San Escobar is a non-existent country, a blunder of Polish Minister of Foreign Affairs Witold Waszczykowski.

On 10 January 2017, Waszczykowski told reporters that, in a bid for a non-permanent seat for Poland on the UN Security Council, he had meetings with officials from various countries, including some Caribbean nations, with some of them "for the first time in the history of our diplomacy. For example with countries such as Belize or San Escobar". - Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Escobar

Source: www.facebook.com/sanescobarcountry/?fref=ts License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/pl/

I just make then using my phone and an app, the app I use seems to have been taken off the store but this is an exact copy;

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.drawing.sketch

Its pretty much just trial and error until you find a style you like/can replicate, I just make these in my spare time when I get a few minutes

I appreciate the compliments greatly!

This is Lathania. A world of machiavellian gods, corrupt rulers and reluctant heroes.

The hegemony of Carrid is coming to an end and powerful forces are schemeing to tip the continent back into total war.

I started the project trying to map todays real world geo politics into a fantasy form, but the manuscript took a life of its own and "The Ravens of Carrid Tower" was born.

Carrid Tower holds a million souls within its walls and is the dominant civilisation in Lathania.

The Quoroubi desert has been taken over by a cannibal death cult.

The Empire of Narubez seeks to overthrow the peace of Carrid.

A queen is crowned in Drorea.

Pirates terrorize the coast.

A boy travels alone to seek his fortune in Talon.

War is coming. Kingdoms will fall. Heroes will be made.

The book is free on Kindle for the next 4 days if anyone wants a copy.

https://www.amazon.com/Ravens-Carrid-Tower-Gods-Empire-ebook/dp/B07HQGX42W/

https://www.nasa.gov/content/goddard/nasa-satellite-reveals-how-much-saharan-dust-feeds-amazon-s-plants/

https://weather.com/science/environment/news/saharan-dust-feeds-amazon-fertilizer-nasa

There’s this wild thing called the ‘internet’ that’s chock full of information. But it’s kinda chaotic so some pretty smart guys came up with this thing called ‘Google’ which organizes it somewhat so you can simply type something in, like a question, into your hotbar and a few seconds later get links to possible answers.

u/sepultallica9 advised me to post this here :-)

This was created by me in MS Paint for an alternate history project which I had been working on and off on in Nationstates like five years ago. Original (and some more maps) can be found here.

If you like the idea of living on an island I strongly recommend An Island to Onself by Tom Neale. It’s definitely a good read. Unfortunately while looking for the link to an Amazon site that sells it I found that they’re now selling it at a ridiculous price. Sorry about that.

If any of yall speak Spanish and like urban fantasy, alternate history, and supernatural mystery and wanna help me pay the bills, boy do I have something for you.

Get Nueva Jericó for Kindle on Amazon: https://www.amazon.es/dp/B09FQGBNFN/ref=sr\_1\_1?\_\_mk\_es\_ES=%C3%85M%C3%85%C5%BD%C3%95%C3%91&dchild=1&keywords=nueva+jerico&qid=1631193179&sr=8-1

This setting takes place 150 years after nuclear war nearly destroyed the Earth, and nearly destroyed human civilization. In the many years since the apocalypse, new powers have risen in the ashes of the old ones, and now, as the grow more and more rapidly, conflict seems inevitable. Here is a run-down of each faction.

UCR#-Outlined by the orange lines, UCR is the closest the Wasteland has come, to rebuilding the old United States. The UCR (United California Republic) acts as a federal republic of States, and is ruled by a president and council much like Old America was. They believe in a myriad of Old World freedoms, such as freedom of speech, individual rights and the rule of law. For more info read here https://www.notion.so/UCR-United-California-Republic-6f341fca7e2a4a4d982db00152eaf6d4

I'm doing to same thing!

You should finish it if you feel inspired to do so. Is it connected to some larger worldbuilding project? Or campaign? Or story?

http://imgur.com/zaUlPBu

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B_J8g6cj1-wrenNvM2RwZl9ZTlE/edit?usp=sharing

The Realm of Aesen is the world in which me and my closest friends play D&D 5e in. It had a humble beginning where i only made a very small location map with a few towns strewn in and it has grown into this world map which it is today.

Summarize of the realm: The realm has five major factions. The Northern Kingdoms, the Last Sovereign, the Order of the Raven, the Empire of the Gods and the Emerald Enclave.

The Northern Kingdoms hold the north protected by a barrier of mountains from the rest of the realm. Here the all the dwarfish kingdoms have rose to unite under the banner of the High-King.

The Last Sovereign control the Aspaarian deserts of the east as well as much of the land surrounding it as well. Here all races who want to seek a better life live in coexistence in the huge cities erected by the now deceased Sovereign Gwyneth.

The Order of the Raven lies in the murky and dark south of the realm. Here the landscape is harsh and the reign of the King even harsher. But even the king fall under the dominion of the Raven God Nevermore, who controls the faction from the shadows.

The Empire of the Gods rest in the west as the strongest of the five major factions. The empire has always followed of the Gods of old, whom where shattered during the War of Mortality. Even though their Gods have gone, they still hold true to the traditions and principles they left behind.

The Emerald Enclave have complete and utter control of the center of the realm, they built their whole society around the dead corpse of a God, Zaw'mjir, who was the world tree and the one to control nature itself. After his passing the faction took it upon themselves to uphold his job.

I made this using the latest version of Photoshop CC and THIS brush set by Joel Pigou.

I used Inkscape to make these maps, and this wonderful tutorial by Upvoteanthology to get started a few months back. I'm sure if you put in the effort, you can get maps as beautiful, if not more beautiful then mine!

To make my most recent and detailed map, I used Adobe Illustrator. Before that, I made maps in GIMP for years which is like a free Photoshop, but the difference is night and day.

While Illustrator is expensive, there is a 7 day free trial which I used to make my map, following along with Artifexian's Series. You don't have to use GPlates as he does, or worry about complete scientific realism, but he has many nice worldbuilding videos.

A free vector software like Illustrator is called Inkscape, but I haven't used it

Ok, so...

There is a map of the world with lots of subdivisions here

I took that map LONG ago and modified it A LOT (eg: Added Flevoland, Antarctica, enlardged Islands, fixed some mistakes, etc.)

I often used it as my baseline when creating most of my maps.

I use Krita (it's free) and essentially work with pixels.

In the future I will most likely create such a map myself with a higher quality, less pixelated and with vectors, but as of now I cannot afford a decent laptop.

(Ps: for the flags and text I added I used this phone app to create them and add to the picture)

(My laptop is unbearably bad so I couldn't deliver a good quality)

When it comes to design in general, WORK, like, do lots of maps, try to see what goes and what doesn't, get inspiration from real life maps, etc.

Thank you!
We are using a site called nationstates for roleplay, in combination with Discord to chat and communicate. We are mostly doing character RP inside of an international setting. Most people just RP as their leaders.

feel free to join us https://www.nationstates.net/region=mythos

That's exactly what you do. You make a name for your country, answer some questions, and your country is made based off of your answers. From there you get issues to resolve within your country that shape it into different forms of government. It's quite simple, you should give it a shot.

https://www.nationstates.net/page=create_nation1

Roll20.net is free to use, though you can become a subscriber if you prefer. Being a subscriber removes adverts on loading screens for you and your players, and you also get some free assets - tokens, maps, that sort of thing - to use in your campaign. You can also use the built in store to buy premium assets as well, though it has a bunch of free ones it pulls off the internet when you search, and you can upload your own, too. There's also a bunch of cool features only subscribers get, like being able to have "dynamic lighting" to give a line of sight mechanic and a darkness mechanic where certain items give off light to remove fog of war. You can even set it to vary from player to player in case one of your players has darkvision or something.

So yeah, it's Freemium, I guess!

It has a built in voicechat system, as well as text chat and a dice roller/macro system, but Roll20's voicechat system is diabolically bad so I recommend using Skype or something as well to manage the sound. They're working on improving it, but I haven't been able to have a session using the built in voicechat that didn't sound like one of the players was stuck down a well. Still, it's an easy workaround, and I heavily recommend it!

Awesome! I tried to mix a few of the images with images of medieval maps using the deep learning dreamscope app https://dreamscopeapp.com They look quite nice, here are the results: http://imgur.com/a/ZeDFY

I actually think using Wikipedia maps is a great idea. Most of their maps are available as vector images. Vectors look great because they scale so well. And they're simple to modify. The tools are available: Inkscape is a good, free cross-platform vector image editor. I use the Mac-native Affinity Designer. Pricy at $50 though. I'd go so far as to say svg maps should be required here.

I thought I would give making a fantasy map a go, I used a tool called "Azgaar's Fantasy Map Generator" (https://azgaar.github.io/Fantasy-Map-Generator/)

it allows you to generate a map, and change countries, cultures and capital cities as well as other things. If you lack the artistic skills to make a map (like me) this is a fairly simple and fun alternative!

You're absolutely right that every one of these region is a combination of every political stripe.

This is just a thought experiment. One that was partially born out of theories such as those in The Big Sort. We have already begun physically relocating to be around people who share our values. This project poses the question, rather than this happening at random with all the constituent portions still under the rule of one political party that doesn't represent most of the constituents — what it it was directed with each broad group getting its own "homeland." The title was a direct riff of the Isreal/Palestine 2-State solution term. Since this is nothing more than a thought experiment, I even evisioned a home exchange program — something where a conservative family from California could swap with a liberal family from Georgia.

Of course this is unfeasible and impractical and would never be executed as nice and smooth and neat as this graphic suggests. Its nothing more than an idea I wanted to work out that doesn't deserve any consideration beyond existing on a subreddit for a few days.

This town is named 1962 (yes, after the year), and is intended to represent a positive reinvention of the middle-20th-century suburb as a place without some of the worst excesses of the world after the 1950s-1960s (but still taking the open-minded and tolerant aspects of the 1950s and 1960s at its best, such as rock and roll, Rosa Parks, technological innovations, and the decolonization of Africa and Asia). This is set (like everything I crosspost to /r/nineteenskylines) in a loose multiverse that explores the themes of the 1950s rock and roll era, the West Indies, and/or creole New Orleans combined with some modern or even futuristic technologies (as an integrated alternative to the current tide of technology and nationalism gone haywire), although part of it was my desire to clean out my Cities: Skylines screenshot folder by using some of my screenshots in a reddit post. The little purple Transformer guy in the lower left is taken from this Amazon listing, color-changed to avoid resembling a certain copyrighted/trademarked character, and the screenshots are all direct in-game albeit with filters and perspective modification. As an aside, those little guys (RC cars, many styled as bootleg Transformers) run wild around my local mall and are a huge trip hazard.

Not that I'm aware of dude. The pen and tablet have a defined set of sensitivity values. I have no idea just what kind of numbers, but the tablet can sense the pen before it touches the tablet, then sense how hard you're pressing. A mouse only has a binary clicking or not clicking function.

This is the one I have. 100 GBP is a lot though. I payed 75 Euro for mine almost 2 years ago. If you check out any local PC stores you'll probably get it far cheaper than that Amazon link. I'd strongly recommend getting even an entry level tablet like mine if you're into digi art at all. I only use mine for big stints every few months and I still consider it a great investment. Without it I don't think I'd have the patience to do anything on Photoshop other than editing existing photos.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/DRAWING-PIGMENT-LINER-BLACK-0-05mm/dp/B0165MXLDY/ref=mp_s_a_1_10_sspa?keywords=uniball+pens+0.05&qid=1561986122&s=gateway&sr=8-10-spons&psc=1&smid=A3QAGNMJBO5UG3

Best price I've found on amazon, gets you a nice range. I suggest experimenting to find your favorites, and then buy multipacks of those.

A little known fact is that the American Communist Party had a strong and significant base of support in the South by organizing Black sharecroppers during the Great Depression.

https://www.amazon.com/Hammer-Hoe-Communists-Depression-Morrison/dp/0807842885

> Between 1929 and 1941, the Communist Party organized and led a radical, militantly antiracist movement in Alabama -- the center of Party activity in the Depression South. Hammer and Hoe documents the efforts of the Alabama Communist Party and its allies to secure racial, economic, and political reforms. Sensitive to the complexities of gender, race, culture and class without compromising the political narrative, Robin Kelley illustrates one of the most unique and least understood radical movements in American history.

>
>The Alabama Communist Party was built from scratch by working people who had no Euro-American radical political tradition. It was composed largely of poor blacks, most of whom were semiliterate and devoutly religious, but it also attracted a handful of whites, including unemployed industrial workers, iconoclastic youth, and renegade liberals. Kelley shows that the cultural identities of these people from Alabama's farms, factories, mines, kitchens, and city streets shaped the development of the Party. The result was a remarkably resilient movement forged in a racist world that had little tolerance for radicals.

In real life, the Confederacy was generally popular among the Mexican population of south Texas. Men like Santos Benavides of Laredo raised armed forces and secured high-ranking CSA commissions, and faced Union forces in battle — and often won. A great source on this phenomenon is “Tejanos in Gray”:

https://www.amazon.com/Tejanos-Gray-Fronteras-International-University/dp/160344243X

Furthermore, the 1835-1836 experience in Texas demonstrated a great willingness among Anglo-American Southerners to make common cause with Mexicans. It’s why men like Juan Seguin delivered the eulogy for the Alamo defenders — in Spanish — and Lorenzo de Zavala, a native Yucateco, served as the Republic of Texas’s first Vice President. Mexicans of the period were not moved by abolitionist sentiments, and still less by humane liberality toward enslaved blacks.

All of which is to say, don’t assume anything in this imaginary scenario. Can we conceive of a Unionist or separatist México? Sure. But what actually happened is always the best guide to what probably would have.

I have released my first full length novel today, Heartscale. It's a 125k word Draconic Fantasy, and it's is available on Amazon today!

This is the full art map for Heartscale, artwork by u/Muellerson_.

Book blurb:

>On one side of the world Graith discovers a dying dragon in his barn. While the country is hunting after the monster, he doesn’t hesitate in doing his best to aid her. Before she is even fully healed, Azelia urgently needs to get back to her cave to protect her eggs. Unable to even fly, Graith decides to accompany her, worried of what might happen.
>
>While on the other side, where the future ruler is decided by dragons, Nerie is chosen by the Kiriga, the golden hatchling. Raised as a merchant in the middle district of Roria, she’s shocked to learn that she is the king’s bastard. Thrown into a chaotic palace life, she’s forced to balance learning to be princess and being bonded to a dragon.

1. Those are the boundaries of the federated states.
2. English along with Doranian.
3. Mainly people from Ticino (Italian Switzerland) and from Lombardy (Italy) in the late '700 who were all explorers or poor immigrants, they chose to have a pacific approach with the native population which wasn't poor but not rich either (something like Czech Rep.). The natives look like north italians but with a darker skin tone and they generally resemble ostrogoth features (even through they have nothing to do with ostrogoths), men are 1.68 meters tall (on average) while women are around 1.55 - 1.60 .
4. Carrado and Blanco are two different states. 5.Yes, being Sialak its capital and also the country 's most populated city (followed by the Doranian capital, Sangas, also known as Laven or Torguarda, the ancient name).
5. They are a separate State called Zadara like its capital.
6. Yes, that is still Lontrinia. It's also the only state to have two capital cities, Gustel and Feame, forming a single metro area with a population of around 300.000 people. Lontrinia's largest city is Coliburgo (yes, there are two Coliburgos, this one and the capital of Terres Ponente).

The Big Sort

Explain this please

The main purpose of a VPN is to hide your online activity. VPNs are often used to guard against hackers and snoops on public networks, but they're also useful for hiding your IP address, browsing activity, and personal data on any Wi-Fi network even at home.

So i would suggest useing be honest i use NordVPN as it has the best price and is one of the best vpns out there. You can check it for yourself here if u want :)

_c?offer_id=15&aff_id=77658&url_id=902

It's a touch dated since it insisted upon the breakup of Russia and the democratisation of China, but it's a fun little (read.)[https://www.amazon.ca/Next-100-Years-Forecast-Century/dp/0767923057/ref=sr\_1\_1?crid=22MDVOUT9QKBM&keywords=the+next+100+years&qid=1657656991&sprefix=the+next+100%2Caps%2C80&sr=8-1\]

>No, I would spin things the other way. The United States as I see it are about as anti-imperialist as you can get, while still being the worlds greatest super power.

lmfao

No, we're just smart about our imperialism through US hegemony, 800 foreign bases across the globe as threats, and pilfering the natural resources from the Global South and East. We're smart about our Imperialism because the kind presented above? Yea, we'd actually be RESPONSIBLE for those peoples' wellbeing and the way we do it now, we're not. We can let them die or better, have the CIA back fascist coups in literally every South American country to ensure leaders who are loyal to the US see: Our involvement in regime change a list so long there's a warning at the top it's incomplete and also read: How to Hide an Empire by Daniel Immerwahr

That happens when you get your history and news from Reddit. But hey, at least there are solutions to that. I'd recommend starting here.

Ohhh it's an amazing project. I'll try to keep it short. OSM stands for OpenStreetMaps.

Basically, it's a crowdsourced alternative to Google Maps and co. You can just log in and edit the map. This is especially useful for remote areas, where big companies have no commercial value in maintaining the map. However, it also offers much more options labeling information on the map:

• Micromapping features like park benches, waste bins, bicycle stands, building entries...
• Labeling intended land usage
• Labeling surface materials of roads (dirt, asphalt, concrete, gravel...)
• Adding "imaginary borders" like ZIP-codes or voting districts
• All of the data is under an open license. You can access every bit of info that is present in the map.

Google Maps and co. also keep track of some of these things, but too often the data cannot be accessed. Many governmental, scientific and humanitarian bodies thus have switched to OSM, because it allows to access important data for all kinds of projects.

The only downside to it is: When everybody has access, it is prone to vandalism. However, the community is very aware and so far, I've actually never seen something bad happen.

My personal positive anectode: I work in a restaurant. 3 years ago, the owner changed and it has undergone some radical changes. However, we are now 2 years in trying to change our information at Google. But since we are just a small restaurant, they don't really care. Wrong opening times, old pictures, old reviews, outdated phone number. You name it. With OSM, I could just edit it in a few minutes. Also, our menu can be accessed via map, we labeled it as wheelchair-friendly, the parking lots and room capacity are shown, people know they can smoke there. Pretty important information, that is now open to everyone.

​

tl;dr Here you have the official website. It's a great tool for mapping details and visualizing data.

For the Portrait: [https://thispersondoesnotexist.com]

For the Random Ideology: [https://political-generator.herokuapp.com]

And for the Country and other stuff such has territories and the flag: Ai Dungeon

If you want a better art program for future stuff but ya don't have any money ya can use this man. https://medibangpaint.com/en/ It's completely free and just requires a tutorial run for you to get a good hold on how to use it.

Continuation of the Arab-Georgian Period series. Made with Inkscape.

I'll answer questions that I can.

Speaking only for my own community, we're still moving forward. I did a quick search for your name and it looks like Makovia CTE'd 14 years ago. You must have operated under different name. Perhaps we can try to recover it? Cheers, Orioni.

Stroulia is an island nation located in the Atlantic ocean, relatively closer to Europe and Africa than the Americas. It's roughly the size of Borneo.

Originally settled by prehistoric groups from Europe, and some from Africa, it was colonized by the English and French after having been discovered in 1465, with the English gaining the entire island in 1628 in one of the Anglo-French wars. Because of the island's rich resources, large settlement occurred, eventually leading to conflict between the native islanders and colonists. This culminated in many of the inhabitants being enslaved and taken of the island into the slave trade.

By the late 19th century, a self-identity had formed among the colonists, seeing themselves as more Stroulian than British, and thus began to push for independence, which followed the establishment of a constructed language made from European languages and elements of the ancient and mostly lost Stoulian language. Then in 1900, the island was able to gain its independence as a constitutional monarchy.

However, by 1936, the island's government had grown ever more corrupt, until a military coup overthrew the government and established a military dictatorship, which was incredibly brutal and led to a famine that killed over 1.2 million people. This would lead to the country collapsing into an intense civil war from 1957 to 1968, resulting in the end of the dictatorship and reestablishment of democracy.

Today, Stroulia is a flourishing democratic nation and a highly functioning economy, the 12th largest in the world, with a population of about 12.3 million. They maintain good relations with the UK, and are part of NATO.

~~

Link to country: https://www.nationstates.net/nation=stroulia

NationStates ( https://www.nationstates.net) Is a political simulator/forum where you play as a fictional nation of your creation. We use it for our RP simply because we met there, and it's handy for nation RP like ours.

I just go the simple route and use This Person Does Not Exist but I'm sure you could setup your own neural network and train it on old photos if you wanted to make it the easiest possible process.

What do you mean realized?

If you mean how I made it, it was with Photopea / https://www.photopea.com/
Some people say that it's kind of dogshit, but if it works, it works :)

I suggest using one of our recommended programs instead of a website (unless that website is https://www.photopea.com/ ). There are a lot of ways to make maps with these programs, but the most popular one is tracing over the coastlines of an existing map.

DO NOT use ms paint unless you want the worst challenge of your life. Learn to use Inkscape or Paint.net. Both can take some time to get use to but they make your maps 10x better.

I know you can download mods for Paint.net too. Don't know if it's the same for inkscape.

unfortunately I don't think they will, they tend to be pretty strict about that rule. it shouldn't be to hard to do this without mapchart, though -- you can download GIMP, a really simple image editor, and then use this map (cropped to North America for your purposes) to make an even better version of your map. the thing might look intimidating, but for your purposes you only need a few pretty intuitive tools

Interesting question. This source says the angular size of Venus varies from 10 to 60 arc seconds. Let's use 10 to give it the best chance of surviving. That's 0.000048 radians, so about a solid angle of 2E-9 steradians, so Venus gets hit by a fraction 2E-10 of the energy, so about 2E32 Joules. Venus has a mass of about 5E24 kg, and it's mostly made of rock, which has a specific heat capacity of about 2000 J/kg/K, so a total heat capacity of 1E28 J/K.

In conclusion, the energy that hits Venus is sufficient to raise the temperature of the entire planet by about 1000 K. That's probably about enough to melt the entire thing. Of course in practice the heat won't be evenly distributed across the rock, so it will probably vaporise a large proportion of the surface rock into plasma which will be stripped into space.

This is a map I made for a fictional scenario in which China falls apart after an unsuccessful invasion of Taiwan. I drew much inspiration from "China Tidal Wave,"a 1991 political novel by Chinese dissident and environmentalist Wang Lixiong.

I didn't include a timeline of the events, but you can pretty much figure that out by reading the passages I wrote for the entities involved.

Check out my DeviantArt page for more ficational flags and imaginary maps I made.

You bet! NationStates is an online geopolitical simulator where you can create your own nation and mold it to your personal taste. It’s fairly simple to get started. Here is mine for example https://www.nationstates.net/klyjanoragh. I hope to see you around! I think you’ll enjoy it. If you have any other questions regarding getting started, don’t hesitate to ask.

You bet. NationStates is a geopolitical online situation where you get to create your own nation and mold it to your personal taste. It’s fairly simple to get started. Here is mine for example https://www.nationstates.net/klyjanoragh. Hope you hope on the train and enjoy!

Bunch of background for those interested here.

I did this all in GIMP, stitching together screenshots of google earth all from the United States, mostly centered around the Midwest. The names are Quechua (Incan), Dutch, and English origins as my nation is the result of a bilingual Dutch-English (Akin to Belgium, but French swapped for English) nation colonizing an Incan-esque landlocked region.

"Do you agree to the founding of a Greater Union of All Slavs, encompassing East Germania, Caucasia and Polonia, under the rulership of <em>Tsarina Anastasia II Romanova</em>?"

This was the question that the various people of the conquered territories were asked, at gunpoint, as rumor would have it. The referendum was a success, but the European Association did not recognize it, while the Empire of Albion stood neutral, leaning towards support. Whether Slavonia will further expand or not, is to be seen.

Sure, well if you’re familiar with Nation States that’s where me and a mate (International law student) one day found out we both play and we started discussing the games and being general Politics/Sociology/Diplomacy/History nerds, and our fellow nerd friends overheard and before long we all had countries.

However nationstates isn’t exactly great for big groups, and we didn’t gel with the larger community and so we made our own forum and had a running game for several years until it petered out as we transitioned into (young) adults.

However now we’re looking at starting a new one, so I made the map and countries and we’re currently fishing for some fresh ideas. If you’re interested, we take in new people all the time - so long as you can handle the kind of bants you get when a single group of gamers has played together for years... :)

paint.NET is free to download and a far better alternative than the original paint from Microsoft. I highly recommend it.

If you want an online tool for editing images, try pixlr.com

There are many different programs one can use to make maps:

Paint.NET: The best raster program around, it's like Photoshop had a child with MS Paint. It's simple to use, intuitive, and can be modified with plugins. It's the program I personally use for my maps.

Inkscape: A vector editing program, it's the program used by Wikipedia mapmakers, and the program used by many other mapmakers on this very subreddit; it can produce maps of really high quality, but it may take a while to get fully used to it. Also modifiable with plugins.

GIMP: This program has a little bit of everything. While it can be inconvenient to use at times, it has some insanely powerful tools to make maps with. Modifiable with plugins.

Photoshop: The classic, the prime raster editing program. A bit complicated to manage, and it has many tools you're never going to use, but it's still the single most powerful image editing program around. Not modifiable with plugins.

Photopea: A lovechild of Photoshop and GIMP, it can be used in your browser (https://www.photopea.com). It's pretty advanced.

MS Paint: Very basic and not recommended, but you can still make some good stuff with it. Not modifiable with plugins.

ibisPaint X: A drawing app for your phone, it can be used to make some pretty good maps, but it's only recommended if you don't have access to a computer.

MediBang Paint: Another drawing program, which can be used in your PC or your phone. Quite good, but not exactly made for anything resembling mapmaking.

There are many other programs one may use to make maps, but the ones I've listed are the most commonly used ones.

Dam. I need to start utilising Coral Draw (In my case Inkscape). I keep telling myself that it's the next step for me in making fancy looking maps, but never actually give myself the time to learn to use it.

The area of interest in a DnD campaign my friend group is playing. As a part of world-building, I generated a world in Dwarf Fortress and put together a comprehensive set of maps, showing things like climate and rainfall that could be used in-game.

This is a special render of part of the map, with some filters and overlays, to represent an actual map an in-game character might see. Tattered edges, drink stains, and sloppy drawing to give it character.

Made in GIMP.

Was playing around with the Azgarr's Fantasy Map Generator's new update that adds battles, ended up making an interesting world. No lore really, except for the three Unification wars. This is my first serious map btw, feel free to rate!

Tools used: Azgaar's Fantasy Map Generator, paint.net

^(boy I sure do hope I didn't fuck anything major up)

This is a map I posted a few days ago, and I thought it would better fit here. I put what was going on in the comment section in the original post.

For those wondering, this was done through the usage of : https://azgaar.github.io/Fantasy-Map-Generator/

I initially used Azgaar's Fantasy Map Generator to get a somewhat realistic map without straight-edge borders or other weird geography. I converted the world by hand, drawing over the land by alt-tabbing between WonderDraft and an image export from the Generator. From that point it was just a matter of putting in all the terrain and towns.

The generator doesn't necessarily create the most inspired terrain, so I added some of that in myself. Stuff like lake- and terrain-names are also not included, so you can really see that I cut some corners on that part. I added in "Kingdom of Ohmun" myself, which didn't exist before the start of my homebrew campaign.

Two more questions (these are the last ones I swear to god):

1: I remember you liked my last book recommendation so I thought I'd try another: Have you read Micronations: The Lonely Planet Guide to Home-Made Nations? I know there's a fine line between Micronations and Microstates but I still think this'll interest you. It's a bit outdated (about 15 years old), it can't seem to decide what age group it's targeting and it may take you a while to locate a reasonably priced copy of it (check your local library if you're having difficulties). But it's pretty entertaining and it's a good read so I think you'll like it. You may even be able to find Microstate inspiration in it.

2: A while back I asked you what your username meant and you said it was meaningless. The reason I asked was because it was really ringing a bell for some reason and I didn't know why. I still don't know why. Are you sure it doesn't mean anything? I just seem to remember it for some reason. I wondered if your name was similar to the name of a band I used to listen to or the username of someone I used to play with, but I don't know. I was just wondering if you had any clue. It's probably nothing, just something that's been bugging me for a while. Thanks.

because im me, here is a totally unprompted book suggestion if you want it. It is a short, easy read about Australia's history / situation from a First Nations' perspective. If that grabs you, here is a similar one from a Canadian perspective

(no worries if you are like "wtf, no thank you" I get this is unprompted, just wanted to share these stories with you/this comment section as I believe them important)

If you're looking for books then Albion's Seed is good. It explains the cultural and political implications the Scottish, Quaker, Puritan, Irish, and Plantation owners, and slaves/blacks had in forming the American identity and their diaspora.

Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee is also a good one. It was written in the 70s so expect outdated terms but it tells the story of American expansion from the perspective of the Plains Indians.

Something that also might be important is Flight of the Eagle by Conrad Black. The book tells the history of the United States from the French & Indian War to the 90s in how it went from a bunch of Englishmen loyal to London to THE global power and the many different conflicts it took to get there.

Here's the rest of my book wishlist on American history if you're interested, not sure how useful they'll be.

• The Barbarous Years by Bernard Bailyn “The Peopling of British North America - The Conflict of Civilizations, 1600-1675”

The Absent Superpower by Peter Zeihan “The Shale Revolution and a World without America”

• A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn

Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Brown “An Indian History of the American West”

• Common Sense by Thomas Paine
• Albion’s Seed by David Hackett Fischer “Four British Folkways in North America”

Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History: Gwynne, S. C.: 8589671111113: Amazon.com: Books

How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States: Immerwahr, Daniel: 9780374172145: Amazon.com: Books

At what point in time? And with what percentage of genetic background? The modern English are typically only something like 35% Anglo-Saxon and odds are that if you went back to the time of Alfred the Great most would be far less because it was the ruling class that were Germanic and their genes hadn't disseminated very far into the main population. Instead the dominant male line traces back to Iberia and the female line came from Iberia through Francia and Germania, then crossed over from Scandinavia.

It's a big mistake to think that culture and genetics are somehow linked. In fact, it's this exact fallacy that led Hitler to believe the the British would join him. If he hadn't believed this the British Expeditionary Force may well have never been given the reprieve that allowed it to escape from Dunkirk.

The history of England is really the story of a population that adapted to successive invasions by adopting each new ruling class's culture, but maintained a fairly strong genetic link going back to the Bell Beaker People. No doubt this map makes similar errors in every grouping but I only know about the British thanks to having read The Origins of the British: The new prehistory of Britain from Ice Age hunter gatherers to Vikings as revealed by DNA analysis. Before you spread more fallacious information like this you might start by doing some more reading.

I have recently noticed that many hand-drawn maps are simply photographed, rather than properly scanned. While I admit that not everyone is able to acquire a proper scanner, I am still concerned about the potential loss of detail & overall quality, that may result from improper camera use.

As such, I am writing this post to provide a possible solution. For those who use Android devices, I recommend Photoscan. Developed by Google themselves, it's very simple yet intuitive to use. I myself have used it countless times in not only photographing old pictures, but my own drawings & even physical maps!

I must emphasize that this option is recommended for those who aren't confident in their equipment or photographic skills. I am also currently unsure of this it's availability on Apple devices or any equivalents.

Regardless, I hope this suggestion is greatly utilised. Thank you all for your wonderful works, I hope to see more in the near future!

What a fascinating map. I find your drawings oddly intriguing, & therefore hope you further develop your skills in the future!

Speaking of, do you have access to an Android? I ask because I recommend this app called Photoscan. Developed by Google themselves, it's very simple to use, yet intuitive & surprisingly powerful. I've found it very useful in scanning both old photos and my own drawings!

Anyway, thanks for your contribution to this subreddit. Hope you share us more of your work!

You could try this app I use called Notebloc, its like a scanner in your phone; it whitens out the paper and it can work with pencils but works better with pens.

It goes even deeper than that. Fritz Fischer pretty convincingly demonstrated as far back as the early 1960s that the Imperial German government deliberately hoped to instigate a war.

He published a number of books on the topic, the two most well know of which are Griff nach der Weltmacht: Die Kriegszielpolitik des kaiserlichen Deutschland 1914–1918 (published in English as Germany's Aims in the First World War) and Krieg der Illusionen (War of Illusions).

Although not without some criticism, the gist of his thesis (which he formulated after reading all available Imperial archives throughout the 1950s) is that the Third Reich's policies of Lebensraum and asserting itself as the master of Europe, was nothing new. Rather they were the primary foreign policy goals of every successive German government after unification. In the early 20th, the government was heavily influenced by conservative and nationalist interest groups that wanted to provoke a war.

Its somewhat mind-boggling that this notion of Germany being an innocent victim drawn into the Great War is still so ingrained when it has been pretty convincingly rebuked since the 60s. A lot of conservative Germans weren't willing to except it themselves. They were willing to except that the blame for the Second World War belonged to Germany, but not for the First. It was so controversial that the offices of Fischer's publisher was firebombed.

The Chronicle of the Jali: Redemption of Storms, an African inspired epic fantasy, that draws inspiration from historical African empires, like the Ashanti, Malian, Abyssinian and many more.

Book one follows a boy on the run from an ancient empire on the brink of collapse. Koujo must navigate the perils of leadership and political brinkmanship as he assembles an army to conquer the land before it collapses into total civil war.

So if this sounds like a read you may enjoy, then join Koujo on his journey to conquer the empire!

Amazon US

Amazon UK

https://www.amazon.com/Historical-Atlas-Medieval-World-600/dp/0760719756/ref=sr_1_4?s=instant-video&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1507954622&amp;sr=8-4&amp;keywords=historical+atlas

If he's also into history or worldbuilding, something like this would be awesome! Any of John Haywood's Atlases are great though (he's got some for almost every historical period)

look to American Nations for further reference on the original settlements --> colonies, etc, and how that culture has continued. i like your modern touches out west along the pacific.

If they like fantasy maps this is a nice book:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/How-Draw-Fantasy-Art-Maps/dp/1440340242

You can probably find it cheaper somewhere else. If they like different styles of maps then there will probably be books for that as well.

You could also get old atlases quite cheap which show different ways of making maps and how territory has changed over time.

If you're from the UK you can buy old OS maps of certain areas, there may be similar maps for different countries.