Hi guys, hope you all had a merry xmas.

As you may or may not remember, I have been struggling a bit in recent months with finding a mapping style and, above all, coastlines for a fantasy continent. It seems that I just really didn't like how my past few attempts turned out. The Corel Painter experiment was kinda sorta OK except Painter turned out to be too buggy to buy for 300 Euro, so that project also fell by the road side.

A week or so ago I had a dream which was, oddly enough, a continuation of a series of dreams I had some years ago. In it, a group of explorers, well, explored a northern continent - I never saw a map of course but just the continent's basic features. So I sat down and started to map it out.

This is the current WIP after about 12h+ of work:

Click image for larger version.  Name: map01e-small.jpg  Views: 362  Size: 460.6 KB  ID: 50729

The coastlines are a major hassle, I can tell you. I did cheat in a few spots, but I think only one is kinda obvious.

What I know about the continent so far:

This continent is roughly equivalent in position and size to our Earth's Canada; unlike Canada, it was home to a major civilization (no offense, Canadians). Think Roman Empire, just populated by non-humans. 100-200 years ago, a cataclysmic event shook the continent and reshaped it; it shattered the southern part and sank it beneath the waves until only the upper parts of the mountain ranges there remain as islands. This also pushed the west down and the northeast up a little, so that most of the southern and western coast are now also sunken. The eastern coast was raised, and the current coastline used to be continental shelf. The seismic activity also caused several large and a myriad of smaller chasms, canyons and sounds (as in the large inlet, not noise).

There are a few human settlements on the east coast, which are now starting to explore the continent (and to plunder the ruins of the old civilization). Ship voyages to the west are only possible if one travels via a route very far to the south; the islandy area at the southern border of the map is considered too dangerous for large sailing ships; no reliable course has been chartered through that area.

I am really only doing the map for the sake of getting the map out of my system, but I think the setting should work well for an extended sandbox style campaign.

Oh, finally, scale - 1cm = 50km, I kinda marked off 5cm in the lower right corner.