My (Sort of) First Map - World of Tellus

[Hecklerus Prime]

when you zoom in the resolution of the background is out of whack with the crispness of the land and geographical details

I have noticed that and am trying to find a way to fix it. My skills at drawing in Photoshop are somewhat lacking. As in, I can pretty much only draw lines right now. Haha. I've used two different pre-made backgrounds available in the program, so their resolution is set. If anyone knows a way to increase that please let me know. My plan so far was to leave it as is so that my player's aren't just looking at lines on white and attempt to re-do the backgrounds once my skills mature.

The biggest problem I noticed with this was that the central sea / lake has 3 rivers flowing out from it, it should only have one. Also, several of your rivers fork down stream which can't happen: tributaries may flow into larger rivers, but smaller rivers don't split off from larger ones..

Thanks for the link. I've been trying to keep realistic rivers in mind, but it looks like a few slipped through. The central sea you mention is Lake of Ghularad, a body of water created when a massive object (rumored to be a fallen deity) impacted the world ages ago. Those three rivers all flow into the lake and have baffled scholars for centuries, as they have yet to find where the water flows out of the lake; the bottom is unreachable with current methods. Myth has it that the fallen deity on the bottom must drink all of the water flowing in before he or she can rise once more. In reality, I don't even yet know how it functions, but it will be magical in nature. Obviously, there is no way for you to have known this so I cannot fault your comment. However, the branch to the side does have a pretty big violation. I'll have to fix that. I think I'll definitely take the advice of that link and draw terrain before rivers from here on out. Thanks again.

One more question on the topic of waterways. If you look at the eastern most river group in Nanoi it has branches on both ends. The right-most branches are to be swampland and a river delta, similar to the Nile. I've tried to represent swamps around the city of Sandpointe in Alduria, but I'm not really feeling the hash mark style. Any suggestions on how to draw nice looking swampland? Or could/should I leave it as is and call the area one massive braided river system?