Greetings, I am Mathig Nihilcehk. Rearrange the letters of my name, and you'll know who I am... I am the Lich King H.
Anyway, I've been doing a bit of mapping for around two years and just now, decided to check this guild out. That said, I've probably been doing everything the long, stupid, inaccurate, and disgusting way. If I can learn how to make new maps even better than before, then I'd absolutely love to.

If anyone cares for a longer introduction...

I am currently an engineering student at a university. Thus, I have PLENTY of time to do mapping and such (/sarcasm). I heard about D&D from the internet, not any actual D&D groups, so... I spent 40+ hours, taught myself D&D, became a Dungeon Master for a group of four/five who have never heard of D&D before. It was legitimately awesome. I decided, instead of making a 2D map, to make a 3D world in Minecraft. The game itself ran fully in D&D's table-top system, but the environment was a custom made 3D dungeon displayed as the group progressed. Then I made a 2D map of the world at large using Dwarf Fortress, Perfect World, and CharonM72's Satellite Map making software. I've since made a total of five maps, with each being drastically different in almost every way.

Just this last week or so, I've been screaming at Sword Art Online for developing my all-time favorite story-hook into my all-time most hated story. So, obviously, I'm now working on writing my own story. (This is supposed to be a joke at my expense) Long story short, I need a planet for this story that is similar to Earth but not Earth. I looked online for Tectonic Plate formations and find this site. Unfortunately, the best(read first) post I can find here isn't at the detail and physical accuracy I want. Yeah, if I'm writing a story, no one will notice if the continents are realistically formed... If anyone knows how to model the Mantel's convective currents to accurately predict the shape and motion of tectonic plates, let me know. I'm currently creating pseudo-random continents, picking magnitude and axis to rotate them on, and building a function to do that in C#.

If anyone cares for critiquing my work, let me know. The only people who've ever seen my maps say "WOW this is the best thing I've ever seen!" Every. Single. Time... or they just say nothing after I've spent two hundred hours on it and I'm left to ponder WHAT WENT WRONG!?! Since I haven't EVER talked to another map-maker,(wait, unless you count this post. Hi all!) I am 95% certain that I'm horrible at this... I've made 3D Minecraft maps, 2D Dwarf-Fortress sourced maps, 3D surface C# maps, and 2D strategic overlays for D&D heavily using paint. I have zero formal training... oh, and I've never used gimp or most of the other programs mentioned here... maybe I should just leave... I'll definitely check out those tutorials on the sticky thread before I go. Let me check my schedule... *every second is filled with school, and sleep*, it seems I have time. *crosses out sleep, and writes read tutorials*.