After finishing a campaign set in the Forgotten Realms, I decided to make my own setting for the next game...

Hey mate, you might find the tutorials and such in this thread to be of use:

How often do your games need whole continents? I think you'll find that most published settings have a smaller landmass than Australia

True, but that feels less realistic to me

bump

>Australia
>A continent
>Small land mass

The reason Australia looks so small on maps is because full maps of the earth are designed so that they have the same dimensions as a sphere which makes all the latitudes and longitudes match up to a grid. Thanks to the position of Antarctica, the earth is actually slightly pear-shaped. All of the southern hemisphere is a lot more stretched out than it appears on a map.

Australia is 5% of the world's landmass, it's not that big.

The whole Greyhawk map of the Flanaess is only slightly smaller than the land area of Africa. I think Ravenloft might be the smallest of the old D&D setting lines, and it's still reasonably big.

Draw it. Spend a month on photoshop. Then hate it, cut it into pieces and put it back together. Then spend another month on photoshop, and repeat about 5 more times and you'll have one continent you almost like.

Pic related. I'm almost done with the top right, can finally redo biomes and color. Haven't even redrawn the other three once yet. I hate them now, but it's fine, because I currently am only deeply developing that tiny region to the left at the moment. That continent is about 5.5k miles across.

>That continent is about 5.5k miles across.
That planet is about twice the size of Earth.

No it isn't, it's like 2/3.

that Tidpoole thumbs up
>Tidpoole likes this

the only time I bothered with large scale and detail... I took the united states and oriented it South/north. Then tweeking.
Because I know enough Geology to realize when I'm fucking something up, but not enough to make something up from the start that works.

You sure? If 820/3600 pixels is 5500 miles at 60° north you end up with a radius of 7700 miles - about twice that of Earth.

Compare the circumferences. It's about 16000 miles across at 60 North there, and the circumference of Earth is 25000 mi.

Maybe I'm misinterpreting what was supposed to be 5500 miles

Oh, I was running of the other continent, because of it being the only one with colour.

Ah, in that case it seems about right

I wonder if user's taken into account the fact that a planet with a radius of 7700 mi would have roughly 2G gravity at the surface if the density's the same.

>305x326
What is this, a map for ants?

donjon.bin.sh/world/
You're welcome.

Yeah I was talking about the rightmost continent. I planned for about 16k diameter or something, I don't exactly remember.

*Circumference, not diameter.

As for gravity, I'm just gonna go with the "insert whatever density to make it 1G" approach.

youtube.com/watch?v=6o7jfinhYmA
youtube.com/watch?v=KheDy8EiDU8

Each video is about 2 hrs long and is a bit rambly since he's building a map with people, but it might give you ideas on how to get started.

Blood, Sweat, and Tears

or in my case I throw up sai and mess around with colors, then try to keep my players from ever obtaining an overworld map until inspiration strikes

It's really just not that big.

That'd make the planet somewhat more dense than Earth, so maybe metals would be more common at the surface. Or not, the extra mass could be further in.

Usually, I start with a general shape for the land masses, refine it a bit and then draw the coastline.

At this point I scan the map as I draw by hand, but for the quick example I didn't because walking to my scanner would take more effort than the map itself.

Then I redraw/refine the coastline in gimp and colour the thing. The mountains in this example came from brushes I made years ago to easily mark landscape.

In terms of looks I pretty much figured things out by trial and error, but you can go look up various tutorials or just copy from maps you like.

It's probably good to refresh your geology, while people generally don't care if your plate tectonics is a bit of and magic reshaped some mountains, it's good to avoid massive fuck-ups like a river starting in a desert and flowing up into the lake atop the highest mountain of your world. Of course you can always just say the map was drawn by a guy in-universe and blame all the errors on them.

Not only is it not really that big, it's particularly small when the authors try to make you believe that the distance from Sydney to Perth (similar to Atlanta to LA) is enough to contain all of their western, middle eastern, and east asian fantasy nations.

>avoid massive fuck-ups like a river flowing up
Speaking of which, what the fuck is going on with those rivers?

Actually doing something smilair as that map there works
For my campagin I used a zoomed in falklands island and flip it 90 degrees and traced the map, works very well

They're just some decoration that I spent literally thirty seconds on. It's not like I was planning to ever use that map for anything.

Here you go user, I have successfully extended the process to cover an entire world.

Sir, please draw a line on a world map from LA to Atlanta, then compare it's length to Europe on the same world map

I use auto relm. Its great program (free) and you can make some decent maps with it if you take the time. It'll never look like something you make on photoshop, but it will do the job if you just want to make an old timmy looking world map.

that is a tasty world map you have there. love the floooowwwww

>Literally everything is in the southern hemisphere
>except for the vast continent of the "northern wastes," no doubt home to tribes of warrior-seafarers that totally aren't vikings you guys!
it's fucking shit

I still won't give up on this as a setting.

Yes, you get my point.
Since in this scenario, which is pretty common in fantasy worlds, LA=Paris, Dallas=Tehran, and Atlanta=Beijing.

>47453175
I, , always keep this saved on my phone, just as a reference.

touch up australia a little bit and it could have a hope of passing, as it is its pretty obvious

It's supposed to be the Earth rotated ninety degrees, like from XKCD, but with more care spent figuring out the climate.

The touching up was about getting rid of glacial features in some places and adding them in others.