Primordial Ooze

I spent the better part of last night working on a fresh new rendition of a portion of my game world, Primordia. The old map was hand-drawn and is starting to show it’s age. You can see a scan of the old map, here:

That map was done with pen and colored pencil about 15 years ago while I was in college. I made one attempt at re-doing the entire map in Adobe Illustrator last year, but I abandoned that effort. My computer still isn’t fast enough to manage that much detail and still be productive. Or, perhaps, I don’t author my AI documents efficiently. You can find that attempt here:

So, instead, I went and focused on a portion of the map and started from scratch. This time, I took advantage of some features of Adobe Illustrator which remained a relative mystery to me until now. These features allow me to create a relatively complex map in minimal time. The following map isn’t done, but it’s starting to come out very well.

Just so you know, I stole the style and layout of the map from one published by Wizard’s of the Coast for the Forgotten Realms campaign setting.

In any case, when the map is done, it should have tons of detail. If anyone is interested in hearing about how I created the map and what those “mysterious” features of Adobe Illustrator are, send me some feedback.