Map Commission: Darkonia, Borania and the Ashera Nebula

In my line fo work it’s always interesting and a little surprising if a customer contact doesn’t come via the web or social media, but through more traditional channels. A while ago the regional newspaper ran an interview with me, and shortly thereafter local author Samuel Sommer approached me to create some maps for his books.

He had some pretty good drafts for the maps, a style was quickly chosen and so I got to do two small maps of the fantasy realms of Darkonia and Borania. It’s always a pleasure using Pär Lindström’s Fantasy Worlds style, so I was happy when Matthias chose that style, and we soon came to a result we were both pleased with.

A little later he came back with the commission for a third map, this time for a science fiction novel. Cosmographer 3 has a number of beautiful styles, and I am very fond of its large-scale Galactic map style, which I got to use here, for the Ashera Star Nebula.

Map Commission: Irth

The World of Irth
Detail – the Nation of Ryld

Here is another map commission I did recently: The southern continent of the world of Irth. It’s the setting for a private tabletop role-playing game and had only a few specifications. It was to be a continent on the southern hemisphere of a world, roughly similar in size to Australia, with a land-bridge to a polar continent.

I fired up Fractal Terrains 3, fiddled the settings and cycled through random worlds until I found something that roughly matched the requirements. I then went in and edited the world to add the land bridge and smooth out some wrinkles.

My customer was very happy with the initial layout and wanted to keep the whole world for future development. No problem with that and so I went ahead and took the desired continent out of FT3 into Campaign Cartographer 3+. I used the Mike Schley overland style to flesh it out somewhat, but the general brief was to only show the nation of Ryld and leave the rest relatively blank to be fleshed out by the owner. The ocean labels are basically just placeholders for future “real” names.

As a little extra I included the FT3 world in the map in the final version of the map to show the location of the continent in relation to the rest of the world.

The FT3 world map