Honored to be here - a new member joins the guild...

[ChickPea]

Hi, and welcome, and thanks for your lovely introduction.

You might be best heading for the Tutorials area of the forum, and trying out a couple. I appreciate you'd like to try a Tolkien style (one of my favourites too!) but you will probably learn lots from working through one or two of the others too, as many of the techniques can be reused in different styles once you've figured them out. I can't help you with Campaign Cartographer, but I see Mouse is already on the case in another thread!

Finally, to digress ever so slightly, is your avatar from a Carol Berg novel? It looks very similar.

[Errandir]

Hello Chickpea and thanks! Mouse has indeed already provided some great thoughts and inspiration.

Your digression has just made my day, because it taught me something new and very appropriate... The image is a drawing by Luis Royo that has indeed been used for a novel. I’ve been using it as avatar for nearly a decade. But until now I never paid much attention to the novel or the background of the character. Turns out it was indeed for a Carol Berg novel and the character is Valen, which I’m sure you guessed but I had no clue. First thing I read online about him: “Valen, the son of cartographers and diviners”. Without knowing more about him (is he himself a chartographer?), it still felt like quite a revelation, kind of like a story reaching a full circle. I’ll definitely have to give the books a try now...