I've been working on a 1000 x 1000 mile part of western Doriant that I adopted. (This is separate from the elvish town in Verinress Arl, Artemisia, that I adopted for the 1000th map contest.) I know that new maps for the Atlas aren't being accepted until October, but that's perfect because it will give me a chance to do more detailed maps of specific settlements and points of interest at the same time.

I previously posted about this map in a previous thread, but I've decided to rename it, so I'm starting a new thread.

If it's okay, I would like to rename this the "Gold Coast," a regional term for an area so named because of the sandy beaches and tawny dried coastal grasses in the summer. It's an area that encompasses a region that includes a predominantly human kingdom of Vacuria, the inland human kingdom of Travi, a small elven kingdom to the north called Enía (a constitutional monarchy with a hereditary monarch and an elected Assembly), and a small dwarven kingdom in the southern mountains called the Kingdom of Gongodûr.

I still want to create a Borders drawing tool to draw the borders of each kingdom, but for now, this is what I have:

I have discovered that naming things is one of my bigger challenges. For several years, I've been maintaining a list on my phone of fantasy RPG character names, some of which could just as easily be used as place names. I also tried an old trick I used for naming gods in different pantheons in my campaign world: pick a language available on Google Translate and then look up words to find something tweakable for the god. (For a Thor-like god, for example, I might look up words for thunder, lightning, storms, etc. to find a word that could be modified a little to be a name.) And I also found a Wikipedia list of small towns in England and tweaked them (like changing the suffix from -ford to -port). And there are also a whole lot of patterns: a river that flows from a mountain may take its name from the mountain, and the village beside the river might as well.

Questions:

1. What did I miss that should be named?
2. Do you have any changes to recommend for fonts, font colors, or sheet effects on text labels?
3. Any other thoughts?

Here are some zoomed-in views to make it easier to see. In the future, would be better to post the larger map in my galleries so that folks can zoom in?

May I adopt this little unnamed elven village marked in the red box on Virinress'Arl? (Quenten, since you did the parent map, please let me know if this is encroaching on your future plans.)

And here are some zoomed-in closeups:

The map is just the highlights of the trip. Here's the full itinerary. Why two weeks at Crater Lake? My extended family has a cabin a few miles outside of the park, so we were visiting family then before finally heading home.

June 9, 1972 — San Francisco, CA

June 9, 1972 — Big Sur

June 10, 1972 — San Simeon

June 10, 1972 — Los Padres National Forest

June 11, 1972 — Los Angeles

June 11, 1972 — Angeles National Forest

June 12, 1972 — Disneyland

June 13, 1972 — San Juan Capistrano

June 13, 1972 — Chula Vista

June 14, 1972 — Winterhaven, CA

June 16, 1972 — Tucson

June 16, 1972 — Chiricahua National Forest

June 20, 1972 — Deming, NM

June 21, 1972 — El Paso

June 22, 1972 — Carlsbed Caverns

June 22, 1972 — Cloudcroft, NM

June 24, 1972 — White Sands National Park

June 24, 1972 — Cibola National Forest

June 25, 1972 — Petrified National Forest

June 25, 1972 — Coconino National Forest

June 27, 1972 — Grand Canyon

June 28, 1972 — Glen Canyon Dam

June 29, 1972 — Manti-Lasal National Forest

June 30, 1972 — Price, Utah

July 3, 1972 — Thru Utah to Colorado

July 3, 1972 — Grand Mesa National Forest, CO

July 4, 1972 — White River National Forest

July 6, 1972 — Shadow Mountain Lake. Through WY to Nebraska

July 7, 1972 — Cadron, Nebraska

July 8, 1972 — Mt. Rushmore

June 9, 1972 — Thru Gilette, WY

June 9, 1972 — Big Horn National Forest

June 9, 1972 — Shoshoni National Forest

July 13, 1972 — Teton National Park

July 16, 1972 — Yellowstone

July 17, 1972 — White Sulpher Springs, MT

July 19, 1972 — Glacier National Park, Canada

July 20, 1972 — Waterton, Canada

July 21, 1972 — Banff National Park

July 23, 1972 — Mt. Baker National - Snoqualmie National Forest. Olympic National Forest

August 2, 1972 — Mt. Ranier

August 2, 1972 — Maple Leaf-Gifford Pinchat Natl Forest

August 3, 1972 — Portland

August 4, 1972 — Salem

August 5, 1972 — Crater Lake

August 17, 2024 — Redwood National Park

August 19, 2024 — San Francisco, CA

Using two of Ralf's recent tutorials, Modern Journeys and Real-World Vector Data, I was finally able to create a condensed map of a 71-day vacation my parents took me and my twin on when we were 4 years old. (The images for the icon symbols are all public domain or CC-BY. Photo credits below.)

Like Ralf's Real-World Data tutorial, I had weird gaps in the middle of my map when I tried to convert the vector lines to land. Unlike Ralf, I didn't have the skills to be able to resolve it (despite watching the tutorial three times)...so I kludged a solution by drawing more land over the gaps. There was some other weirdness on the eastern side of the map that I didn't even have to worry about once I realized that I only had to show the part of the U.S. where we traveled.

Also, because I wasn't shading each state differently, I didn't have to trace the boundaries the way Ralf did. I simply moved the lines to a Border sheet and changed their properties to be the color and line thickness that I wanted.

I originally was going to source the photos from the U.S. National Park Service's website, where they have a database of images from their parks that are all in the public domain. (In the United States, all intellectual property published by the government is automatically in the public domain.) I was struggling to find images I liked, so instead I resorted to Wikimedia Commons. I made a point of only using photos that were either in the public domain or were published by a Creative Commons CC-BY license. Those licenses allow for commercial use, unlike the CC-BY-NC licenses (even though this isn't for commercial purposes), and allow for derivatives (unlike the CC-NY-ND "no derivatives" licenses). That allowed me to edit the images to be in sepia and cropped into circles. Instead of following Ralf's approach of making them sepia in the map, I used GIMP to desaturate them to sepia and then crop them to a circle which was then exported to a PNG (with the portions outside of the circle being transparent).

I added the photo credits to a Map Note and added a hotspot in the lower right corner to open up the note. Here are the photo credits (including some I wasn't able to use because of space considerations):

San Francisco, California - Dasturias, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Big Sur, California - Brian Lopez, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Los Padres National Forest - Damian Gadal, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Disneyland - Tuxyso, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Chiricahua National Forest - Zereshk, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Carlsbed Caverns - Eric Guinther, User:Marshman, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

White Sands National Park - uncredited NPS employee, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Petrified National Forest - AndrewKPepper, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Grand Canyon - Tuxyso / Wikimedia Commons

Glen Canyon Dam @ Lake Powell - Christian Mehlführer, User:Chmehl, CC BY 2.5, via Wikimedia Commons

Grand Mesa National Forest - National Archives and Records Administration, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

White River National Forest - JasonC photography, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Mt. Rushmore - Colin.faulkingham at English Wikipedia, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Teton National Forest - US Forest Service, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Yellowstone National Forest - Brocken Inaglory, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Glacier National Park - TaikiMcTaikiface, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Banff National Park - Sergey Pesterev / Wikimedia Commons

Mt. Baker National Forest - Joe Mabel, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Falls View, Olympic National Forest - Forest Service of the United States Department of Agriculture. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Crater Lake, Oregon - DSparrow14, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Redwood National Park - m01229 from USA, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons