This map of Shadow World was created by Matt Hanson from the Cartographer’s Annual Vol 3..

I started creating a map of the continent of Jaiman on Shadow World® to include in an upcoming Player Guide. I wanted to create a comprehensive map that included all map related layers of data in all the official books: Places of Interest for players and GM’s, Essaence Flows, Climate, Navigator Obelisks, Roads, Cities & Towns, Kingdom borders in different time periods. However the base map was on the continent scale so I felt the “Fantasy Worlds” style from the April ’09 Annual would work best and give a nice simple and clean look.

I made a few changes to the standard Fantasy Worlds style. Given that the entire continent (45 to 70 degrees latitude) would be covered in forest I felt that the obvious borders in the standard forest (that uses a tree symbol fill) didn’t make much sense. Instead I changed the color of the default land fill to make it a darker and more saturated green. I also created two additional bitmap fills – one darker and greener, and one lighter and more yellow. I scattered a handful of polygons about using these fills to give further variation in the landmass, representing denser than average forest, and more sparse forest mixed with grassland.

Jaiman Map Copyright Matt Hanson 2009, based on Terry Amthor’s Shadow World setting , now published through Guild Companion Publications. Shadow World® is a registered trademark of Terry K. Amtho. This map will be available in final form in the upcoming Shadow World® Player’s Guides series.