The World of Aeryl

[Ra-Tiel]

Good morning (or afternoon, or evening ) fellow cartographers.

I've started remapping a world from a heavily customized d20 game from long ago for an upcomming 4E Points of Light campaign. I'm primarily using Paint.NET - mostly because I just can't wrap my head around the GIMP interface. To create the basic shape and layout of maps I found a very nice tool: TerraJ.

I'm looking for suggestions and comments, because I'm sure there's quite some room for improvement. Just as a warning: I'm colorblind regard most green and brown tones and some red and green tones. Especially the light versions of these colors are a complete mystery to me, so if you have color suggestions please use the HEX or RGB formatting so that I can get it right.

So far I'm undecided what version I should use, the basic (colored) one or the aged version.

Also, putting in location names and other writings seems a tad more complicated than I thought. I tried putting in fonts directly, or on some sort of "background" (like a scroll image or shield image). When I wrote directly (without background) on the map the font was sometimes hard to read, no matter what font I used, while when I used a small scroll background it seemed to clutter up the map and distract from the important things.

Anyway, enough of my ramblings. Let the pictures talk. The first picture is the final, aged, map. The second shows the original from which I started my work. The third map is the colored version before aging.

Regards, Ra-Tiel.

PS: Regarding the scale... my maps are always measured in "scale of plot". I like to be able to resize the map on the fly if need be, without being tied down by some "1mile 10miles 100miles" scale bar.