they actually make sense in Gaelic as I joined a few names that looked good together without really caring for the correct structure.

• Fàsach na Fear (Mountain of Man)
• DÌthreabh bho Dheas (Southern Wilderness)
• Eileach bho Thuath (Stoney North)
• Linnhe Dubh (Dark Pool)
• An Frith Feàrna (Small Wooded Land)

The red dots are the capitols/main town of each island. The yellow dots are the permanent towns and villages that have been built up around natural resources. The blue dots are the temporary longphorts where the boats have came ashore to over-winter or to set up trading posts.

Any thoughts?

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I’ve put a couple more hours into the map and its progressing quite well.

click for larger version

There are quite a few things I’m not to happy about though. The colour isn’t quite right, the hills do not blend into the mountains very well and the ocean floor shelf looks very unrealistic. Thanks to the beauty of layers though they are all easliy tweaked. I’ve also just noticed one of the lakes a smaller island has been messed up so I’ll need to fix that as well.

click for larger version

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Since we started dividing up the map for the RPGBN Campaign setting I’ve been trying to come up with a way of mapping my islands at the standard I wish I could attain every time I start a new campaign setting. There’s usually no surprises when at the beginning of the first session of a new campaign that I whip out a map from an old boxed set just to start us off.

Don’t get me wrong. When it comes to smaller scale maps I’ll be the first to reach for a scratch pad and pencil but I always like the main map to look good. It’s been about 10 years since I last draw a map free hand for my main map and been happy with it.

So for this setting I decided I should learn a few new tricks for Photoshop and see what I can come up with. I tried a few of the other cartography software packages out there but they were either not up to the standard I was looking for or their learning curve was a little too high for my liking.

With the bar set by MadBrew with his version of the world map I started looking looking at all the tutorials over at the Cartographers Guild for some help and inspiration. The first thing that struck me though was that almost all their tutorials generated a random map and left you to use any artistic abilities to push and pull that into the shape you wanted/needed it to be. I may as well do it freehand going from those tutorials.

So how did I go about getting to where I am now?

Well we started off with MadBrew’s map.

From that I cropped out my islands and blew them up so that they fitted onto a canvass 2000×2000 at 300dpi. You never know I might want to print them out on a decent sized bit of paper at a later date. I’ve only worked on the main island for now so I’ll leave out the rest until that’s finished.

It was turning this map into something usable where I had the problem. What I ended up having to do was follow the random map tutorials through until they had they’re land masses created and then copy and paste the coast lines around the island in such a way that they follow the general outline of the blown up islands from the original map. It takes absolutely ages though on a laptop using a touchpad. I think I added it up to about 4 or 5 hours spread over 3 days just for this one island. It would go by in a fraction of the time if I had a mouse though.

You can click through for a larger version. I’m only at the stage of working on the outlines of the islands but even at that I’m impressed so far. What do you guys think?

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