Grackslu WIP

[Ramah]

Castle Bastardry...

= best name ever.

[Spiritless]

Ascension: oh it's far from finished. I'll be adding more stuff than a compass and a scale. Still thinking about a good name for it (because Grackslu is a continent, and this one is only a minute part of it) and there's more. And with the names... well, if you look really good you'll find more of villages like smallfontville (that was the test one for verdana)

su liam: thanks man. Without that i'd have "Fort 1" "Fort 2" "Fort 3", I've forgotten about the other "words"

[nolgroth]

Wow. What a great map! Keep trucking because I would like to see this map in the Finished Map section.

[Steel General]

Looking good, even the really small fonts could be read.

It appears to me that your 'icons' for your cities, etc. are a bit pixelated. You may want to check that.

[Spiritless]

It'll be hard to change the symbols, because they are that small... I tried making them bigger, but then they appeared oversized. So I have no Idea how I could change that

[Juggernaut1981]

Got it. Not using that font. Here's how it looks, after naming all the cities and towns and all, every forest, some mountains and so on.
One question: how should I name forts? Like fort something or? Because I really have no idea. And there is a reason for such chaotic naming (that land is over 3500 years old, some names survived for more than a few hundred years, some for less than a hundred, some for all that time).
For me, this is the crucial map-creation time, soo... Any thoughts? Tips? Anything?

Just get the name of your location, badly pronounce it and add "Fort, Keep, Castle" to the end. If you can't think of something else, start putting a famous person's name to it.

For Example...

There is a keep on the Trout River. You could get: Truffort, Trafford, Fort Troutiver, Castle Midlands on Trout...

Shark Bay
Sharkfort, Sharktooth, Finn Castle, Sharrfort...

Winchester's traditional Castle
Winchcastle, Winchfort, Winchefort, Winfort, Castle Winchfort, Winfort by Sea....


It's a fairly "english" sounding result, but I'm sure you can do similar things in German, Dutch, French and Spanish to get different sounds...

[Gidde]

I'd like to second what Juggernaut just said ... I used this method with a mix of English and French words to name most of the stuff in my latest map.

[Spiritless]

Done with the naming, thanks guys for the tips.
Now, I'll have to find a way to create that box around it I've dreamed about. And it's going to be difficult... It's going to be a somewhat wooden frame with more space on the left of the map for the compass and some notes, along with the name and some other stuff. Gotta figure it out.
Here's the (hopefully) final version of the map itself.

[Karro]

Looks pretty good. Although it's kind of a strange mix of decent sounding fantasy world names and a few tongue-in-cheek names.

[Spiritless]

what do you mean by tongue in cheek?

and by the way, the plan was to create the whole scene in 3d (you know, map on a table, compass by the map and stuff) and while modeling all of the additional stuff was not really a problem, I don't think my machine could pull of a 6000x4500 resolution render with a lot of additional lights, gloss and everything (well, maybe if I put it out the window it could, but I won't risk an overnight freezing). So, most probably, you'll be seeing the photoshop version in the finished section somewhere today/tomorrow.