I love creating and using the detailed terrain images and make maps from them, they are great for immersion and creative deep dives. Sometimes they are not the right tool for the job though, something simpler that concentrates on the essential is needed, enter the orienteering maps. I choose to call this style of maps orienteering maps to honor my inspiration for them, could also be called ordinance maps, the maps used to find your way as hiker, soldier or sportsman.

Thanks to my decision to keep separate different types of data, making maps that are very different in style and purpose can be made without too much trouble. A 15 x 15 mile area my porta-potty resolution took me less than an hour to make once I figured out how to set it up. That include variants with and without vegetations, light or colored versions and so on. The set of test maps depict the same area I presented here: https://www.patreon.com/annabmeyer/posts/terrain-163572123 so if you haven’t read that post and download the images so you can compare the images in this post with the others.

The purpose of these maps are to make it easier to find key information, like roads, buildings and elevation. To be able to discern the lay of the land quickly and accurately, which means loosing clutter for a simpler view on things. Another benefit with this type of map is more room for additional information, like an overlay depicting battle movements, or the influence of cultists.

The elevation lines on this map are created using the Cartography Node in Gaea that created beautiful output but lacks the ability to properly label the elevation onto them. This is an ability that QGIS has but I haven’t dug that deep into QGIS yet, but I will so future maps of this type will come with elevation marked as well. A bit of more work but should be doable once I have the heightmaps properly georeferenced.

Data is stored as masks and then imported into Photoshop where it can be styled as needed. For the colored version I’ve based it on a parchment texture which blends through a bit too keep a bit more of a fantasy feel.

Another benefit with Photoshop styling is that you can add stroked and color overlays, which makes narrow things like roads and buildings remain visible even when you reduce resolution. Very handy for large area overviews.

Even when I shrink the 16K image down from over 16,000 px to 512 px it is still usable, but works bets in simple light version showing the water and roads.

This is a great base map for political overview maps.

This is the map I will use to annotate my game prep, and the after action reports. I will also experiment with more extreme styling to see if some cool handout maps can be created using these. You can download the whole sample pack here (537.8MB ZIP): https://annabmeyer.com/Downloads/NG/Shield%20Lands%201%2064K%20Herechel%20Orienteering%20-%201.zip
As always, a download manager is highly recommended!

Thank you again for your support!!