A snippet of a large map done with CC3 in Forgotten Realms style

[Richardb]

This was my first heavy duty attempt at a FR style map, using the bitmap backgrounds in CC3. The JPEG save is at low res, so shows some pixelation you would not see in the actual map. I really like these maps for their readability and simplicity. Not realistic, but great looking. The entire map is about 12 times the size of this bit, and is about 6 megs in CC file format.
I have also included a snipped of detail on one small area.
The most difficult aspect of these maps is the memory leak in CC3 associated with bitmap fills in large scale. Lots of random crashes to deal with...
You will notice that when doing detail work, I changed to mountain symbols instead of true FR style. The FR mountains did not look as good in detail to me, so I did the detail maps differently.

[thebax2k]

Good googly moogly, that is a nice map. Do you have a website for your campaign? It would be nice to be able to see the entire map your portions are a part of. I also like the city map (wish a higher res version were available), it reminded me of the City State of the Invincible Overlord.

Hmm, I don't know what the posting limits are, but should you ever feel inclined to share your maps, try rpgmapshare.com. Although they mostly carry Dundjinni maps, I believe their posting limits are more generous than Photobucket or Flickr.

[Richardb]

Looks much, much better in CC3 or in larger file format (I did a good JPEG of it, but it was about 12 megs...)
I just closed down my own website... where I was able to host these things. The biggest problem with great maps (especially with bitmap fills) is that they make for huge files!
I never really set them up as campaigns, since I do worldbuilding, but don't play D&D. I just sort of build out the world, all of its aspects, its demographics and maps, etc, then move on and do it again. I have hundreds of them...

[thebax2k]

File sizes have tripped up a lot of folks with smaller sites. OCRing can help a bit (its more effective on text than drawings though), but hosting several large files can hose a site. There's one I posted a link to in the Reference subforum called the Selandia campaign. It has these wonderful multi-meg polychromatic maps--but I don't want to even think what the hosting bill is (although he may be on a French version of Geoshi...er...Geocities that permits larger files).

Sigh, it always seems like by the time I find out about cooler sites, the link has spoiled or the sites' been yoinked down. Oh well, my loss. Should you ever put your site back up or find a better hosting solution Richardb, please let me know. I, for one, would like to see more of your maps.

While you probably already have these in your favorites folder, if you are ever looking to see what other folks have done, go to either the DMOZ world building open directory http://www.dmoz.org/Games/Roleplaying/World_Building/ the Empireans link page http://empireans.aequarion.com/links/links_list.php or the course page for a course taught in world building at California State University http://curriculum.calstatela.edu/cou...ers/index.html
I would have also posted the link for Worlds in the Net, a finnish site that listed 200-300 created worlds, but it seems to have vanished into the pesky http 404 ether. You might try the internet archive web.archive.org to see if a copy or two of some of its pages still exist (be warned though, Worlds alwas had problems with link spoilage).