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Thread: My First Map - A Continent for My Pathfinder Game

  1. #1

    Wip My First Map - A Continent for My Pathfinder Game

    Hey everyone, I'm working on a map of the continent my players will be starting on in an upcoming Pathfinder game. While I've started maps using some of the tutorials on these boards before, this is the first one I'm really putting a lot of effort into taking to completion. I used the GIMP version of Ascension's Atlas Style tutorial to get the geography together, and a combination of that and terminal's Cartographical Economics and Demographics tutorial to locate and define the cities.

    I'm open to any and all suggestions about, well, anything, so go ahead and critique away!

    Just as a note, I unfortunately had to scale the image down from 2000x2000 to 1600x1600 to get it to fit within the forum's size requirements. This has made some of the smaller text harder to read than I would like, but aside from that, I think it still looks fine. If anyone has any better ways to get the size down (or another place to upload), please let me know and I'll put up a full size version.

    Click image for larger version. 

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  2. #2
    Guild Journeyer randigpanzrall's Avatar
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    Doesn´t look bad. What is the yellow line in the center of your continen?

  3. #3

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    Quote Originally Posted by randigpanzrall View Post
    Doesn´t look bad. What is the yellow line in the center of your continen?
    Ah, right, forgot to explain that. Basically, it's a miles wide stripe of dead, cursed land nearly spanning the continent that will play a part in the campaign I'll be running. As I really have no idea what I'm doing with mapping (or artistry in general), the best thing I came up with was a stripe of brown with some added noise/clouds (can't remember which) set to Hard Light. Any suggestions on how to improve it and make it more visually impressive/obvious would be greatly appreciated.

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    Guild Grand Master Azélor's Avatar
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    Hi and welcome to the guld! This seems to be a nice start.

    To save you picture, I found that the best way is to use Jpeg rather than png unless you have transparent pixels. Lowering the quality of the Jpeg when saving is usually better than reducing the dimension of the map. I still don't know the limit. It's 4,67 megabytes in size but for the dimensions I think it's 5000x5000 or more.

  5. #5
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    The geographic features of the land tell "island" to me, not "continent". A big island perhaps, but not a continent.

  6. #6

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    Quote Originally Posted by feanaaro View Post
    The geographic features of the land tell "island" to me, not "continent". A big island perhaps, but not a continent.
    Can you be a bit more specific about what makes you say that?

  7. #7
    Guild Grand Master Azélor's Avatar
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    If I just look at the climate I guess that the north would be tundra or arctic climate. There are deserts in the south wich would suggest that it is probably near the northern tropic. So it's actually pretty big according to an earth like climate but smaller than asia.

  8. #8
    Guild Adept Viking's Avatar
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    Yea it's funny, though the climate suggests a large landmass I also can get what Feanaaro is saying and maybe it has to do with the scale you feel from the way things are laid out in terms of towns and cities. I guess it depends on whether you intend for the smallest settlements to be cities or villages. To me at largest I would guess it to be the size of Great Britain (including Ireland). I find scale a bit tricky myself.

    I would strongly suggest you differentiate your rivers and your roads more! It is very hard to tell what is what despite the labelling.

  9. #9
    Guild Expert rdanhenry's Avatar
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    Replacing clumps of mountains with mountain ranges may help. Most of the mountain areas seem like individual mountains.

    The square grid with no visible signs of distortion also suggest a large scale map.

    There also doesn't look to be much variation in the type of coast.

    Those are the things I see that may give it an "island" feel.

  10. #10
    Administrator waldronate's Avatar
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    Putting an explicit scale on the map will tell the viewer how big things are and not require them to project their own understanding of maps onto the image to guess its scale. A border would be nice as well.

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