Thursday, June 22, 2017

Beautiful Maps

A year ago or so, my good friend Thorfinn Tait embarked on a personal journey to establish his Patreon business. For this, he selected the creation of new geographical maps.  Anyone who knows the world of Mystara and Thorfinn should understand why. His claim to fame originated from a wealth of game maps, updates from existing TSR's Mystara gazetteers and others (often my own more recently, and vastly improved.)  Since producing maps for Mystara as a professional cartographer just isn't a legal option due to copyright limitations, Thorfinn opted wholeheartedly to create his own mapping style for the world of Calidar. This was the same reason I shifted my efforts as a writer from Mystara.

Thorfinn initially produced poster maps for my first book, CAL1 "In Stranger Skies."  This wonderful piece of cartography came in two formats, an artful version and a stylized hex map inspired directly from the format of TSR's popular D&D gazetteer maps of the 80s and 90s. His next opportunity to emulate this feat will follow in 2018, with the next Calidar Gazetteer. Meanwhile, Thorfinn started developing more detailed and refined versions of kingdoms of the Great Caldera, Calidar's known world (see below.)

There is a plan to develop the "Dread Lands," which is everything else on the planet outside the Great Caldera: Calidar's other continents. This competes with the excitement behind opportunities to map out Calidar's three moons, Mars-like Lao-Kwei and its own watery moon, Kumoshima (settings inspired from Earth's Far East), and Mercury-like Draconia (the dragon's Hollow World.)  I posted some of his work here for your enjoyment. If you appreciate Thorfinn's maps and would like to see more in the near future, do visit his Patreon page, give feedback, and show some gratitude!

Click on these maps to get a better resolution.


Naturally, if you become a Patreon supporter, you can get access to full resolution poster maps that are truly amazing. So, on behalf of Thorfinn, I'll just say:

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