The Manix Map: Step One (Waters) & Step Two (Mountains)

Manix: Water & Continental Outlines

Manix: Mountain Ranges & Elevations

My partner has run a variety of D&D games in his home-brew fantasy setting called Manix. First created when he was in high school, it's seen a wide variety of adventures and gaming shenanigans, and a large number of players have trod its soil through the years.

Recently, he decided he wanted to return to Manix for the purpose of running a D&D Next game (using the last iteration of playtest rules). So, I volunteered to take his binder full of notes and lovingly hand-drawn maps and apply a little Photoshop wizardry to them.

This map uses the Saderan Tutorial I've mentioned before, from the geniuses at the Cartographer's Guild.

Since I already had a map of the place, I didn't need to generate a new continent outline.

Instead, I created the base layer of clouded black-and-white (see the tutorial for what I'm talking about here) and then pasted the map I had in a layer above it. I then reduced the Opacity of that map layer low enough to where I could see the black-and-white layer beneath it, and then shaped the landmasses below.

Now, although Manix is a flat-world created by magic, and so doesn't necessarily have to follow terrestrial standards for things, I still wanted to use what little I know about the basics of plate tectonics to figure out what its subaquatic geography and mountain ranges should look like. So, on another layer, I simply drew in some red lines as rough guidelines, basing them on where my partner had already put mountains in his setting.

After that, I put some detail into the water for the map, as you can see in the first map above. After that, I went ahead and added in the mountain ranges, layer-by-layer, until I finished with what you see in the second map above: a continent cluster full of various mountain ranges.

Total Time Spend in Map Creation by this Point: 2-3 hours