Realm of the Dark Warlord

[Gandwarf]

What kind of online game are you producing? Browser based or something else?

[Strickland5]

What kind of online game are you producing? Browser based or something else?

It's a play by post game on rpol.net.

[Karro]

Since you're planning on taking this into GIMP, I assume you're familiar with RobA's GIMP tutorial? Even if that isn't quite the style you're looking to take this map in, if you aren't already very familiar with GIMP, following it will help you learn a lot of the tools GIMP has to offer.

So, do you want to push this more in the hand-drawn style (like what you've already got going, but moreso)? I haven't used it much, yet, but for this style, I wonder if Inkscape (also open source, I believe) might not be a better option... but there's not much advice I could offer on that front.

So, to the map itself: At the mouth of the river that runs down between Arcin and Keidrean, there are a number of blue sea-shore dots that are overlapping the land. Does this represent a swamp? If so, in particular, I'd recommend doing something a little different, primarily because it looks like an error where the seashore design accidentally overlapped the land.

Do the gray lines represent borders betweeen the named regions?

[jfrazierjr]

I would echo what Karro is saying. For the dots that over lap the land (and you have some in more places than Karro pointed out, though only a few), this is where a layer mask would come in handy. RobA's tutorial is a very good primer in how to use a ton of different GIMP techniques, so if your not very experienced with GIMP, start there.

Also... for the borders, I would think about doing something a bit different. It appears you may be using rivers for borders in some places, but not others and this visual distinction can confuse a reader. For example, Arcin and Keidrian appear to be seperated by the central river... and by the grey line on land. However, this logical division also makes it appear the Arcin is bounded by the river to the West also and Keidrian to the river to it's east. One easy way to avoid this distinction is to make the region names cover their areas more, in GIMP, you could do this using the text tool and a path. Likewise, another way would be to create a political border map where each region has a different color OR possibly a color halo that delineates it's border. Of course the second choice will define your map style to some degree...

[Karro]

I would echo what Karro is saying. For the dots that over lap the land (and you have some in more places than Karro pointed out, though only a few), this is where a layer mask would come in handy. RobA's tutorial is a very good primer in how to use a ton of different GIMP techniques, so if your not very experienced with GIMP, start there.

Also... for the borders, I would think about doing something a bit different. It appears you may be using rivers for borders in some places, but not others and this visual distinction can confuse a reader. For example, Arcin and Keidrian appear to be seperated by the central river... and by the grey line on land. However, this logical division also makes it appear the Arcin is bounded by the river to the West also and Keidrian to the river to it's east. One easy way to avoid this distinction is to make the region names cover their areas more, in GIMP, you could do this using the text tool and a path. Likewise, another way would be to create a political border map where each region has a different color OR possibly a color halo that delineates it's border. Of course the second choice will define your map style to some degree...

Joe's remarks are some of what I was getting at regarding both the blue dots and the question about the borders (I was going to point out the potential confusion of whether rivers serve as borders until I knew that's what was represented by the gray lines as well, but there you go, that's it).

Good start, so far, keep us updated!