The Great War Map (WIP)

[jetfx]

That's lovely! I've been looking for something similar to this for maps of my own (real world shapes with topography, I mean). How did you get it, may I ask?

Well, there's oodles of geographic data available for free online via many government and academic sources. The one problem is that much of it is aimed at users of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) software. There is free, open source GIS software though, but it's not the easiest thing to learn.

Anyway, for my pdf map I linked, I got data like lakes, rivers, coastline, cities, contemporary political boundaries, etc from Natural Earth. However, their vector data comes in ESRI shapefile format, which requires some kind of GIS software to work with. Raster data comes as a TIFF, which can be opened in photo editors.

The terrain and land cover I got from the Global Land Cover Facility. They have lots of satellite imagery and data derived from satellite imagery. It comes as a geoTIFF, which is a TIFF with geographic information tagged to it. It'll still open in a photo editing program. If you go to their data viewer (click on Map Search), you can download the data. I downloaded specifically, the 'SRTM GTOPO30', which is the continental sized tiles of world topography, with each pixel covering 1km x 1km, and the 'Global Land Cover, Global', which classifies the Earth's surface by vegetation or land use, with each pixel also covering 1km x 1km. There is much higher resolution imagery, but it covers much smaller parts of the Earth.

While I didn't use them, there are free shaded reliefs of different scales and regions of the Earth available from the Shaded Relief Archive. The format is TIFF.

I hope that helps answer your question somewhat.

*Edit: I forgot to mention, David Rumsey has a huge collection (24,000+) of historic maps going back over 500 years, all scanned at very high resolution and available for free viewing and download. I used them for checking historical political boundaries and place names. It's a great place to go even if you just want to look at beautiful old maps.

[jetfx]

Here's an updated version of my boardgame map, with hexagons and sea zones for movement and combat. I integrated the land cover and terrain, but it still needs some work. Forest is green, and the desert is the speckles in the Middle East and North Africa. I turned the names off for now, so the map can more easily seen.

Comments, criticism?