Made up Historical Maps

Did them in a big rush, so they are not that pretty. Although they did give me a lot of ideas. 

I basically used Google Maps and took screen shots of the places and traced over them. Its harder than 

it seemed and it would have been better if i did them in Inkscape than in GIMP. 

Lessons Learned

• Use Ink scape and start my own Gdocs notepad of my own notes for how to use it. 
• Solid colors and shapes, would be useful when using Inkscape. Since they are vector I can zoom in and out. Of course as vector maps and program, It will require my newer notebook computer than this older one. Such detailed maps are going to be very ram and processor consuming. (its not like I can afford an 8 core sigh...) 
• The best thing about Vector is in a JOINT-project. someone can just add more detail when they have thee time, and you have a new map. You see a lot of Vector maps in Wikipedia in the historical sections about Rome and Byzantium. 
• I have to prepare brushes and tools ahead of time. Develop some legends on how to draw mountains and the like. I guess I will need to spend some hours researching in the cartographers guild. 
• Towns are hell small, I noticed that the ruins of their walls are still visible in Google Maps. They about a few hundred meters across. It would not take much time to walk from one edge to the other, and it would be hard to get lost in a town compared to our standards of complexity now. 
• When i do taranto I'll try to do it in vector. With Haven in my other campaign, I'm basing haven from Manila, Rio, and HK and adding some more geological features. I really need a season break to prepare more materials. 
• You really dont need much details, relative positions and landscape. Google Maps, you have to type out Terrain to get the terrain features which is not part of the options anymore. 
• Mapping the mediaval world even if its not going to be accurate is going to be useful in many ways, for history lovers and gamers a like. Even if its not going to be accurate, just having a foundation to work on is so much of the workload off the GM's or story writer's shoulders. 

Here is another Useful map from +Winchell Chung