Hello. The last month or so I've been working on a campaign for my gaming group, and so I've started looking at mapping in great detail. I found this site quite helpful, particularly RobA's stuff, so I thought I'd become a member.

The last few days I've been working on drawing mountains in an "Artistic Map" style (to use the term RobA has in his PDF). I've really "wasted" a lot of time messing around with mountains and drawing them in different ways. Currently, I think I'll try and see how a map looks if the mountains are made of polygons. Though since I've been working in Inkscape, it wouldn't be too hard to use the fractalize path function to make them more natural. I guess I'll see which I prefer more stylistically. Anyhow, I was thinking about posting a tutorial on different ways to do artistic mountains in inkscape. I think it is easier to do them there than in photoshop/gimp, or at least the results look better, and converting what you've done to brushes is easy enough.

I've also been messing around with how you'd go about mapping a torus with hexes, since I think a toroidal world would be cool. I think Hexmapper got me thinking of that...err, not the hexmapper most people mean though, but this one. Neat little program that literally lets you map a surface much bigger than the earth in hexes. Starts out with massive hexes and then you can break down each hex into smaller hexes. You can do this all the way down to 5' hexes. I might mess around with making a more versatile program like that for fun. Well, once my campaign gets going.