I met Anne McCaffrey some years ago and she urged those in attendance to compile and keep a list of names which we could draw upon whenever we needed one. That practice has stuck with me all these years later, and I have lists of thousands of names I can use.

That's what I do, too. Unusual last names are good fodder for fantasy realm names of people or geographic places, though I sometimes tweak the spelling. I keep a notepad list on my phone that jot down names as I encounter them. Every so often, I paste the list into Excel where I can make notations when I use a name.

I don’t make up languages, but I do rely on existing languages to provide names of people, places, and especially gods. For example, for one religion I might pick Finnish as a commonality, and then when designing the pantheon, I will look up words in Google Translate like thunder, storm, rain, lightning, etc. for a Zeus-like god. If I find a word I like, I will then tweak it a bit to make it unique. For a nature god in the same pantheon, I might look up words for forest, woods, tree, nature, spring, etc. That way, all of the proper nouns will all sound like they came from the same language. Another religion might use Croatian or something else unfamiliar to a majority of English speakers as the base. For the names of ancient things, like the name of the world, I looked to long-dead languages like Sumerian. But that’s not the same as creating a whole new language. I have a book on how to create languages written by the guy who devised the languages in Game of Thrones series on HBO, but I was overwhelmed by it and didn’t pursue it.

I think it’s great. My one confusion is that you have lakes that don’t seem to have rovers or streams flowing into nor out of them. Maybe that’s the scale — lots of little streams and creeks but no rivers that would register on a map of this scale?

The world is very Earth-like, with a circumference of 25,000 miles. I’m out of town without my laptop, just an iPad, so I can do a proper measurement of Lumadair, but I previously calculated that the coastline of Lumadair was a little over 10,000 miles. Here it is on a globe of the full world to put it in perspective.

I have been working on taking a part of the world I created in Fractal Terrains and recreating it in various CC3 styles. I did a version in the Parchment style, and now I'm working on one in the Mike Schley style. (I was going to wait until it was done, but I just can't contain myself.) When that's done, I will try doing the shaded contours style that Ralf demonstrated in this video:

The portion of my world that I've been experimenting with is a great island nation called the Republic of Lumadair, a democratic republic with elements inspired by the Roman Republic. Here are exports from Fractal Terrains. (Note: this map is about 6,000 miles wide, so the rivers shown should be considered to be only the very largest ones. That said, I may still add more to the island later.)

And here it is again, recreated in CC3 using the Parchment Worlds style:

It is intentionally scant on civilization details other than labeling the capitol and a mysterious and foreboding area of magic.