Here is the PSD source file I've used for this project. I'm trying out to attach files to a patreon post for the first time, I hope it works for 180MB files.

Tomorrow Alyssa Faden, Jay Scott and me will have Jared Blando as our special guest for the third episode of The Fantasy Mapping Show. The topic of the episode will be second most iconic D&D map, the setting map.

Please join us tomorrow Friday the 13th @8PM EDT on LordGosumba Twitch Channel 

First I have to welcome all the new patreon members, thank you so much for helping me do this, it means the world to me!! 🙂

Here comes the what I see as the final first version of my Oerth Planetary Model, a look at the planet that is the home of the Greyhawk setting.  I've adjusted the ice cover and adjusted the texture and climate model to match, and I think this is good enough to be used as a base for future more detailed continental and area maps. 

It is a very diverse place with lots of interesting adventure and world building potential. Every biome imaginable have plenty of room and often in interesting combinations. Everything from huge landlocked deserts and waste lands to remote islands far from civilization. The frozen areas are as large as the hot deserts and there are both northerly and southerly cold expanses of lands to explore.   

Two large rifts, the infamous Rift Canyon in the Flanaess and a much larger rift in the western part of Oerik. Alongside are deserts, lakes, jungle and huge mountains. Ripe for epic campaign development. 

Large to massive rivers in every climate zone from the artic to the tropics, some several thousands of miles long. Flowing from deep into the tropics all the way to the arctic. 

Next installment in this series will be a look at Cold Oerth....

I missed the deadline for this post, both due to a project for Griffon Lore Game that needed to get started and also due to my almost unhealthy obsession with detail.  Forests and texture editing took longer than I thought and I have now spent almost 100 hours in Photoshop editing on this map, half of that time trying to figure out the best way to do it so it should be considerably less on future maps in this series.  I still have another twenty or so hours to go before it is ready for the final phase of 3D rendering.

You can get it here (89.6MB JPG): https://www.dropbox.com/s/eo8j08n01cy4emn/Shield%20Lands%201B-16.jpg?dl=0

I'm very happy with it, a super detailed take on 225 square miles of the Southern Shield lands  seen at 5 feet per pixel. It includes roads, buildings, fields and more in over a dozen settlements. I have made most of them but a few remains to be added. This is the texture plus shading making it the top down map that will be used together with heightmap and masks to create the 3D map.

Roads, buildings and even trees are on separate layers which mean these features can be added, changed or removed as needed. The texture itself can be edited to suit new conditions like seasons, climate change and calamites like fires and things that leaves marks on the landscape.

This project have made me push boundaries and  forced me to learn new tricks to try and create believable, useful and inspiring terrain at this level of detail. The results are better than I hoped, but also shown me areas that need to be improved to improve the process.  Especially forest placement is way too tedious to do by hand, I need to spend some time to workout a process to make a better starting point for forestation that can then be edited here and there. Now I basically did it all by hand in photoshop. The same goes for wetlands, they can also be done more by fractal to speed things up.

Forests and wetlands are often linked in this landscape. Most of the area is too dry and not fertile enough to facilitate tree cover, this is due to both a drying climate and millennia of logging. The original forests still covers hills and difficult to access areas., with new generation of trees have started to conquer the bogs. First hardy evergreens like pine and spruce, then more and more trees cover the former lakes as the bogs looses its acidity in its late stages. When the bogs dry out completely the tree cover slowly disappear transforming the bogs into flat grassy plains. I've tried to depict this on the map by having lakes  and bogs in all stages of transformation. It also gives an interesting landscape for adventuring with  lots of features spread throughout the area.

I hope you like this first take on detailed area maps, I definitely want to make more of them, lots of areas of Greyhawk would be interesting to map in this detail.

I'm going to do a first YouTube stream tonight at 6pm PDT. It will be a first live test stream of me working on my Shield Lands maps, mostly photoshop editing.

You can tune in here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUDQUoLLN5PowDb24ZxsEWg

Here comes a second version of the Oerth Ice Cover Map, with adjusted colors. Thank you all for great input, and a special thanks to Erik for pointing out the colors. I hope this is better, but I'm not completely sure what to do with the permanent vs seasonal thick ice color wise. 

Old ice tend to be more blue so I tried that here, what you you think?

Together with Alyssa Faden, Jay Scott and special guest Ted Uram, its time to dig into Dungeon Maps on the second episode of the Fantasy Mapping Show at 8pm EDT on the  LordGosumba - Twitch Channel.

Please tune in and join the discussion!

I've been a fan of the maps in Adventure Begins and From the Ashes by Sam Wood since I saw them but never made anything with that admiration. Also a hand drawn fantasy mapping style similar to Sam's is something I've been missing in my repertoire, and I've been reminded about that quite often. Not everyone likes the accurate "satellite" style maps, which makes sense, they are only part of the maps a well prepped DM needs. 

So a while ago I decided to have a go at making a map that payed homage to Sam's maps. It was not until recently I had to time to sit down and have a go. Work like this requires a lot of doodling and sheer trial and error to try and come up with something you like. 

After couple of sessions I made real progress and started to get the looks I wanted, then came the difficult second goal with this test project. Could I make maps like this fairly quickly without much fuzz and get a consistent result. The answer is yes, with a Photoshop template custom brushes and premade settings I can make a map like this in about an hour.

Now comes the question, is this a project worth spending time on, would you guys want to have each realm of Greyhawk mapped in a style like this?