The Hourglass of Zihaja: The World of Siraaj

[Zeta Kai]

This is the continent of Admaja, on world of Siraaj. It is a companion piece to the corresponding map of the world of Najmah. It was made in Photoshop CS3 & Illustrator CS3 for a homebrew campaign setting called the Hourglass of Zihaja. It is an Arabian Nights based setting, made from the votes by the members of the Giant in the Playground homebrew forum.

• Text in dark green is a settlement.
• Text in dark brown is another location, such as an adventuring site, a geographical feature, or a region.
• Every settlement larger than a thorp has a name.
• Settlements in yellow are major cities.
• Settlements in gray are lesser towns & villages.
• Settlements in red are former towns that are uninhabited &/or in ruins.
• Locations with a star on them are prominent locales (IE something that I have a lengthy description for).
• The scale is in the lower-left corner, opposite the compass rose.
• The blue lines in the oceans are major oceanic trade routes, which are mostly for the pahari & the marid genies.

Those mountains nearly killed me. The names of various places are taken from actual Arabic, the Admajai conlang, ancient Persian places, & authentic-sounding gibberish. The whole thing was made by painting it in Photoshop using my normal mapping techniques, tracing it in Illustrator to lay down the rivers, roads, & settlements, then porting it back to PS at a much high resolution & laying down more detailed textures on top of everything, & piling on filter after filter; I used some methods from Pasis, Ascension, RobA, & Tear. I hope you like this map in direct proportion to how much time that I spent working on it.

For some reason, I've had trouble uploading images here in the past, & the big map is huge (4,925×4,925 pixels), so click on the thumbnail below to be linked directly to the big map hosted on DeviantArt.