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!!!

[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

[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.

[Redrobes]

Hi Thorf,

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.

Still, to get some idea of what is going on there is a post here from one of the admins Monks :-

http://www.cartographersguild.com/showthread.php?t=1332

and even though the main site is down all the links should work I think. So you can see the scale and effort being put into it.

Most of the main admins are here Monks, SeerBlue, Arandil and myself. Were missing just Oshyan who is very busy as a key developer of Terragen and a planetside admin. I should add that I am not a Tolkien guru but more of a programmer making tools to enable us to get there - the others have much more extensive knowledge of the world and his writings.

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.

[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.