Majestic Wilderlands Overview Map

I am working on a bunch of project at the moment and decided to try to update this map



This map had a torturous history.

It started when I needed to do some historical maps to work out some elements of the Majestic Wilderland's history. Writing is all dandy but sometimes you just need to map it to see if what you are describing is possible. So I what I did is took the overall map of the Wilderlands from Tarantis and shrunk it down. I then used a homemade lighttable to pencil a tracing. After I double checked the tracing I inked it and had my master for photocopies.

Around 95, I acquired CorelDRAW and had release 12 of AutoCAD, which sill ran under DOS. I also had a tablet. A tablet works similar to a mouse except that if you lift the pointer up and put it down elsewhere the cursor will snap to that point. Artists still use them today.

So I put my master on the table. Luckily I had a 12 by 12 tablet so it was easy to get the letter sized map taped down. I then used AutoCAD to click around the coast and mountains. After that I exported it as a DXF file into CorelDRAW and made what you see.

Needless to say the map isn't very accurate having several generations of copying done to it. However in 2001 I made a highly accurate map using Campaign Cartographer. I that by eyeballing the coastlines hex by hex. It isn't as hard as it sounds but it is tedious.

The problem up to this point is that Campaign Cartographer stinks at getting it's data out in a vector format. DXF or EMF (Enhanced Meta File) should work but don't. Over the years I cleaned up the original CC2 drawing isolating the problems one by one. Finally I bite the bullet last week and got into CorelDRAW. There was still a lot of cleanup to do but it was a lot faster than redrawing the thing.

Now that I had a accurate version I can start revising some of my base maps. Here is the first one. Once I have some of the other projects finished I will start making more.