Ah, it's lovely! Did the eastern continent get added after you showed me the player information, or was it present in the original world scetches, and the information was just omitted for brevity?

Also, tell me more about your process. I've done a lot of fantasy mapping projects in different styles, but I haven't really arrived at a style I like yet. One of the big things I tend to balk on is mountain chains. I like the elevation scheme you're using on the map... how exactly did you achieve the effect?

The second continent was partially present in my original sketch, and is still visible in the original map I created on the computer, but I cut it, and most of the other large land masses out of the stuff sent out to players because their characters don't know about any of it save as myth--none of it has been officially mapped. I recently fleshed out and completed that continent because I'm planning to run a 1-on-1 game with my wife as a player set on that continent, when I finish developing the background material.

As for my process...this map was created first by sketching it out on paper (except for some of the new continent, which was sketched digitally on my tablet). I basically just do semi-random scribbling of coastline to form the continental shapes. I then figure out where topography goes, starting with mountains, usually, then rivers, forest, and desert in no particular order, depending on what I'm trying to wind up with as a final product. This second continent was done more holistically than the first one, as I had an idea of where I wanted national borders (not shown here) to fall, so I tailored the layout of things to that.

The elevation effect is simple enough, really. I drew an outline of where I wanted the mountains to start using the freehand selection tool, then I feathered the selection (I can't remember by how much, but that'll depend on your working resolution anyway) and filled it with a slightly brownish green. Then I contracted the selection, feathered it again, and filled it with a slightly browner color, and so on until I was at almost black and doing just tiny irregular dots for peaks. The deepening ocean effect is the same basic thing in reverse, and using blues, with the starting selection being the land masses inverted. I gave it that sense of irregularity by putting a layer of black and white rendered clouds (from the filters) over the whole continent, then setting that layer to multiply and lowering the opacity. I did the same thing on the water, but separately, and at a different opacity, so they wouldn't blend together. The desert and forest are just textures on color fields set to multiply as well.

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There is nothing more agreeable in life than to make peace with the Establishment-and nothing more corrupting.
-A. J. P. Taylor (1906-90), British historian.