So I've come back to mapping after a long hiatus due to life, and so obviously I decided to start with something small. Like mapping out an entire continent for a D&D campaign, in a chimera of styles whilst attemping a soft satellite style. Two weeks later and I'm mostly happy with the result!

For those who want to see a slightly higher resolution (12mbs):

And for those who want to view it at the stupidly high resolutions I tend to work in we have Medium scale (50mbs):

And the full one (191mbs):

I started out using Fractal Terrains 3, and the wonderful tutorial and tools from the one day world builder (Annual 155) by Sue Daniels to create a continent shape I was happy with, tweaking and sculting to add some interesting features that I knew I'd want. I then cut the export to the size I wanted to map and copied it into the Ancient Realms Annual style, and spent multiple iterations trying to get the right feel for the elevation shades before giving up and using GIMP to create new coloured fills of the standard mountain fill that the style comes with in order to get the smooth transitition from snowcaps down to the plains. Afterwhich it was just a case of messing around endlessly with sheet effects to find stuff I liked, including dipping into Annual 24, Shaded Relief, for some of the textures and to remind myself how to use the bevel feature. I also decided to use the symbols from the Realms of Legend annual as I quite like the clean look for this zoomed out map.

The world itself is, as I say, going to be for a DnD campaign I'm hoping to run in the next few months. It will take place in the Broken Kingdoms region which is where a lot of the Eastern realms like to dump their exiles, criminals, or inconvenient radicals. For millenia it has been uninhabited, and largely uninhabitable following a catastrophic event that destroyed the very first bronze age civilisations to arise on the world. This being due to the overabundance of monsters and the undead, and also a large amount of what is effectively background magical radiation that has a tendency to react poorly to living flesh/nearby sentience. Though over the last few hundred years the intensity and extent of these effects has been slowly diminishing, allowing those exiled there to survive longer and for those with more optimism than sense to attempt to explore the ruins of the ancient civilisations that once thrived around the shores of the Amahuru sea.

I'll probably switch to a different style for a more zoomed in map of the region/s that the players will interact with, but as I add new stuff I'm hopefully going to add to this map as I go forward.

Obviously more than happy to hear any suggestions or critiques anyone has!