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Werthead
Learned Scribe
United Kingdom
173 Posts |
 Posted - 25 Mar 2024 : 14:42:45
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I think a lot of the images in the discussion no longer exist, or are in Dropboxes that expired some time ago.
I have tried to pick up the cartographic gauntlet a little bit after the numerous early worthies, with my recent Nations of the Forgotten Realms series (plus maps of every continent, plus the entire planet) here. My maps are heavily influenced by the official Forgotten Realms Interactive Atlas CD-ROM from 1999.
I believe - someone can correct me on this - that "Handsome Rob" is now doing official cartography for both Pathfinder and also some of the DM's Guild Forgotten Realms material, so a lot of his earlier, unofficial work got scrubbed from the Internet. As Markustay points out above, a lot of his maps were also scrubbed due to him using an art style that was similar-ish to the offical 3E maps, which Wizards of the Coast were not so keen on. |
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sleyvas
Skilled Spell Strategist
USA
11695 Posts |
Posted - 25 Mar 2024 : 20:15:20
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| Just wanted to say to you Werthead, from having tried to make a similar map of the world inside of campaign cartographer, I can appreciate your dedication. I'm definitely not a good map maker. BTW, I also appreciate your question on your world map about Arandron. That's what I suspect as well is "Arandron". I would like to get some definitives on that from Ed. Granted, at the same time... what one group calls Arandon others call something else. That's why I've taken to calling the "northern huge continent part of Maztica" .... by the name of "the place that Faerunians call Anchorome". |
Alavairthae, may your skill prevail
Phillip aka Sleyvas |
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Werthead
Learned Scribe
United Kingdom
173 Posts |
Posted - 25 Mar 2024 : 23:34:23
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I have Campaign Cartographer 3 but that thing is nuts, I've never gotten my head around it. The only reason I have it is because it's compatible with the maps from the Interactive Atlas and it allows me to up-res them to a higher standard and then serve as a basis for new maps.
That said, having had some communication with the people who made the FRIA over the years, I know it has a lot of problems and errors resulting from the timeframe they had to make it. I have been considering going back to the 1E/2E base maps and doing a completely new ultra-map based on the original source material, but that would be excessively time-consuming. If I had better skills I'd also look at creating the "Google Toril" idea someone mentioned before, but that seems daunting as well. |
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sleyvas
Skilled Spell Strategist
USA
11695 Posts |
Posted - 27 Mar 2024 : 15:01:11
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quote:
Originally posted by Werthead
I have Campaign Cartographer 3 but that thing is nuts, I've never gotten my head around it. The only reason I have it is because it's compatible with the maps from the Interactive Atlas and it allows me to up-res them to a higher standard and then serve as a basis for new maps.
That said, having had some communication with the people who made the FRIA over the years, I know it has a lot of problems and errors resulting from the timeframe they had to make it. I have been considering going back to the 1E/2E base maps and doing a completely new ultra-map based on the original source material, but that would be excessively time-consuming. If I had better skills I'd also look at creating the "Google Toril" idea someone mentioned before, but that seems daunting as well.
Yeah, I have CC3+ as well, and I spent a lot of time trying to make maps for my own versions of Anchorome/Maztica/Lopango/Katashaka using it. They were very pretty. But what I found is that once I got a bunch of icons for forests, cities, etc... basically the program was crashing or taking so long to do updates that it became fruitless (even though the file sizes were relatively minimal, guessing because it was using pointers or something to the icons). I then played with the idea of using the icons from that program in drawing programs, but realized that's against the rules, especially if you want to use it in anything you'd publicly share. I then THOUGHT it wouldn't be hard to make my own icons... and yeah, I'm no artist and it takes a lot longer than I would have thought. All of this to say ... I've gained an appreciation for good map makers as I've begun to slowly learn the issues. |
Alavairthae, may your skill prevail
Phillip aka Sleyvas |
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Werthead
Learned Scribe
United Kingdom
173 Posts |
Posted - 27 Mar 2024 : 18:13:38
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I think they basically need a modern CC4, but they've resisted doing that, presumably for budget reasons.
It's a shame but other programmes (Inkarnate or Wonderdraft) are much easier to use, even if they're not as powerful or customisable. |
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Werthead
Learned Scribe
United Kingdom
173 Posts |
Posted - 27 Mar 2024 : 21:53:41
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So I assembled a grand collection of all maps from the OG products I have in PDF form (which is almost all of them, and some faffing around with scans of my physical collection) to create an original megamap of Faerun using the highest-scaled maps possible, starting from 1E and moving forwards.
This started off promisingly. The Old Grey Box maps fully align with near-perfect precision with the Savage Frontier, Empires of the Sands and Bloodstone Lands maps, to the point that all of these feel like cut-offs from a larger map someone created (presumably a 1"=30 miles scale map someone drew based on Ed's original hand-drawn map), with even individual mountains being the same across the overlaps.
However, the Dream of the Red Wizards map is notably out of keeping with the rest, with the sections where it overlaps the Bloodstone Lands maps not quite cohering (not to mention, the cities on both maps in Impiltur are all over the place, with several cities located on different parts of the coast). It feels like it's about 5% off in size, but upping and lowering the size doesn't line things up correctly at all. The best-case approach was to ignore the overlapping area and get the edges to align and cut off the overlap. Even this is imperfect but it's possible to make it work.
The Old Empires map is then completely out of whack with the Dreams of the Red Wizards map (and, of course, with no features in common, it's impossible to determine if it is in keeping with the rest of the continent map) which causes headaches (and wow, Tharsult and Alaor's shapes change on every single map that they made back then).
The Great Glacier map then satisfyingly aligns almost 100% with the Bloodstone Lands map, except for a slight variance in scale.
I'll keep cracking at this and then try the same thing with the 2E maps and see if it's possible to get a good idea of a large-scale map of the continent using the OG sources. I certainly have vastly more respect now for the FRIA team (and that respect was a lot in the first place) who had to make a lot of judgement calls in getting these sources to work.
Ed seems to mention the Karen Wynn Fonstad map a lot from the (non-interactive) Forgotten Realms Atlas, so I wonder if he regards that as a better reference option. Hmm. |
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Blaidd31204
Acolyte
USA
2 Posts |
Posted - 27 Mar 2024 : 22:15:24
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| Outstanding! |
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George Krashos
Master of Realmslore
Australia
6646 Posts |
Posted - 29 Mar 2024 : 01:27:00
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Ed has always deferred to the paper FR Atlas product.
-- George Krashos |
"Because only we, contrary to the barbarians, never count the enemy in battle." -- Aeschylus |
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Ultimate high-resolution map of Toril
