Well, I got sidetracked once again. After finishing to trace the remaining mountain flank lines I realized that there weren’t too many additional features left to digitize. So I went ahead and completed data collection. The result is this svg file containing all the shapes required to recreate the 3.5e Faerun map:

A critical part of the data collection was finding the names for many of these features. A good number of mountains, rivers and hills (as well as many other features) of the 3rd edition map are unlabeled. Still, their canonical names can be uncovered by researching detail maps from campaign books and previous editions. My main sources to complete the map data were:

• The Forgotten Realms Interactive Atlas (2e)
• The Forgotten Realms Atlas (1e)
• The “Lands of Faerûn” section of Realmshelp.net
• Adam Whitehead’s latest maps of Toril and Faerun
• The Forgotten Realms Fandom Wiki

Cross-referencing features between the various atlases revealed where the 3rd edition maps made significant changes and also introduced what seems to be minor mistakes. As previously discussed, most regions of the map have been squashed or streched but that is a reversible operation. The regions to the east of Amn however changed massively, with the Snowflake mountains moving far south and completely replacing the Kuldin peaks. This will require manual intervention when we transfer the 3e visual style back to the 2e shape.

What is missing

With all the available sources I was able to find names for a vast majority of map features. What remains are some mountains, tributary rivers, and smaller islands that are not mentioned on any other maps. To give them an identifier, I named these shapes “Unnamed” + plus the closest relevant named feature. (E.g. Unnamed Baldur’s Gate Islands for the 4 small islands west of the city).

Some features, particularly tributary rivers, were listed in source books as “unnamed” but there might be some names that eluded me during my search. So this is where I am setting out a call for help (mostly to other redditors). Below is a version of the raw data svg with all nameless features marked in red. If you know the name for any of them or at least know where I might find it I would appreciate a message to this reddit thread or a PM to u/the_domokun.

But with at least the shape data collection complete, I can return to making it look like 3e in the next post.