Into the deep end of the pool!

[buzzgunner]

Hello, fellow (and lady) cartophiles. My name is Mark, I'm a 54 yr. old software enginerr in Corvallis, Oregon (USA). I've been a member of the Cartographers Guild since April 2006, but am only now getting around to "showing my face". I've been a tabletop gamer since 1980 and a GM most of that time. As such, I've been creating maps during pretty much that entire period. Up until about 10 years ago, they were all hand-drawed. Now, I do everything in Photoshop, CorelDraw, and Bryce, with the occasional detour into Dundjinni, CC2 (and other ProFantasy apps), whatever else is handy.

I'm in process of generating a city map for my Barr al-Fadi desert campaign and have many members here to thank for a landslide of mapping help and tips. Some of my existing maps are already viewable here on my Barr al-Fadi website. For a while, I was trying to standardize my town/city maps appearance on the Cities of Harn mapping style, using CC2 and the Mappa Harnica Toolkit, one of which is shown (at the bottom) on my "maps" page.

While this has worked OK for small villages, I've always found CC2's UI to be too non-intuitive (for me anyway) and not conducive to the creation of large cities. Using Photoshop, along with a lot of the wonderful advice and reference available here, I'm making substantial headway towards my first major city map. I hope to post it here, once it's finished.

Anyway, thanks to all of you for providing such a great community to work in. I'm looking forward to participating!

[Rythal]

Welcome! Hope to see some of your stuff in CorelDRAW, I dont get to see to much in that done

[Steel General]

Welcome Aboard!

[buzzgunner]

Welcome! Hope to see some of your stuff in CorelDRAW, I dont get to see to much in that done

Here's a link to Vindarten, the main campaign continent for my game world Vandhar. If the continent outline (and some of the names) look familar to you, it's because I found the map for Chaosium's QuestWorld a couple decades ago and "appropriated" the base outline for my game. Since then, I've been "rolling my own."

Anyway, except for the parchment background, the entire map was done in CorelDraw! Converting the continent and mountain outlines from a scanned background raster into closed polygons was... well... time-consuming feels like a bit of an understatement. Still, I'm happy with the results. (BTW, the Rhumb Lines on that map are even CLOSE to being accurate.)

[NeonKnight]

Welcome to the Guild!

[Redrobes]

April 2006 !!!

Need a new badge here for most stealthy lurker or something...

You joined way before my time. In fact I expect Arcana set up the board and you must have joined up next to be that early.

Welcome btw

[Korash]

and he is even stealthier than we knew....

I checked and Arcana "joined" 29 March 2006, while buzzgunner joined almost a month later (27 April). Thing is, he isn't even on the member list!!