After my short introduction in the new members section, I wanted to show you the first two maps I made for my D&D campaign.

Both maps were initially drawn on a piece of paper, before being scanned and then worked on digitally using GIMP.

The continental map only includes major features. The purpose of the map was not to provide a detailed representation of the terrain, but rather give an idea of the political situation of Arudien. To that end I didn't really colour the map, as I did not want to establish the climate for the different regions from the get go.
Overall, I am quite happy with how the map turned out. The labelling could be prettier though.

Arudien.jpg

The Stormlands is the region where takes place, and provides a more detailed topographical representation without showing every single hill, tree or village. However, I wanted to give the players a few points of interest, which they might want to visit. The clouds on the edge are there to cover up the adjacent regions which I haven't designed yet. Overall, I am very happy with the result, I especially like my floating forest. However, there are also two things that still bother me: perspective and labelling. The mountains are drawn from a slightly tilted perspective, while the rest seems to be a top-down view. I think that makes the map look a little weird. And again, I am not too happy about the labelling, as it does not always follow the feature perfectly (especially rivers), but I find GIMP to be extremely clunky in that regard.

Stormlands_web.jpg