We are 195 Patreon members as I write this, thank you all for supporting me, it means more than you can image to gain such a trust!
My posts have been scarce lately, for which I apologize. It is due to two reasons, a Kobold Press Project that takes up the majority of my time at the moment and will so for another month or so. Then Greyhawk mapping is back into the forefront again. The other reason is that a lot of groundwork is being done for things to come. Now that March is soon here and so is the start of Con Season, it is time to start to reveal what I have planned for this year.
Lendore Isles and Hepmonaland are already under way, and significant progress are being made on the Lendore project. Hepmonaland is a different beast that share a lot of workflow and technique with what I'm doing for Kobold Press, so it will get a boost from what I'm doing there this summer. A major installment is scheduled for you guys in August. Exactly how much it will be depends a bit, but it will be a large part of the continent for sure.
Lendore Isles is a project on the cutting edge of both my abilities and what current technology can provide, so it will take a bit longer to get fully polished. A first look at the terrain and how its made is planned for Cartography Patrons in June. These are contested islands with various versions presented in the past, so this project will have to honor that too with at least three different versions coming this fall.
The 2019 Edition of my Flanaess map was just launched, and I'm very proud of how it turned out and I've received an unusually large amount of positive feedback. This doesn't mean that this year's Edition is done, there are a whole bunch of versions still to be made. I'm currently exporting it layer by layer in full resolution PNG's with transparency so I can make things like: Player - DM maps, area maps, and special versions for Realm Works among other things.
One of the benefits of this is I get a good chance to go back to a pet project again - handout maps. The first batch of handout maps got a lots of love, but also constructive criticism. This was good valid points (most of them), which I take to heart. It was also my first try at doing something similar and learned a lot from it. So the take away is - Do it again and Do it better this time - Flanaess Handout Maps Set 2 is coming! This time they will be full resolution, include layered versions, better labeling and a documentation on how you go about creating similar maps for all the Cartography Patrons.
As soon as something is done, my routine is to sit down and try and figure out what to do better next time, so work on 2020 Edition is already under way. My Campaign version of the map has always been serving as the test bed for new features, which is a tradition I intend to keep, so this spring and summer an updated version is coming. Will update the borders to the new territorial control paradigm instead of the old claimed territory.
Thanks to some well worded questions and criticism I came up with the idea to test out if Adobe Illustrator CS could be used to add mile markers at certain intervals along roads and trails. Initial trails where very promising, and you can see the first results in the image above. So now I will add a small marker every 10 miles and a larger marker every 50 miles. Thought this was a feature that needed GIS tools, but it looks like old Illustrator still has some tricks up it sleeve. An special post on how I did this, and styles for download, will come later for Cartography Patrons when I have the final settings done.
Preparering for my next campaign set in the former Shield Lands in the winter of 598-599 CY, and as you probably all guess maps are a big part of my campaign planning. So the Empire of Iuz and its surroundings will get a major work over for the new Campaign Map 2019 Edition, with a special add-on in the form of my take on Iuz Demiplane. It will be my first foray into planar mapping, so don't expect too much , but one has too start somewhere right!
So what can be left to talk about? 😉
Well, something that have been asked for since I posted my first map on the web, a "classic" map of the Flanaess. I'm hearing you, and now its the time to do a Flanaess 576 CY Map!
Struggled for a long time on how to approach this, and even did a smaller version a few years ago with just the same information that was on Darlene's original map. I have now decided to do it like the features that are on the 598 CY map existed back in 576 CY, and change borders, names and heraldry etc to match the situation of 572 CY. There will be exceptions of course, some places where not built until later, but they are the exception. And yes it will come with a 30 mile hex option, and no, my 30 mile hex layer will not match the one on Darlene's map. Despite this I think it is a map that many will find useful.
Gary Con preparations are under way and I just go back from the printer with a bunch of handouts presenting my Greyhawk mapping and my Patreon. You can download a PDF version here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/8nm9gyszyq7zmg3/Anna%20Meyer%2017.5x12%20inch%20Handout-preview.pdf?dl=0
The back side, seen above, is a sample area around Greyhawk. The print turned out really well, much better than previous prints I've done at Staples and other print shops. This print is done at a printing company where I help out from time in their art departement, with Illustrator, Photoshop and InDesign work, and they have modern large capacity digital printing equipment. The equipment they have and the fact that I could oversee the whole process made me really pleased with the result.
The good results with the Gary Con handout made me think, what about printing the whole map in pieces. They largest format they can print borderless without resorting to expensive inkjet, is effectively 12x18 inches so we are talking a number of pieces here. One of the benefits of digital printing is that it can be done in small numbers. It will be expensive but less than the of $500 - $1K that an inkjet print would be. It is also a lot of work managing the print and then packaging and sending out the prints, but my Patreon members who are interested could be a manageable number to do.
I've thought about doing this as a special offer when we reach 250 members, it will give me more steady funds so I can devote more time to do something like this. If it works out well it can be done as a yearly thing perhaps. If we reach 500 then the budget both in time and money increase and bigger print projects can be tackled.
Regular Twitch Mapping Sessions and special Patreon only sessions will start when I get back from Gary Con. The Patreon only sessions will use Zoom, a tool that makes two-way communication and high resolution screen share work well. Been using it now for the Legends & Lore Show and very pleased with how it works.
There are a number of new cool tools to look at as well as maps to work on!
Thank you again for making this possible, together we can make more Greyhawk maps!
To have the honor of finalizing the latest edition of my Flanaess map is the heraldry of Prince Myrhal of Rax, a (former?) prince of the Great Kingdom, Death Knight and prized owner of a price of the Regalia of Might.
He resides in his keep in the Adri and his shield will be the final feature to be added to this update of the map. I'm also changing the label to "Flanaess Full Map 598 CY - 2019 Edition" to better tell the time of its release and what year it depicts.
I've been in stealth mode the past week and worked really hard to set up my new website, and now it it up!
It is far from finished, but the base functions are there. You can reach it using both http://ghmaps.net and https://annabmeyer.com but the site is hosted under the new URL. Don't worry, http://ghmaps.net will always work as well, and I'm still using it for my email and a number of other things. A single site to maintain for all my web presence made a lot of sense for a number of reasons, so I decided to have it on my new domain. I now have 200GB of server space, and generally much more capacity, which I'm sure will be needed later on.
There are a number of things still missing, like a dedicated Download section for you guys, my Patreon Members. It will be up soon. A proper search function, and separate sections for each realm of the Flanaess so you can find the right content quickly.
Please test it out and report issues, I'm sure there are bugs to iron out.
Thank you agao so much for your patience with the lack of maps and other proper content while I'm getting this done.
I'm sorry to be blunt, but this month will be mostly housekeeping. A new website need to be up and running soon so it will require a lot of work. The other big item this month is to finalize the Flanaess 2018 Edition, it needs to be made into a number of different formats, which will involve a lot of splitting, converting and such.
In my line of work these mundane and rather boring and tedious tasks take up a significant part of my work, a fair warning to anyone doing this. Now to the more creative parts...
Gaea is nearing an initial release and it is time to take a first peak at this new tool. It still lack a few key features I need for it to be useful for my work, but they will hopefully be around fairly soon so it is time to take it for a first spin.
There will be no Hepmonaland content done during January, but I will be working on it so there will be some in depths look at the technique and files so the Cartographers Tier Members can keep up to date with my progress.
More Campaign Sketches are under restoration and will be presented for the Adventurer Tier members along with Campaign Map updates and some other tidbits.
Twitch schedule is not nailed down yet but regular shows will be starting in January along with Screen Share Sessions for the Cartographer Members.
Thank you again for making this possible!
Time to kick off the new year with a Needfest Special Map!
Made a winter version several years ago and updated it to the use the new terrain in parallel with the new terrain to have it ready without too much extra work, and here it is. It comes in a hexed version as well.
JPG version:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/b0otx0dpn1upu27/Flanaess%20Full%20Map%202018%20Edition%20Winter%20RC3.jpg?dl=0
Easyzoom:
https://easyzoom.com/image/132554
Easyzoom hexed:
https://easyzoom.com/image/132555
Now comes the season for reflection, reckoning and to look forward. Traditionally I try to sum up my professional year and lay out my main plans and goals for next year. Thanks to the miracles of Internet and the Wayback Machine I managed to retrieve last years post from my now defunct website. Again I'm sorry for failing to maintain my website properly. To get a new proper website up and running is first priority for 2019, with added functionality for both regular visitors and my patrons. My goal is to have this up and running in January.
A year ago I wrote this:
By the end of 2018 my plan is to have successfully finished my second Midgard project, launched my Patron and have my first sets of maps on the new Content Markets. I also want to attend more conventions, Gary Con, Paizo, Con and others as well as Gen Con would be a real treat to attend. Budgetary constraints will prevent me from attending all of them but a with a bit of planning and luck I will get to some of them.
So how did it go?
Midgard was a huge undertaking that took up the lion's share of the first half of the year but I managed to finish it roughly on time. Mapped an area roughly the size of the Flanaess in around 8 months!
My Patreon launched quietly in the background at first with two minor projects to test the waters. Despite a reasonable interest things didn't feel right, so I sat down and worked out a new plan for my Patreon - to do what have always been my main passion - Greyhawk Maps. So In May I relaunched my Patreon with the goal of mapping the World of Greyhawk to the best of my ability. How this have fared I will come back to below.
But first I'm proud to say I did nearly all of the things I listed, except one, my maps are not on any of the content markets. My excuse for this is that the two I had in mind was DM's Guild and Realm Works content Market. Thankfully this is not due to me being lazy, since one is not yet open for Greyhawk content and the other is not open at all yet.
In fact 2018 have been my best year in doing this by far, with GaryCon, Paizocon and Gen Con as highlights as well as visits to both WotC and Paizo's offices. Have meet Darlene and a very many professionals and fans from the gaming community over the year, its been fantastic, inspirational and many new friendships have been forged. This year has also been the year that I have confronted my limits and weaknesses as well as my strengths. Now there are no doubts, my biggest professional flaw is that I find it horribly difficult to try and talk to my webcam explaining what I do. It feels like talking to myself in public, which throws me completely off track. My ambitious plan for a series of "How to videos" came to a meager few poorly narrated attempts that have prompted me to rethink my approach.
The social factor is key, as the series of Legends & Lore Shows on Twitch for The Greyhawk Channel, that I co-hosted with Mike Bridges as well as having Jay Scott as a guest on one of my two Map Streams on my own Channel. With someone to interact with I can do this, is my take away from what have been both a challenging and very rewarding new part of my professional life.
Thankfully I have received a solid backing on Patreon that have given me the chance to go back and work on Greyhawk again after several years doing other things. After a few months of trying to get things up and running I found my mojo again and more..
The results are a revamped version of my 20 years old Flanaess Map, with a reedited terrain and many new and corrected features. This map will be a good solid foundation for my Greyhawk related work going forward. Lots of extras have also been possible, with the spread Maps and Handout Maps that I'm in the middle of finishing as the main highlights.
Next years commission will be a still secret one for Kobold Press that will take the lions share of my time this coming spring. More on this when the project is announced. This will be my main commission project for the year, and thanks to your support I will now plan to devote half of my working hours to Greyhawk, the most I have done ever!
What to come.....
I have a myriad of ideas and a number of things that are in the experimental phase (I'll present my workflow in a separate post later) and a number of projects ready to be started next year.
The first of these are a first expansion of my Flanaess map, Hepmonaland in the same style as my existing Flanaess map. For the past year I have try to figure out if it is possible to expand my Flanaess map using using only Photoshop and still get a result that are at least as good as the existing map. By skipping the tedious and liming phase using Bryce3D I could advance much faster, and also be able to separate the shading from the texture. This is a holy grail for the ability to use the texture with a future created heigthmap.
After a fair amount of experimenting I now know how to do this and it was easier than I thought and the results can be stunning, and it also gives me complete artistic freedom to take things to new heights that can be needed for a fantasy world. Oerth is a truly fantastic world that will require an epic majestic take on things at times.
My goal is to have Hepmonaland ready for public release next Holiday Season. My Patreon members will get a contentious access to new versions as the projects progress during the year. This will be the big ticket item this year and hopefully a good companion to the existing map, as well as creating texture and other elements for a future 3D map of Hepmonaland.
This project will also mean I gain invaluable knowledge in how to work in Photoshop to create texture, shading and more. If the results are good enough I plan to go back and rework parts of the Flanaess to do the same and make that part of the goals for Flanaess 2019 or 2020 Editions.
A big part of this project will be a new way to present and store data. I will try and do this using QGIS and some of its plugins to make this a GIS compatible project. The goals with this is to make the end result much more usable and editable. QGIS is an open source application.
Before you set out on a project you have to plan and research, last year one of my main focus for this was how to skip the Bryce3D part of mapping. This year my research will be to do the opposite, to bring back the 3D bit again. This time it will not be using technology from the 1990's, it will be with state of the art tools of today. The first test area for this will be the Lendore Isles that won the vote on Flanaess Geographical Society Facebook Group. It needed to be a set of fairly small islands separate from the mainland.
This will be a multi stage approach. First to create a 3D map with the same resolution as the existing Flanaess map. This can be used for overview maps as well as part of a global 3D map. The next step is to refine and re-texture this data to create a high resolution model of the terrain that matches the exiting map as closely as possible. The resolution I'm planning for these are 100 ft per pixel, covering areas up to 20 miles or so. This data can then be used to create photo real images covering areas of a few miles across, for things like city maps, famous locations and more to be presented in ways we haven't seen much of in the world of RPG settings yet. My goal next year is to do the first stage for Lendore Isles and a first area of mainland Flanaess.
Due to persistent support among my most loyal Patreon members, the honor of being first mainland test area will go to Ratik. If the Lendore Isles turns out successful, I hope to be able to do Ratik as well next year. These are the my main project plans for 2019, but there will be time for small side things as well. Spread Maps will be something I will come back to and develop some more, trying to expand their usability and creating interesting stuff with them.
The field of computer graphics is advancing very rapidly nowadays and this trend is probably only going to pick up speed the next few years. The field of 3D graphics will be way more accessible with cheaper hardware, major releases in the field of open source tools like Blender. I'm my specialty, a new generation of terrain tools is coming with Gaea and Vue with new features and better performance. Some of the old tools like World Machine might be able to keep up with new tricks, whether they will or not, the tools will get much better. This is great news, but it also mean having to learn new things.
I plan to take lots of time to learn and improve. A big part of this will be try try again to invite you along on this journey, so there will be written blog posts, Twitch Streams and Discord screen share sessions. Twitch Streams will be for everyone and focus more on basic stuff and a way to get a taste of what I'm doing. A new season of the Legends & Lore Show will start again fairly soon next year on the Greyhawk Channel. In addition to the L&L Show I will do a weekly map centered show on my own Twitch channel, and also the occasional special show if I have something extra to show. I will try and invite guests to take part in my Twitch Shows, so if you have a short little project that might be doable in a couple of hours please reach out to me and maybe we can do it in an episode. I had a blast creating a custom Ulek map for Jay Scott, and he will be back for more next year.
For my Cartographer Patreon members I will do screen share sessions showing how to do things and general Q&A or topics of interest. Hopefully these session can be recorded and be accessible for my top tier patrons afterwards as well. I'm sure it can be done, just have to figure out the best way to do it. Scheduling will be worked out in January when the Legends & Lore Show have its new recording time set. Another thing that needs to be done next year is to determine the projects for 2020. This is a job mainly for my Patreon members, so expect a series of polls to decide what my Patreon should be doing going forward.
In the background
I routinely spend time learning new stuff, experimenting and trying to improve my results or find a better, or easier way, of doing things. This is not something I do haphazardly, I try to focus these efforts on what I need for future projects. For example this years big experiment have been to try and recreate my Flanaess mapping style using only Photoshop, and now that is ready to be used in mapping Hepmonaland.
The stage before Experimenting is Concept, basically focused daydreaming with note taking. Letting my inspiration run wild and writing down ideas, sketch visions or capture those fleeting ideas when they pop up. Experimenting is to try and find out if an idea might be possible to realize. The Underdark is one of the big things that I'm now ready to bring from Concept stage to Experimenting with. Fantasy Elements are another one that sounds cryptic, but will probably make sense when I present some of the experimentation.
Thank you so much for making it possible for me to do this, it means the world to me to be able to work on what I'm passionate about. Fantasy Cartography is a long meandering journey filled with struggles, pitfalls but also adventure, excitement and the joy of exploration and world building. I hope you want to share the journey with me!
The Handout Maps are now complete with the split up of each of the 18 large Flanaess Handout Maps into 27 area maps, 486 maps in all!
Each area maps come as a zip file.
All of the Handout maps are available here:
https://1drv.ms/f/s!Agxb5Bf6MfQRgSzh39uSdbRE8_9Q
Maps like this have been on my to do list for a long time, and considering how much work it was to get them done I know know why it took me so long before I tackled this project!
I'm generally pleased with the outcome. Still a few ideas left to pursue in this field, there are always next year for that....
This is the last content for 2018, and only one more post this year - presenting my plans for next year.
Time for the Holiday Special - The large Handout Maps 18 different variations covering all of the Flanaess in full glory.
I'm testing to use One Note for sharing, please report any issues.
https://1drv.ms/f/s!Agxb5Bf6MfQRgSzh39uSdbRE8_9Q
There will be pieces of these large maps available soon too, it just takes a while to split up all the variants into separate files and make the edges look like old parchment.
Thank you all for your support, it means a lot to me to be able to do this!!
I hope you all have a great time with family and friends over the holidays and hopefully get some time to game as well 🙂
An outlook with plans for next year is in the works and will come soon, as well as the area pieces of the large Handout Maps.
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