Cartography?
 

Does anyone here have any expierience in fantasy map-making? Like most-all you other losers, I'm still working on a tabletop system and am at a point where I'm actually trying to build a world and maps I can use for reference.

I've searched online and everything seems kind of meh + you have to pay for the software so hand-crafted seems the way to go.

I'm not really asking for anything specific - just input, suggestions, dirty lymrics, whatever. If you feel like all artsy n' shit and up to doing something like this for me, I'd love to collaborate.

Cartography, at least in terms of a fantasy thing, really isn't all that hard. Well, at least not if you have the benefit of layers. Just put down a parchment yellow as your background, do a cloud render with white or a lighter or browner yellow depending on the look you want, and take a nice brown and draw over it with anti-aliasing, using layers liberally to keep everything separate for easy editing.

Not that I've ever made maps, mind you, since I've never had the need to, but I did similar when designing my logo for PoC.

I don't think it's the parchment he's concerned about.
I think it's the whole actually MAKING a map. With continents and countries. Lay-out. Design. Etcetera.

As for something, you could always grab a sheet of white paper, drop some blots of ink on it from sufficient height and see what that does for you. Add a brush, so you can steer some lines you'd think would look nicer.
Then scan or try to recreate the result to a digital form to further enhance the work (add countries, country names, etc, etc.) Mind you, I have no experience making maps either, but that sounds like something that could work.

Ah, in that case, yeah, just do something random for the continents, then divide them up with more jagged, squiggly lines. Honestly, that's pretty much how things tend to look. Land masses are giant, irregular blots, and countries are just more of the same inside of them, since they're almost always arbitrarily defined by who won what battle where and pushed the enemy back, at least in a fantasy setting. Some rare exceptions exist in our world due to land purchases and treaties in more modern times. On the other hand, look at Africa. There's a freaking country land locked by another single country over there. Again, this was because the lines were just drawn as battles were fought between warring factions, and they weren't even the native people! Europe decided Africa's map the same way it decided its own.

Toss in some islands and archipelagos and you're pretty much set. You could do the entire thing with a set of watercolors and a paint brush, or, hell, skip the paint altogether and hold the paper up to the light. XD

I wouldn't suggest Campaign Cartographer unless you're looking to get serious about making a tabletop RPG - learning how to use it is like learning Japanese to go to Japan. It's very very time-consuming and works like a Bizarro-universe photoshop. It does make some pretty incredible stuff, having said thus.

You know, I used to make treasure maps and stuff all the time as a kid, complete with map keys a compass rose and everything so that you would know whether you were in the Lava Caves of Fire or if you were in the Jungle populated by squiggle-line monkeys. I really should be able to open up photoshop and just GO. Maybe it's a special talent of 6-10 year olds. I'll consult my 9 year old brother in law.

The daunting thing is that I really want to make a full planet sized map and plan out where everything is, and then create smaller maps of paticular areas for campaigns. My system is so ready for play testing it hurts sometimes, current roadblock is an actual story/world which has some very rich concepts going into it, but a severe lack of specific history and most notably, a world to exsist in.

I'm actually having a similar problem - I went and created a world and started to place landmarks before I realized that if the map truly was as I was saying then the biggest continent would be an hour to walk across.

Related: Any Final Fantasy world map ever?

The heroes of my stories don't turn fifty feet tall when they exit a city.

You could just change the scale and be done with it.