There are several issues with it. The first thing you'll notice is that it's not complete. Most of the cities are not named yet and not all the roads are drawn in. The most important part of the map for the first novel is the Mountain Province and it's more complete than the other regions. I was generally filling in the details as I needed them for the book.
The second problem is that the map is of the modern 'altitude' contours type. It looks pretty enough but it limits the narrative freedom to have a high mountain where the story needs it to be or rugged hills where they need to be or hidden valleys. It limits narrative freedom, full stop.
The map was generated with software that used fractal algorithms to create 'realistic' looking global maps. Then I used other software to convert the image into vector form so that I could use a vector art package to add the cities, names and other details. I prefer to do this with vectors because the writing and other features can be scaled more freely up or down.
I'm working on a new version of the map but it's not ready to show yet. It's only a background thing I do when I need a break from writing.
A.I.Marin
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