Again, where have you been all my life?

[jPeMelin]

I guess many feels the same. I just found this site by the URL at the map in the beginning of Richard Morgans first fantasy book, The Steel Remains.

I'm honestly not drawing so much these days, but I'm a confessed cartophile since reading Tolkien the first time in 1980, and then developing the urge to draw my own when first drawing a map for an RPG in 1984. Since reading about the cartophiliac Kender species in Weiss/Hickman's Dragonlance series I also realised, that was my ailment too.

Among my recent activities in cartography, is my project on hold, to model the entirety of Tokiens fantasy island of Nümenor in 3D för VR, and a lot of studying historical maps of my hometown of Göteborg for the purpose of building a 17th century model of the inner city, purely for the sake of my own pleasure. That project, also on hold for the time being, is now overtaken by the project of building a contempoary CG-game racetrack of the central avenue of Göteborg. I also submitted a few building models for Google Earth.

In past times I have held lectures on the evolution of Tolkiens Middle Earth for grade school students and made an exhibition on the same material, drawn campaign maps of continents and worlds and star charts for mostly science fiction RPGs. My latest proper map was of the known universe of a swedish RPG - Robotar och Räknestickor ("Robots and Scientific Calculators", RoRak, from here on) - a Flash Gordon/Buck Rogers pulp fiction fantasy adventure universe.

My interest in this group and it's forums will be that of a curious but experienced bystander. Hopefully I will be inspired to draw more maps and to publish them here.

/Jim

[Gandwarf]

Welcome to the guild jPeMelin!
Be sure to post up any work you would like to share.

[Ascension]

Welcome aboard. Poke around and have fun.

[Redrobes]

Among my recent activities in cartography, is my project on hold, to model the entirety of Tokiens fantasy island of Nümenor in 3D för VR...

Ohhhh - Jim ! I am one of the admins for the ME-Dem project which is aimed at producing the entire middle earth as a 3D DEM (digital elevation model) in ultra high res. The site is www.me-dem.org but its not had a great deal of activity for a while since its basically just two of us hard core pain resistant guys still on it. There has been recent progress tho even up until this weekend so the project is not dead even if the web site makes it look that way. The main problem is that its hard - really hard and people give up on it. So we would be REALLY interested in looking at what you have. Were just putting in some road layers and trying to get the version 1.0 map out. You can see where its up to tho by looking at a recent map we made in January as part of the challenges here each month...

http://www.cartographersguild.com/showthread.php?t=4055

I guess you know about the Minas Tirith project too which collapsed through lack of interest but that was looking good for a while. Were pretty determined not to let that happen tho so were dead keen to make affiliations with anyone who is mad enough to be doing something similar.

[töff]

Räknestickor ... reckoning sticks (slide rules)?

Willkommen, kompis!

[NeonKnight]

Welcome to the guild!

[Robbie]

Oh my! The Richard Morgan book has a link to us? for real? I thought it was just going to have our logo. Holy crap! Ravells, is that the one you did? I MUST have a signed copy lol.

[töff]

I nominate Ravells for Publicity Czar.

[ravells]

LOL Yeah, it has the guild URL in the cartouche. Thing is I haven't seen it in print yet as it's not out in the UK until 9th July but was released in Europe earlier. At least the url is legible, so that's a good thing! Robbie, you can have your signed copy when you come and visit <g>.

Welcome to the guild, Jim. Most of the techniques I used in making the Richard Morgan map I learned here, so as you can see the Guild is a good place to learn how to map.

[Steel General]

@jPeMelin - Welcome Aboard!


@Ravs - You need to brings us all autographed copies when you do your whirlwind publicity tour of the states to promote the book.