Greetings and はじめまして

[Thorf]

Hello!

My name is Thorfinn. I'm originally from Orkney in the north of Scotland, but I've been living in Akita, Japan for the past 8 years. My wife is a local Akitan. She's a dance teacher. I work as an English teacher at a private high school, which unfortunately takes up a lot of my time these days. Cartography is one of the many things I try to find time for.

On the Internet I generally go by my nickname, Thorf. I'm involved in quite a few communities, but the one most relevant to my mapping predilection is Mystara, which is one of the original Dungeons & Dragons worlds. Most of my mapping efforts to date have been recreating the old maps from this setting, in the form of exact replicas as well as updated (corrected, expanded) versions. I did most of these maps between 2004 and 2006.

I'm also a great admirer of Tolkien - books primarily, but I also loved the films. I have yet to put my hand to remaking a Middle-earth map, though. One of my favourite cartographers is Daniel Reeve, who did a lot of maps for Peter Jackson's movies. I'd love to be able to do something as professional as Daniel did, but unfortunately I'm really not much of an artist.

Most of my mapping so far has been in Adobe Illustrator. I'm a big fan of vectors, and I love being able to have complete control of the scale without losing detail. I also use Photoshop, and I'd like to put a bit more texture into my maps in the future, and reduce the crisp, digital look a bit.

In the future I hope to be able to get back to my Mystara maps, expand into renditions of Tolkien's worlds, and also work on my own original setting, which has been ongoing since 2006 (although still under wraps).

It's a pleasure to find a community of fellow cartographers to share tips and tricks with. I hope I can learn a great deal here, and I'm honoured to make your acquaintance.

どうぞよろしくお願いします。

[Thorf]

One more thing - you can check out my mapping resources at the link below. They are released under a Creative Commons license, so if you can put them to use, please be my guest.

http://mystara.thorf.co.uk/mappingcs2.zip

[jfrazierjr]

Welcome to the Guild Throf

[SeerBlue]

Welcome to the Guild, Thorf, and I envy you greatly, I spent 3 years in Misawa Japan,,,,a wonderful, scenic place, with amazing people.....South Dakota just isn't the same...... SeerBlue

[Robbie]

As the admin of this site, you scared the crap out of me with the oriental letters hehehe...I was soooo worried this was a spam attack...

Welcome to the guild!!!

[Gamerprinter]

Welcome, konichi wa. Akita gets cold! Samui desho.

I'm half Japanese, and have spent time in Yokosuka, Yokohama, Kyoto, Osaka and the Shimaneken district. My mother lived in Akita as a child sometime before the war, though she is actually from Shimaneken district on the western side of Honshu. I digress.

Welcome to the guild - let's see some maps!

[ravells]

Yeah, and we're still waiting for that Hokusai map, GP!

Welcome, Thorf, to our little happy world.

[rpgmapmaker]

Welcome to the guild!

I like the maps you have been making... nice, clean, and organized look and feel...

Your FAQ on fonts was a good read, thanks for sharing and again welcome.

-Chris

[RPMiller]

Welcome to the Guild Thorf! I hope to one day make it over to Japan. I actually work for a Japanese company, but unfortunately I'm an IT person so there isn't any reason for me to travel over there unlike the sales people who go over about every two months or so.

[Thorf]

Thanks for all the nice welcome messages!

Welcome to the Guild, Thorf, and I envy you greatly, I spent 3 years in Misawa Japan,,,,a wonderful, scenic place, with amazing people.....South Dakota just isn't the same...... SeerBlue

So you were at the American base in Misawa? Even though Akita is not so far from there, I have yet to take a proper trip up north to Aomori or Hokkaido. Someday...

But yes, the whole Tohoku area is quite beautiful. We just passed the magical week or two each year in which all the rice paddies are filled with water, and the whole land looks like a vast mirror - especially if you look down on it from a mountain. But the shoots are out now, and it's over until next year.

Living here has definitely been an experience for me, after growing up in the Orkney Islands, surrounded by farms.

As the admin of this site, you scared the crap out of me with the oriental letters hehehe...I was soooo worried this was a spam attack...

Welcome to the guild!!!

Oops! Sorry about that. It's nice that they show up correctly on so many computers these days, and I know people like the look of them, so I often post some Japanese in my introductory posts.

Welcome to the guild!

I like the maps you have been making... nice, clean, and organized look and feel...

Your FAQ on fonts was a good read, thanks for sharing and again welcome.

Thanks, Chris! My maps so far have almost all been in a very specific style (i.e. hex maps), but within that format I've been trying to improve them as much as I can. The next step would be adding some texture - perhaps a nice parchment background - and working out a better way to take extracts from the maps. (Basically you either have to cut or mask the hexes at the edge, or have angled edges to your map. I'm not entirely satisfied with what I've got so far.)

Welcome, konichi wa. Akita gets cold! Samui desho.

I'm half Japanese, and have spent time in Yokosuka, Yokohama, Kyoto, Osaka and the Shimaneken district. My mother lived in Akita as a child sometime before the war, though she is actually from Shimaneken district on the western side of Honshu. I digress.

Welcome to the guild - let's see some maps!

Yes, Akita is pretty cold in winter, although it doesn't usually go much below 0 (C). Conversely the summer is really hot and humid, and that's the part I find difficult.

It's amazing to find so many people with Japanese connections on this forum! Nice to meet you.

Welcome. You might be interested to know that there is a MeDem project running which is to create a DEM of Middle Earth at ridiculous resolution. The project has been going for several years and a lot of effort has been put into it. The main site for that is www.medem.org except that the site got hacked again so is down for a few days whilst it gets fixed and patched.

<snippety snip>

The attached pic is the land in 3D. The map so far is 10K pix square but thats just the starter map. The intnention is to get it to about 100K square. You can see the 'Mistys' Mountains running through the middle of which the links in the post are referring to.

So yeah, post anything you have right now and we can chat about ME more later.

Wow, what am impressive project!! Am I right in thinking that in the long run your map could be used to generate views of various parts of Middle-earth? I've always thought it would be nice to have some photo-realistic (or almost realistic) pictures of Middle-earth. The movies provided a lot, but not enough to satisfy my voracious appetite.

I'll definitely be keeping an eye on this. Thanks for letting me know!

Welcome to the Guild Thorf! I hope to one day make it over to Japan. I actually work for a Japanese company, but unfortunately I'm an IT person so there isn't any reason for me to travel over there unlike the sales people who go over about every two months or so.

I hope you make it over some day. It can be a real experience, especially if you haven't been to Asia before.

こんにちは。　こちらこそ。 Welcome to the Guild, Thorf. My Japanese is limited since I am still learning (勉強中です). (^_^)/

日本語上手ですね！　何年勉強していますか？ You seem to be doing pretty well already! がんばって下さい！