Wow! Fantastic! Thanks for sharing!
That was my second map for the old Dungeon Magazine. Mike Schley was my editor, another great guy (whose astonishing work I saw yesterday in Barnes & Noble in the new D&D 4.0 Forgotten Realms Campaign Guide). I wanted to try a unusual approach to a regional map, something like some National Geographic maps I'd seen. Mike let me fly with the idea, and Dungeon published it.
I got very mixed feedback. Nobody had a neutral opinion. Some loved it. Others hated it, noting that computing accurate distances across the map face was impossible and saying it looked like an overly saturated satellite photo rather than a genuine gaming map.
But I loved making it. I should do another thread on that map. Lots of lessons learned! And I could tell the story of the vignette illustrations surrounding a later version of the map. But here's the basic map Dungeon published (copyright 2005 by Edward J. Reed, all rights reserved):
We don't stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing.
-George Bernard Shaw