Hello all!
I'm new here, but I wanted to take the time to introduce myself and invite anyone who is interested in Darkmoon Vale to check out my Tales of Darkmoon Vale campaign site, located on the Obsidian Portal, and my Map of the Vale, hosted at the Cartographers Guild.
Why create a new map? Good question, the map's of the region done by Robert Lazzaretti (as well as others done by Christopher West) are certainly wonderfully executed. However they are set within the region of Andoran in the world of Golarion. I on the other hand am using my own homebrew campaign world of Eriond as the backdrop for our Darkmoon Vale campaign. So as you might imagine, I needed to figure out just how to incorporate the region of Darkmoon Vale into my own world, which I have already mapped out. Hence, my current project. I have nearly completed the map and just thought I'd share it with this community, since I see that there are many fans of Darkmoon Vale here. I'd love to here any feedback or critiques that this community has to offer.
Cheers,
-Thaddaeus
Well, since this thread has not yet received any comments, I'm not sure that this will be of interest to many people, but on the off chance that it is, my Alternate map of Darkmoon Vale is now completed. I consider this a fan project.
Cheers,
-Thaddaeus
Funny, I almost did the exact same thing a while back when I was considering running the Hollow's Last Hope module, but ended up deciding not to run it so I never did the map. Didn't realize Christopher was on the Cartographer's Guild; I'm on there too, small world.
I love your mountains, btw. I struggle with those a lot, mine always look like someone put stickers on top of the rest of the map, but yours look like they're actually coming out of the ground.
Hey thanks for the feedback Sarandosil. Yeah I had a hard time with the mountains myself. Took allot of trial and error experimentation to arrive at what you see, and I'm still not completely satisfied with them. But they are much better than when I first started the map.
Anyway yeah, we are loving the the Darkmoon series modules. In fact, I just purchased "Hungry are the Dead" a couple of days ago (it'll be a while before we get to them though. So are you running a homebrew campaign as well Sarandosil? If so, have you created any maps for it yet? I'd love to see them if you have.
Cheers,
-Thaddaeus (aka "Arsheesh" at the Guild)
Edit: So I checked out your "Velish" map at the guild. I thought the mountains turned out rather decent. In fact the whole map looked great. Looks like you made use of Pasis tutorial for some of it.
Yeah Pasis has some really fantastic work. I'd actually stumbled on the same method of doing mountains before I ever joined the CG, but didn't manage to make anything decent out of it, and after I found his tutorial I learned that I'd gotten rather close to something workable right before I gave up on it. Then I outright 'stole' his texture and got to what you see.
I think I already post (posted? What the hell is the past tense of post?) this on the Velesh thread, but as far as my homebrew goes this is the current map I have. Velesh is a map I'm working on for a friend that's been loooooong overdue for me to finish it, heh.
That's a nice looking map you got there; good forest textures and an original technique for doing the oceans. I especially liked "Somewhere Land" and "The Country full of something cool like Frost Giants"; that gave me a laugh. In an earlier iteration of my map I had actually attempted Pasis' tutorial for the mountains, but since I am using GIMP and not Photoshop I kept running up against walls in trying to do a conversion of the method