Thread: Salutations from Shadow World

Hello all - I've stopped by this site a few times, but am now finally embarking on a project that has been a couple years in coming.

I purchased CC3, along with a few add-ons, a couple years ago but had not yet devoted the time to it. I've recently picked it up again and started working on my projects. I also own Illustrator and Photoshop but was interested in CC as mostly a time-saving device.

The project I've started is to create several maps for Terry Amthor's "Shadow World", originally published by Iron Crown Enterprises. I'm currently working, with Terry's input, on creating a Player Guide to SW and am trying to load it up with as many graphics and pictures as I can.

While SW did have some good maps, I don't ever feel like it had enough. So I'm looking at creating a series of maps that will convey a variety of information: racial populations, languages, trade routes, roads, political borders (both old and new), climate, Essence flows (particular to SW), etc.

I'm basically combining all the various information from all the SW books and putting everything as separate layers onto one base map for each continent. If all goes well I'll eventually make smaller regional maps as needed. For now I've started with Jaiman and have got the base map traced using the original maps as reference, along with rivers and simple contour lines.

While I'd really like to go with the Fenlon style (for obvious reasons), it's not well suited to these continental scales I'm starting with so I've decided to go with the Par Lindstrom Fantasy Worlds style from the Cartographer's Annual 28 (April '09). I had started fiddling with using some of the relief techniques, and also trying to better replicate the look of the existing Jaiman map but realized I could easily get sucked into spending months upon months doing this. Getting a unique look would be nice but the trade off is time spent. I've got many layers of info to add, and still lots of work to do on the non-map portions of the Player Guide....

Great looking resource in these forums here though. I'm planning on posting WIPs as I go and hopefully get good criticism. I want to make these maps the best that I can since they will be used for publication for a fairly well known fantasy world and I think the community here will be a great resource.

- V