Hello there!
I'm Stell, from Canada's west coast. I do D&D* and my maps are absolutely functional tools, drawn on scraps of paper (usually) or in my notebook (if lucky). I've also used PDN in the past but would like to move to something handsomer and more robust, so I expect I'll be learning Inkscape this winter. My handle on discord is 'Epistellar' and that's how most of my work is signed. Sample of my work below.
I have for some time very much admired Cartographer Guild's yearly awards and am glad to be on the forum.
Small scale map of my WIP world, 'Wel'.
PDN
wel_map_02_annotated.png
Obviously for my own utility and not player facing. Something interesting, or at least unexpected, emerges almost without effort by randomly and semi-randomly accreting detail atop detail, a principle I took from here.
The not-projection is a bit unusual. I couldn't be bothered to mentally deal with distortion, and though tempted eschewed the Traveller-icosahedral maps. I just unfolded a cylinder... I tried to be clever by reducing the size of the polar part, which was sliced off at 60N, so its circumference was 1/2 that of the equator (as a little circle of that latitude would be on a spherical earth). Waste of time though, v2 will just be a cylinder with impossibly large polar landmasses and it will be great.
Medium scale map of an unplaced peninsula
Hex notebook, marker
frol_penn_map.jpeg
Quite a scrawl, eh? Leaving aside the annotations for changing the system**, you can see the peninsula itself and perhaps guess at the symbology. I call 'em 'Quasi-hexes' or 'qhexes', and though they're overlaying a printed grid in this case they don't need to be. Meant for lightening-fast drawing of an area, so a province can be dealt with with as systematic and definite an approach as a dungeon of 10 foot square. Meant to be drawn with pen and scrap paper in an airport or similar.
Isometric Dungeon Map
Marker
iso001_dungmap.jpeg
This is pretty old, haven't drawn one of these in a while. Assume the tunnels are one square wide (which for me is 3x3 metres) and scale it from there.
Portrait
Marker
portrait_matchlockren.png
If your NPCs don't look like cursed Zardoz-Landsknechts what're you even doing?
*Not using the Dungeons and Dragons 5e or 6e rulesets, good heavens. OSE or my homebrew of GLoG.
** I was figuring out a way of dealing with tides and ships' draughts.