Tackling the Beast: Drafting up Map17 to 19 (Patreon)

I have begun the long journey of planning Map17, 18 and 19. This is definitely the biggest chunk of level design I've worked on so far, so it will be a tough challenge to pull out. I really need to put my best talents at work here, and get something on Gothic's level of open-ish map design (especially the aspect of exploration, expansion and backtracking being tied in with meaningful quests). 

So far I am planning to sketch out chunks of the wilderness and then switch to mapping them out, then back to sketching further and so on. This should help me get a general feel of things, so expect me to post sketches and screenshots these weeks.