This is my first attempt at making a map digitally, and was done with GIMP and Inkscape. Rather than invent a world from scratch I decided to adapt an existing fantasy world, in this case Allansia from the Fighting Fantasy books. This map therefore comes with deepest and most sincere apologies to anyone who has a connection to Allansia, because I have taken extreme liberties and changed it a lot! I hope no one is too offended. Mainly I have increased its size (almost tripled it in fact) and added (lots of) non-canon place names.

Everything was drawn by hand either directly as a bitmap in GIMP or in Inkscape as a path and imported and stroked in GIMP. The rivers are tapered by using different brush sizes. The most time consuming part by far was labelling everything, which was excruciating. If anyone has good ideas about how to label things easily in GIMP I'd love to hear them!

The style is deliberately anachronistic/incongruous. Allansia is a mediaeval high fantasy setting but the style I went for was mid-20th century topographic. This is partly just because I wanted to try something with contours (I like contours ) and partly because I'll use this map for an RPG campaign and I want to know where things are with precision. Actual size is 47x28cm or 4693x2830px; it has been shrunk slightly to get it under the file size limit.

The WIP thread for it is here: http://www.cartographersguild.com/re...-contours.html

Would be great to hear what people think as to what works and what doesn't!

contours_upload5.jpg