World of D'Haon - first posting - WIP

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Hi,

I was recently directed to this site and am posting for the first time. I'll UL a few images of a map I've been working on collaboratively with 3 other guys. The map is in a nearly finished state. It may never be truely done but thats the nature of fantasy cartography.

The world is called D'Haon.
The map was created for a RPG that started about 30 years ago - mid 1980s.
It was first drawn by hand and then transferred to CorelDraw v3. Now working in Coreldraw v14.

The working CDw map is 30,000 x 24,000 pixels (~25MB) with about 30 layers, representing about 4000 x 3000 km of land. With this map I was going for a National Geographic style, though I've tried various others.


Here is a closer zoom in one section showing some human settlements along with a combination of elevation and vegetation zone information in colour.


Multiple layes can be confusing, so here is the same area with just the human settlement information.


I have additional information in layers such as ocean currents, prevailing winds, precipitation expectations, seasonal temperatures, elevations (see height-map below), faultlines, bedrock type (sedimentry vs igneous) and regions with interesting geological mineral findings such as various gemstones, metals and coal, so a GM can work with some economics. Here is a close up of a different region with the overlay of gems and metals. Yes, there is an index to explain the colours.


At present, there are 47 countries scattered about. We have a good ideas on about the last 500 years worth of political history for every country and a fair idea of the last 2000 years of history in more vague terms.

The guys have also invented a pantheon of 10 gods and a really interesting creation-story to set the tone.

The map holds about 4500 settlements from small towns up to large cities. The names of the countries and the settlements were generated from clever software written by one of the guys so as to mimic 13 different fantasy languages. There are 9 different climate zones.

I recently discovered the software package Wilbur and I've been working on a height-map and subsequent bump-map for the world. I'll post some of that work when I get something I'm happy with. What I loved about Wilbur is that it identified the same major river systems I did! Clever.
I like the Wilbur rivers better than mine, so thats likely the next major iteration.


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I notice that many submitters here use pixel-based software (photoshop/gimp/etc) and far fewer using vector-based software such as Coreldraw and others. I'd be very interested in member's opinions on a) our maps of D'Haon, and b) the pros and cons of vector-based versus pixel-based software.


Cheers,
~Scribbler