I made a homebrew map for my homebrew D&D campaign. Welcome to Fel'Way.

Starting with the finished map. This took me about 2 weeks in total of tinkering, usually spending hours placing a texture, replacing a texture, reverting to the original texture and then starting all over again.

Here is a list of all the links I used for inspiration/textures and credit to the people who made them - it upped the quality of the map enormously!

My Map Making Process in Inkarnate by Jacristi:
http://imgur.com/gallery/fIm72

Inkarnate Texture Gallery by volz_rocksti
https://www.reddit.com/r/inkarnate/comments/62fivu/inkarnate_texture_gallery_im_back_yall/

8 New fan-made textures by Spadie
https://www.reddit.com/r/inkarnate/comments/5snbd6/8_new_fanmade_textures/

My original campaign plan was to take a section of the Faerûn map, homebrew my own locations in there and use the land as a template for what I wanted. Then I stumbled across Inkarnate and attempted to make it from scratch.

I initially half-assed it, and had something looking similar to the Faerûn map but with its own flair. My friends joked about the square rivers and I wasn't happy with the scale of it so I moved on to a ver2.0.

Here is what I came up with, and that was all I was going to do.

I have DM'd 1 session so far, so I'm a complete novice and don't expect the party to get EVERYWHERE in the north, let alone anywhere else, but it was fun and cathartic, so I carried on. Maybe I could build a map that we could use to stick one shot sessions in, and (for fun) I could write some lore for the areas.

It turns out world building and imagining the stories within the world is my jam.

QUICK TIP: For land, I started off with big round chunky areas, then used a 3 thickness brush to subtract around the edges and let my hand wander - then I turned 'add' back on and started giving the shapes I created some structure.

This whole area happened accidentally. I used the wrong colour green for the ground and it looked like a thick woodland, so I placed trees on top of it. Where the river enters my main chunk of land naturally had an indent so I leant into it.

QUICK TIP: Place trees, hills and mountains on the map, highlight them, and move them on top of each other to make areas denser. Default placement of each object will leave too big of a space in my opinion.

I added this section because the south west land looked too smooth. It originally followed the path of the cost where Old Southport is and up towards the desert, but I had an idea to add a new land that was rising up from the ocean floor, or the sea level was lowering - either way, it was something I could turn into a story where there are loads of unexplored caverns and caves.

Old Southport is in a little bit of trouble since the port is mostly dry now, all the trade has left so it also opens up interesting options for storylines about what will happen in the area for the residents.

The illithid isles happened because the cthulu looking land was a happy accident so again, I leant into it and tried to shape it a little more. Then I had the purple texture and wanted something to do with it - I think it looks cool.

The North West area took form when I started asking myself questions about where the foot of the mountain was - I imagined it being really dificult terrtain and growing out of the ground almost like an old tree with many roots and branches. Then I thought it would be cool to have a ruined city from a previous eruption and because of that the nearby land would have also been affected, leading to a hot springs area and a sort of blasted lands called She'ol Basin (She'ol being an old Jewish word for a grave or a place where people bury their dead I think).

The desert was originally much bigger, but I think the charred land between the Semiarid Steppes and The Calmlands makes sense to differentiate the two areas. I then had to use all my willpower not to stick things in the calmlands - less is more some of the time.