Etemena - a gaming map for a new continent in my TTRPG campaign

[jonkka]

I've been working on this map since summer 2019 so it's been a quite a long road to get here. Because it is a gaming map, drawing the map has only been half of the work as I've been writing nations, locations, history and lore for the continent as well. I call it ready for gaming but obviously this means that it will be updated in the years to come, therefore I chose WIP forum to present it. This also means that I've left large regions relatively empty for future expansions, as of now the civilized areas form only fraction of the map.

Since it's a gaming map, I have not devoted time to dress it with usual cartography paraphernalia like compass roses, fancy borders and for example the Legend-box is meant to be detachable as a floating layer on the TTRPG tool we use to play on this map (hence it's always visible to the players no matter what part of the map we are on). This tool also means that we will be using the map with 100% zoom almost all the time, never zoomed far out. Because of this, all labels and details are optimized for readability at that zoom level.

Map is huge, I drew it at 9000 x 14000 pixels, GIMP file has 775 layers (bulk of those being text labels) and save file size at 1.1 GB. I scaled it down to 71% and exported the JPEG heavily compressed to get it fit into 10MB file size limit here. After that, smallest labels are barely readable but I chose not to host full image off-site or post it in two parts. All cartography brushes used are of my own make, as are heraldry albeit using components from the net.

While geography should observe real-world rules, I've consciously chosen not to respect those rules to the extreme. Instead, to facilitate interesting gaming possibilities some places might defy realism but those should be rare as my chosen style of gaming is not very high fantasy. Since this is just a map, some details may not make sense without knowing the history behind it all. For example, Frozen Wastes region at the south is not due to it being a polar region but rather it's under a big ash cloud creating a localized ice age further to the south. Continent is situated south of the planet's equator, hence the hotter regions are to the north anyway.

Finally, I would like to admit an influence from one of my cartography idols, so to say. Surely this map pales to his brilliance but I've studied and blatantly copied his style, hopefully not causing any offence for that. In case you didn't recognize it yet, he is Maxime Plasse, known here as - Max -. Compare this to his Gnosis map and you'll see marked similarities.

Map itself coming up on next post, in a minute.

[jonkka]

And here is the map itself...