This is a reimagining of a battlemap I made a long time ago, but now done in Mike Schley stile:

I'm not quite happy yet with the shadows. I think I made the tree shadows too long. I'll play around with that a bit more.

Especially the shadows of the treetops: I placed them manually on a separate shadow layer. They seem to vanish completely, I probably made them too weak. Also the positioning is just guesswork. A drop shadow that's bigger than the object it is casting it (as if the tree stump was close to the light source) would be perfect to automatically generate treetop shadows, but I didn't find such an option.

The bevel effect on the high ground however looks really nice and I think it gives a good impression of depth. I'm quite pleased with that.

The little waterfall is a good start but I think it's missing something that gives it more live. I tried to add white lines with an edge fade and a dropshadow to simulate areas with lots of air bubbles and the shadows those would be casting, but that did not look good at all.

here is a closeup of the waterfall:

Does anyone has any ideas on how to improve on that? I think @Loopysue made some amazing water ripple effects once, but I don't remember the map annual she did it for :/

Thanks sue for the link, I'll dig into that!

@jslayton For efficiency, this would be nice, yes. But I don't think it's really necessary. This is what I created so far with "symbols along" and the trunks on the top are of course completely hidden by the poly, so that's fine...

I've never done this before, so maybe this suggestion is total nonsense, but what if you just fill the dense poor areas with random houses using the "fill with symbols" command? like Ralf did in with the trees in the last live session but with houses instead?

you have the big streets as guidelines, so you could just draw polygons in each of these areas and then fill it with houses. poor areas are not that well maintained and abandoned houses might get reused/repurposed/rebuilt and there's probably not that much incentive to really check the building regulations, so the ensuing chaos of the fill with symbols effect could be explained that way. wherever there are too big gaps there just naturally streets are formed and where houses overlap you can delete a few of those.

I guess that would be way less work than actually placing all of them/setting up streets in advance that might end up being to close to each other resulting in lots of overlap anyways...

I'm not sure how popular it is right now, as it's just a few days old.

And to be clear: it is NOT a map drawing tool. It is meant to be a small mini game for people who are about to create a world to help build a history of said world. I think even if we don't need to build a world right now it's a fun way to get some inspiration for a new map we're about to draw.

It's set up in multiple stages. Each Player starts with an empty sheet of paper (or a section of a single sheet of paper). First everyone gets a few roles that determine what the player shall place in their respective area. The players can choose where exactly to put it and the guidelines are pretty vague. For example you roll for landmasses and you might get something along the lines of "one big island/continent and a small one". How they are shaped and where exactly they are is up to the player.

After a few steps when land features and some starting settlements are placed the players will be able to grow their start-kingdoms and during later steps they are allowed to place the features/settlements/etc on the other players sheets as well (when a WAR! was rolled up for example already existing settlement might get destroyed, or your kingdom could set up a colony on an other players sheet...)

Again: how you draw that exactly is all up to you/the players and it is meant to be done as a crude sketch on paper.

But, and that's why I posted it here: if anyone ever wanted to start a new map but lacks inspiration this game would be a nice way to get the outline/concept of a new world going.