Vandaria

[Tegutei]

First off, hello everyone!

Map.png

This is a map I did back in June for my sister's story, but I never got around to registering and posting it here. The map was done over about a day in GIMP with StarRaven's brushes, and the rivers were done by drawing some fairly thick lines, then blurring and sharpening them.

SPOILER ALERT: It's a pain in the ass to do rivers that way.

Anyway, looking at it now, I can see some flaws such as overlapping trees and mountains, but overall I'm still fairly happy with it.

[rdanhenry]

Your mountains are in ranges, your rivers branch correctly, and you handled terrain overlap about as nicely as can be done with terrain brushes. A worthy post.

[atpollard]

Is there a way to give the text a white glow rather than a black glow? Reduced contrast makes reading it harder.

... but I would be happy to use it in a game. Nice map.

[jbgibson]

Hi, Tegutei - nice work. I agree the overlaps among trees, hills, and mountains are well done. The river overlap is awkward though. It would improve the look if the river layer was beneath the tree layer, or if you selectively gapped the trees to let the river show. The road isn't quite as bad a problem - even going over hills is pretty much OK - roads DO go over hills :-). But on most maps you don't see trees depicted in the water.

The text glow is the same issue, sort of -- dark shading around it does muddy up the legibility, where a white halo would improve it. Since you have only a few labels, I would actually manually kern some of them, but that's my compulsiveness when it comes to being able to read stuff :-). Like the "li" of Torcliffe could stand a bit more separation. That's just me though .... like I said - nice work!

[atpollard]

The road from Dunan to Oakmeet could be eliminated since it is only about 10% shorter than the road from Dunan to Witanmouth to Oakmeet. (Just my personal opinion ... definitely keep it if you have some specific reason for it).