Kristy Shields has made an incredible map of Ravensgate, her picaresque Gothic fantasy city. She made it with hundreds of layers, so she can turn on and off things like building numbers, street names, neighborhood colors, parchment background, and so on–on a neighborhood by neighborhood basis!
She has helped me with a number of maps, but this is quite a magnum opus of Photoshop map-making. Check this thing out! (And tell her how cool it is here.)
that is gorgeous! Although i will always have a place in my heart for hand made maps, that appear as they would in the game world. My mate Slick made this one for a game world of his own designing.
http://www.hugs-site.co.uk/forum/index.php?topic=855.msg15298#msg15298
Slick’s map is very cool! But it has typing on it; surely it was at least modified in the computer?
At any rate, I’ve done a LOT of hand-drawn maps in my time. I even have one I did on a sheet of newsprint in a frame on the wall. Trouble is, they are hard to share. Hard to label. Hard to update. Hard to “drill down” to get more detail. While I think hand drawn maps have a charm of their own, I also think their versatility is so limited that I will only go back to them for player props.