Summerlands Before the Breaking

[Gidde]

Thanks Diamond! I was trying to get to real-scale for the river which would be 1-4 pixels or so, but I think I agree with you. More tapering would still be better at this scale.

[Naeddyr]

The second style is definitely better.

[Gidde]

Arg. I did island #2 to make sure that I could repeat the style from island to island .... and I just can't get these mountains to work reliably from one map to the next - which is frustrating since they're so much darned work. Maybe it was just a once-off style that I happened to make work once. Dammit. Back to the style drawing board yet again, I'm afraid. >.<

[Gidde]

So after falling back and punting style-wise, here's the first crack at the whole-world map. I'm just starting on rivers, but otherwise the landforms are done. The white ring will give the angle measurements for the reticule and further subdivisions, rather like the astrolabe. The legend, title, scale, etc. will go in the parchment-colored empty space above and below the map. The center feature is a permanent howling storm that bars exploration of the center of the world. LOTS of work yet to do, but I figured I'd post this up since it had been forever since the last update.

[Ascension]

Looks nice, ma'am.

[Naeddyr]

This is looking quite excellent, quite excellent, myes. Looking forward to more.

[Diamond]

I give this the Diamond Seal of Approval.

[Gidde]

Thanks for the kind words!

Lots of stuff done for this update, though it may not look quite as impressive lol -- behind the scenes the basic demographics for each island is started; visibly, there are rivers and dots for the major cities placed. The dots are temporary location-markers; I'm thinking that I'll indicate size of cities by the label font, and have all of the city markers themselves be even.

I also finished the outer ring of angles and the labels for the reticule. Now .... massive amounts of labels to add in. Yay!

[Gidde]

At a temporary standstill with the labels as I'm struggling with fonts for the islands vs. nations vs. big cities vs. small cities. So I worked around the problem a bit. I have the city icons finalized (I think). The map now has a title and by-line (Mr. Daergelnackle is a PC from one of the first games I ever ran, and he is now uber, retired, and the owner/captain of a rare gnomish airship), and I started on a depiction of the ring of sun-torches (although it obviously needs some more work -- they need to look like suns/torches, not christmas tree ornaments). Also a legend started that I completely hate so far. And, I'm starting to think that since all of the cities are coastal, maybe I do need some forests after all. Not sure on that one. Opinions?

Oh, and I had to shrink this to half size to upload it, so the full-res version can be found here if you want to view that.

[Diamond]

I would leave it as is, sans forests. They'll just clutter it up and hide the rivers. If you later on do regional maps of the various islands, you could add 'em then.

I think the general idea/layout of the torches looks okay; maybe tone down the colors a bit, so they're more pastel-ish?