Imperium Saerdastim

[Locution]

I can see what Ascension is talking about. It has a sort of game-board feel where the icons are more important than the terrain. If that is the intent then you have achieved it. If not it's still a nice map.

[Gregorus Prime]

If the text gets any smaller then I begin to lose details. If I lose or downplay the glows too much then the text and icons are not legible. I plan on playing around with transparency levels once I get everything labeled, but I'll keep your criticisms in mind.

EDIT: Scaled down text/icons for some areas for view as comparison. Roads and borders re-drawn, province/mountain range labels blurred slightly and made less opaque.

I'll probably have to re-do the text if I go with the smaller icons. If they look bad I probably wouldn't mind re-doing the icons as well. Tell me what you think.

[Ascension]

Looking better. I'm totally fine with the icon size, they look great. I'm guessing that purple is for borders and red is for roads. The thing about the roads is that they look like the blue rivers with the same glow...that's where I get all mixed up. Since your glows are color coordinated by country why not just use say a green text with a green icon for one country and red text with a red icon for a different country and then put a small black stroke on them? At any rate, it is looking better.

[Gregorus Prime]

They're provinces of an empire, actually, as the thread title indicates. The rivers don't have any glow underneath them, that's meant to be the shoreline. I guess I can go back and spread it a bit or make the effect stronger. I really don't like the purple borders but I can't think of any other way to make it stand out without making what's underneath illegible. And you're now seeing why I had such strong lines for the roads as well: they really do need to stand out.

[Ascension]

You could use a solid black line for the borders (maybe with a small low opacity glow) and change the roads to a dotted low-opacity tan color and that should stand out well against the terrain.

[Gregorus Prime]

Here is another new version. All of the icons and labels for them have been re-done. It's frustrating that the colors go a bit off and it loses some definition even if I export it as an uncompressed PNG file, but it's pointless to lament such limitations.

I think this version strikes a good balance between making the important things stand out without obscuring the topography too much.

[McKenney]

You definitely have much clearer roads--those look spot-on. Icons look great. I thinkThe city names look better with a single-color glow as well. I think, though, that the problem with the text readability is not the size or the effect behind them but the font itself. Those skinny letters aren't very readable at smaller sizes. Does that font have a bold weight? If not, I would try a font that has more weight to it.

[Gregorus Prime]

That IS the bold typeface. Trajan is the name of the font and it's the only font I've found that has the nice strong Roman feel I need but isn't so ridiculously thin that it's completely illegible at smaller sizes.

But anyway, the map is done after an all-night mapping session. Tomorrow I take an uncompressed PNG export of it down to the local copy center to get it printed on photo paper and laminated for protection. And before you ask, yes I left most of the roads blank on purpose. The Western Road and the Imperial Road are the two most important roads on the continent and to be frank I didn't want to think up a whole bunch of road names that will probably never get used.

Still plenty of prep work to do for my session tomorrow, though. For one thing, I still need to write up an adventure. I'll put it up to a vote to see if they still want to run my most likely half-done adventure come tomorrow or let someone else run one more time.

[ExMachina]

Well if you're looking for a good Roman font with a little weight to it I would recommend Roman SD from dafont.com (it's completely free as well ), I've been using it exclusively on my current map Hestia Revisited if you want to see what it looks like in practice.

I hope that helps with your current dilemma.