First post and First Map - The Realm of Zaia

[necrominog]

Hi All!

I've been a long-time lurker of the Cartographer's Guild And this will be by first post and submission.

First off, a HUGE thanks to all the members and posters of the forums. Your musings and tutorials have been a great inspiration to me (especially rpgmapmaker!).

I was approached by a friend of mine several weeks ago to create a map for a game world he was creating. He had seen some of my older maps and really liked them. But honestly, I cheated when I created them. I would take relief maps of real places and tweak them, placing text and terrain objects on top. While (I think) they looked good, I've always wanted to create a map from scratch.

Well, here it is! My friend gave me a map that he had started in Campaign Cartographer and wanted to know what I could do with it.

The first thing I did was redraw the entire map in Adobe Illustrator. It is so much easier to edit elements and text in Illustrator (IMHO). Once the rough draft was completed I exported it to Adobe Photoshop where I tweaked it to what you see here. And I have to mention rpgmapmaker because of his awesome tutorials, this map is here today!

If you are out there rpgmapmaker, YOU ROCK , and also, I would love to get a hold of your brush set in a CS5 format. The one you have posted here are for an older version of Photoshop and are not compatible with CS5 .

Anyway, I look forward to any feedback/criticism.

Thx!
'nog