Reply With QuoteYou might try lowering the opacity on the borders to lessen the impact against the white background.
Also your labels are getting lost against the terrain symbols, you need some kind of stroke and/or glow on them.
Added symbols for the major ruins. Tweaked some rivers. Darkened the swamps, which were too light. The most obvious change is a rather crude marking of the political divisions. (Well, the giants in the north aren't technically a nation, but they have a recognized area that is under giant control.)
Not too happy with the look, although the political map will be separate and I'll tone down the opacity of the terrain layer on it, but I'm thinking I'll be wanting to learn to do my labeling in Inkscape, because the text manipulation in GIMP is too limited.
SG, thanks for the comments. Some of the forests have mixed trees and having installed some new brushes, I'll be changing the Elvenhome wood to another symbol. But one hill symbol and one mountain symbol makes it easier to tell which is which at a glance and differences in the forest symbols indicate differences in the tree populations of the forests.
Eventually, I'll work on revising the map to make it prettier, but right now I'm working on having it "finished" (in having the minimal detail available on an initial player map -- the GM map will have lots of extra layers I can turn on to show resources, lesser sites, underground highways in the Shield, etc., that can be added gradually, at the same time I make the basic map more artistic).
You might try lowering the opacity on the borders to lessen the impact against the white background.
Also your labels are getting lost against the terrain symbols, you need some kind of stroke and/or glow on them.
My Finished Maps | My Challenge Maps | Still poking around occasionally...
Unless otherwise stated by me in the post, all work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.
Latest version. Improved the political boundaries and changed to coloring plus a separate key to improve readability. Not a final final version, but I think I could give this to players as their "common knowledge" map and be happy with it.
Added a scale and named the forests.
It's coming along...much better than the original version.
My Finished Maps | My Challenge Maps | Still poking around occasionally...
Unless otherwise stated by me in the post, all work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.
It isn't the greatest of maps... but this is my second map ever on the computer (the other was a very simple map in... I think it was MacPaint... more than a decade ago) and the first thing I've done on GIMP (not counting one barely-started project and some photo clean-up). I think it isn't bad for a first go. (And I've been avoiding tutorials to start with, other than the one to get my coastline jaggy, so I play around with GIMP a bit on my own first.)
rdanhenry,Originally Posted by rdanhenry
I think that statement alone warrants rep. I've started on the tutorials here right away (after some playing around with a few youtube tuts).
This is a fine player map handout. More than I (if I were playing) would expect (as a GM, I started an unspoken fog of war style game
until the players stumble, search, or earn a map; it's like finally finding the light switch in a crowded porch).
Namasté,
~Tim
Steel engravings, Gothic lettering,
A bar of sulfur left in a cabinet,
The heavy tollings of insomnia,
Sunrises and sunsets and twilights,
Echoes, undertows, sand, lichen, dreams,
I am nothing but those images...
The Maker by Jorge Luis Borges
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