Two Color Regional Map

[madcowchef]

When will my rpg group learn to stay on the nice maps I make them? I wanted to make a map using only two colors to emulate a group that didn't have a ton of colored inks available to them. So far I've only used shades of brown, the second color is being reserved for magical features and is a mostly red brown. The map is purposely inaccurate (including both rivers that cut all the way through land features and don't feed into anything) with several exaggerated features compared to my ugly but accurate master plan map. I'm not happy with the city icons. I wanted to do something semi pictographic to keep with the writing style of the people making the map but I don't think its a good fit and will probably redo them as solid silhouettes. The upper half has most of the city markings in with the lower half needing them still. Any suggestions are welcome.

ExSuncarvanV1.jpg

[AlexSchacher]

Really cool map so far. A suggestion though, you may want to prevent having the town labels overlapping the regional borders. For instance, what if you moved the label "Karmock" to below and slightly to the left of its icon? I think if the artists were drawing this map in ink, they would try to prevent overlapping whenever possible, for readability. Similarly, looking at the road going from the "People of the Sun" label up to Ganga, what if you tried simply removing the dots that are touching the mountain and river drawings? The eye would allow the reader to know where the road continues, and prevents the different things from blurring together, and I think it would look a bit neater (although it might just be my OCD). One last thing is the regional borders overlayed on the mountains. This one actually bothered me the most, although I think it might be the hardest to find a fix for. Possibly removing the lines that go over the mountains, but leaving them where they go "behind" the mountains could work? Although I'm not sure if that would leave enough of the line there to know where it is, and what it is. Although I think this would work better if using in a slightly different color, such as a muddy red, but as you said you were reserving other color for certain things, which is fine. Anyways, take my suggestions with a grain of salt as I usually don't know what I'm talking about!

[madcowchef]

Thanks great points all. The mountains border problem stems from having one of the kingdoms entirely mountain based, but I will review and see if I can at least lower the number of instances.

[NedS298]

I love this map, the mountains are amazing. The overall look is just great.