So, I consider these maps finished (despite their minor flaws), but I'm still putting them here rather than Finished Maps, since there are multiple maps, and I wanted to go a bit into how I made them.

These maps are for the campaign world that that I am GMing for a group of friends. Currently there are three (presentable) maps, but I'm slowly expanding as it becomes necessary.

The first was created 6 months ago, showing the northwestern part of the empire that the party is running around in

NorthWestern Empire.PNG

Then two days I zoomed out, and mapped the entire region around the empire

Empire Map.PNG

And yesterday I zoomed back in, and mapped the southwestern frontier, using approximately the same style as six months ago

SouthWestern Empire.PNG

While I'm a fan of the pseudo-parchment look of the zoomed in maps, I think I may have developed a crush on the zoomed out one. Once I got it printed out, it was really vibrant, and.. well.. I can't stop looking at it. I'm kinda afraid of making more maps in that style, in case I make something boring and ruin the style for me.

But I digress. Part of the reason that I'm happy that they came out looking so good, is that I didn't just plop down the terrain to look the best it could. The maps are actually based on hex-maps that I'm mapping the entire world in. Because I'm crazy that way.

So, the first map was constructed on top of this hexmap

R - Northwestern Empire.PNG

The second, zoomed out map was constructed on top of this

SphereMap.png

And the third was constructed on top of this

R - Southwestern Empire.png

The pretty maps, as well as the first hex map were made in Campaign Cartographer, using various Annual Pack templates (Annual Classic Fantasy, Annual Classic Realms and Fantasy Hex). Though, for the Fantasy Hex pack, I customized the symbols pretty heavily, to allow to more accurately map terrain and features.

The last two hex maps were made in a program that I programmed myself, so I could A) have an infinite map and B) store details directly on the map (so selecting a hex shows the hex's information in a detail window) and C) add extra features whenever I felt like it.

The content of the hex maps are mostly randomly generated, with a bit of human input. The zoomed out map has 162 mile hexes, while the zoomed in maps have 54 miles hexes (one third). So each 3x3 hexes on the second zoomed in map are randomly generated based on the terrain in one of the zoomed out hexes.

And it is turtles all the way down. Below the 54 mile hexes I have 3x3 18 mile hexes. These are also used to map out exactly which areas will be populated, and by how much.

SR - Barony of Wymar - Infrastructure.PNG

And below them I have 9x9 2 mile hexes, which I use to run the actual game. Because I'm crazy. A month ago that would look like this:

1013 - Northern Wymar.PNG

But now I'm using the aforementioned home-brewed program, so I don't have to switch back and forth between maps when the group is at an edge.

At one point I did stitch most of the maps together into one image, but that wasn't really usable in play: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/...eth/Bigmap.png
And I've probably mapped twice or thrice as much of the world by now to the 2-mile hex level of detail. Only a long snake following the party's travels south, but still. Once I've added all the old maps into the new program, I might add a function so I can print the entire thing out into an image file.