First go at worldbuilding

[Garanth]

UPDATE:

Shrunk down and started working on a country-to-country basis. This will be the starting point for my campaign, so I figured I should map this area out first.

The jungle is a custom fill, just drew up some jungley trees in photoshop (100x100 document), then used filters>other>offset. Offset vertical and horizontal by 50%, and fix up the edges so that the pattern will tile properly.

Used the lasso tool to select the area i wanted fill, then simply filled it with the pattern. Then using the same colour in a separate layer, I went around the edges and drew trunks/leaves to even it out.

C&C appreciated. Barring a few city names that needed to be added, I'm pretty happy with it.

[Hoel]

The mountains look awsome!
You could do better with the plains fill thou, it's a bit low res right now..

[Steel General]

The mountains are great, as is the jungle fill.

Agree w/Hoel on the plains fill - looks like just a bunch of dots and dashes.

[Ascension]

Great idea with the offset

[Fabrice]

I like the lettering of "Azahrim". Is it a font or did you write it by hand?

As for ideas of kingdom, something organised like the late Holy Roman Empire can be quite handy: a patchwork of so many semi-independant realms that nobody really care to remember their names, loosely united under an emperor spending much of his time waging war with neighbouring countries. Ideal to import 3rd party adventures / locales into your world without having to struggle too much to make it look consistent (since it does not have to be). Not to mention all the backstabings between prince-electors...

And dragons ruling the world does not sound silly to me. Much less so than people ruling dragons!

[Karro]

I think it looks pretty good. It's very redish in color, but that isn't really a negative mark, per se. I did notice one tiny thing: the mountains have a very minor distraction in the pattern. I wouldn't have noticed but for one tiny thing: one particular small little mountain on the pattern has darker shading on the western slope than the rest. Every time that little mountain crops up, it calls attention to itself, and to the fact that it sits next to the same couple of slopes. Other than that, nothing else negative to say.

I think your players will be proud!

[Garanth]

I think it looks pretty good. It's very redish in color, but that isn't really a negative mark, per se. I did notice one tiny thing: the mountains have a very minor distraction in the pattern. I wouldn't have noticed but for one tiny thing: one particular small little mountain on the pattern has darker shading on the western slope than the rest. Every time that little mountain crops up, it calls attention to itself, and to the fact that it sits next to the same couple of slopes. Other than that, nothing else negative to say.

I think your players will be proud!

mm, I see it. Should be easy to fix with a low opacity eraser.

Everyone's also right about the desert fill. It was done when the map was a much lower resolution (scaled up), and never entirely fixed. Perhaps I'll do it again on a smaller scale and give it some wave-like distortions? Not sure how else to do a desert fill though...

The font used for all my country lettering is called Cup and Talon from DaFont.com

[jfrazierjr]

Very nice.... Remove the fill pattern under the mountains surrounding the city of Qudram. The pattern is very distracting, especially when all the other mountains are empty underneath.

[Kashabat]

Lol, I'm slightly color blind myself. Sometimes I mistake some reds with greens in the computer screen.