Hi, everyone. My name is Cory, and I stumbled upon this site about three days ago. I just started DMing for the very first time (D&D v3.5, though we may migrate it to Pathfinder at some point), and I was looking for resources to make passable battle maps for my players. I was initially excited just to find out how to easily make 1" grids in GIMP for producing really simple maps, but after looking through a couple of tutorials I found my way here. Two word: blown away!

I've only been doing this for two days, but I've got a continent map in progress already thanks to the amazing info on this site! Two days ago I didn't even know how to create channel masks in The GIMP, but now I have this map, courtesy of the amazing tutorial by Ascension and the GIMP adaptation by Giide.

Click image for larger version.  Name: Continent 1 - WIP.jpg  Views: 45  Size: 568.2 KB  ID: 35674

I did deviate from Giide's tutorial a little. In particular, I didn't care for how extreme the ocean texture was, so I turned the opacity of the "Ocean" layer down to 50%. I also felt that the ocean should be darker outside of the continental shelf, so I added another layer right below the "Ocean" layer called "Deep Ocean" and filled it with a dark blue (#000033). I did a "Channel to Selection" of the "Coastline" channel, then did "Selection -> Grow 30px", then "Selection -> Feather 30px", then deleted the color within the selection. I set the layer to "Overlay" with 75% Opacity, and the result is what you see in the pic.

I have a real feeling that this will become an absolute obsession very quickly.