Hello there.

[Syt]

Hi everyone,

I recently registered here, and made my first post today.

Who am I?

I'm a 32 year old guy from Northern Germany, now living in Vienna, Austria, working as an accountant.

I got interested in maps since, well, I can't remember really. I recall loving two atlases my dad has when I was a kid. One of them had a beautiful design that I haven't seen anywhere since. The land areas were all greyish white, with broad colourful borders for countries and a greyish shaded relied for mountains.

I also loved the maps in the two volume Reader's Digest's World History that we had. So I drew my own maps/military campaigns soon enough. When I was about 13 I read Lord of the Rings and the Lone Wolf gamebooks. I loved those maps and especially the ones in Lone Wolf with their beautiful borders and colors. That's when I decided to write a fantasy novel at some point and drew more maps. Actually, the fantasy novel is, 20 years later, still a plan. The computer game Starflight caught my interest, too, and at one point I mapped out a whole sector for a story idea, using dice to determine ecosphere/species/culture/tech level/economy etc. for the planets.

Later, due to real life constraints (job, mostly), I lost track of this. It's only when I moved to Vienna that I returned my interest to planning to write creating worlds.

I'm mostly using Campaign Cartographer these days. I create maps for myself at this point, and the features the software and its expansions/annuals come with give me enough to do (I mostly use the Mercator styleset, handdrawn or black/white maps; and I greatly look forward to the August annual that covers Napoleonic battle maps) to make lands, cities, dungeons or spaceships. I attach as an example a WIP of a Mercator style map for a steampunkish/Lovecraftian story I'm working on that's partly set on Venus.

What do I do beside mapping?

I like movies (mostly classics, but also newer stuff; no romantic comedies/"blockbuster" movies for me - with a few exceptions), history (most my reading these days is non-fiction), music (nearly everything from metal through Sinatra to classical) and a few other things.

I can't say yet how active I'll be on this board, but I'll most likely stick around if only to read the friendly posts and tutorials here; plus the challenges may push me a bit to try/learn new things.