How do you like my map so far guys? It's for a 5e campaign

Alt+PrtScr and you'll never recieve this kind of replies

Bland as tofu

I'm more interested in what program this is

It looks alright, but everything seems really bland. You've got the westlands where everyone civilized lives, the Deepwoods where the elves live, the plains and mountains where various flavors of barbarians live, and the badlands where the ugly monsters we don't like live.

It looks nice at least, just fairly basic.

Inkarnate. It's pretty good all things considered.

Oh my God
.did you

Photograph

Your fucking screen

It looks ok, if I was picky and annoying I'd say that there is a lack of rivers and those mountain chains dont make much sense geologically speaking but that would probably not bother you in a campaign

Screencapping this thread

This needs to stop at once.

those names are incredibly generic and boring
looks like an mmo

>This needs to stop at once.

Fuck you

That shit is pretty hilarious. Good job user.

caught in a landslide, no escape from reality...

...

It always bugs me that this doesn't have notJapan off in the sea.

10/10 would play

You're a weeb and a dumbass. It doesn't have Japan because it's making fun of fantasy maps, not a map of our world.

>not having not-japan in your hackey fantasy setting

user =/

You're right I guess I just imagined all those shitty asian supplements that plague the hobby. Sorry for pissing off your Niggnerness

>leeward sides of mountain ranges not forming a single desert/arid area

What the fuck is wrong with you?

It's pretty funny, I capped it for future use

OK, full consensus is that it's bland. So how could OP improve this?

Personally, I don't like the fact that it's got no proper nouns in there. I started getting irritated with that when the first collection of YA novels started getting made into films. (No Sherwood Forest, no Lothlorien, just "Deepwood", two mundane words smashed together.)

io9.gizmodo.com/10-rules-for-making-better-fantasy-maps-1680429159

Literally the first point in the first response I got by googling "how to make a good fantasy map" mentions that maps need to tell a story. You can see history in a map. Even the map of Westeros with its ridiculously rectangular outline has a few proper nouns, and details like an enormous fucking wall or the fact that Dragonstone is on the right. Those details tell a story.

Second point on that list is that the map should keep the viewer in mind, meaning your potential players, which brings me to the second cliche that jumps out at me: it's a series of islands with nothing outside them. You don't need to make a world map, you need to map the area the players will be exploring and put all your attention and detail into that area. Real maps have edges that cut out detail the mapmaker didn't think was important. "Here be dragons, or some other shit, whatever, I don't care." Keeps you from putting interesting stuff in a place your PCs will never see, and tells the story of what people who get maps made in this world care about.

I too would play it.

General map dump thread ?

With history!! And as you say some common sense.

First of all, names. They mean something. Why is it called the golden sea? I pressume it's not for the color of the water, and trade routes have been historically sources of wealth and commerce. So, let's imagine the golden sea is rich as f%ck. Like, you make a good deal there and the elephant carrying your goods is free. You could put trade cities in there, from one continent to the other, around the coastlines, etc.

I tried to draw some nation territories, but the lack of natural barriers (and any kind of history) caused me some troubles.

It occurs to me that the coastal nations close to the river should be the richest of them all, if a bit fragmented. Kinda like italy back in the day. The forest nations, on the other hand, are the most isolated, requiring months or years of travel just to reach.

I think bland and generic maps are good for d&d, but the names suck. And as others mentioned, fucking screenshot.

Ok, so I understand I shouldn't have taken a pic with my phone lmao, sorry all.

So besides the names, where could I improve? I don't have too many tools in inkarnate. As far as the names go, I named the Golden Sea the Golden Sea because yes, that's where the most wealth lies as far as sea trade goes. I also named it that because there is a lot of pirating and the pirates are, of course, after gold. So it's the Golden Sea because they get the most gold from that sea.

And as far as generic names go, real life is generic. I don't think everything has to have some super tolkien fantasy name. I mean come on, irl we have the fucking Rocky Mountains........

Rocky. Mountains.

Also, I look at it as two continents, not two islands.

>Screenshot
>The names

Absolutely masterful bait thread, well done user.

Also if it helps, I'm drawing this map from a human perspective. So the names, are gonna be in common tongue, generic, etc.... maybe it's called Deepwood to humans, but the wood elves call it something else in their native language. Idk why humans would name a forest an elven name if they aren't elvish

Tell us about your world, man. The map is okay, I guess. But what really matters is the content.

What's wrong with Print Screen you monster?

>And as far as generic names go, real life is generic. I don't think everything has to have some super tolkien fantasy name. I mean come on, irl we have the fucking Rocky Mountains........
>Rocky. Mountains.

Don't ever be afraid to use common words as the names to places, OP.

The trick to making cool names for locations is in the choices of words to use. "Highpoint" implies a city built on a cliff or maybe a mountainside, while "Cloudspire" implies that it might actually be above the cloud level.

Rate and hate.

Beat me to it.

However I am tempted to develop Clichea as a campaign setting with its tongue firmly planted in its cheek.

Maybe because the elves were there first and they learned about it from them?

I mean, come on, think of all the place names in the Americas that come from the original native names for those places, or the way we refer to place names in other countries. The name for the forest in common might be a bit of a butchery of the proper elven name, but not an outright translation. For instance, in English we say "Austria" instead of "Österreich", but we don't call it "Eastrealm".

Open your eyes, look up to the sky and see.

Why is your map a rectangle?

I'm just a poor boy, I need no sympathy.

Why couldn't it be?

Because mountains don't usually come in box shape, user. Your map would be instantly improved if you just cut out the mountains, even if that left the rivers sourceless

>Hillfort
>Duplex
>Icicle
>Lagoon
>Glacier

This nigga needs to spend some time in the City of Lernin'

My general rule for making a map of a fantasy land (not that I make many of those) is to first design the geography, then the climate, then the history, and at last the places.

That order is important, because it allows for an organic flow. Of course, it is perfectly valid (and encouraged) to have an end result in mind while doing that, while being flexible enough.

So, think of what do you want? One elven land? 2? Where do the humans come from? What's the history of the main human culture(s)? What existing cultures do you want to copy, and how?

That sort of stuff, it only takes a day of thinking, but it ads depth to the whole thing. More importantly, it serves as a seed from which more depth and lore can be drawn in a pinch.

You don't need to write an enciclopedia of your fantasy land, but if you have the general story of the main lands figured out, you can improvise if you need it without breaking inmersion.

Usually being the key word here.

I fail to see the mountain box.

To be fair, there's places in the UK named shit like 'Bath' ( named after local Roman baths ). Plus most British place names are actually old-English words for whatever they were: mentalfloss.com/article/88110/ham-sandwich-40-odd-british-place-names

Hillsfuhrt being a place at the base of a mountain isn't that unreasonable.

>I started playing DnD at 5th ed: The map.

Look below the cordillera cantabrica, and above the sistema central. Then turn your head 60 degrees to the right.

...

I like it.
What program do you use?

Program?

>No Sherwood Forest, just "Deepwood"
You know Sherwood is literally just "shire wood" (as in, the wood controlled by Nottinghamshire), right? It only sounds interesting because it's not modern English.
It's the same reason Sahara desert sounds unique, when Sahara is literally just "desert".
That's not an unbroken wall of mountain, dipshit.

Inkarnate maps.

It's totally free. Give it a Google.

Thanks found it hang on making mine.

Mountains are fractals anyways, if you want a perfect square mountain better get a good chisel and get started.

For most purposes, for most people that is a square mountain chain.

Fuck that pseudo science. Is the Sahara desert in the leeward side of a mountain? No. Is the middle fucking east? No. Holy shit I wish morons would stop with that meme.

Thoughts?

George made me smile

If you're going for that naming style, then just call "Suthvest Harbire" "Southwest Harbor."

George is a cool dude.

You can literally export that from Inkarnate as a PNG.

reddit

Most pre-modern maps aren't intended to be photo/geographically-realistic. They would often just be shaped to match the paper.

far better than OPs

This is an interesting criticism. aren't most maps either generic and realistic, or batshit insane snowflake nightmares

i read a story once about a boy that went to a pair of islands that said no

>Using shading for terrain.
>Adding small bits of detail.
>Using map making software.
Virgin detected.

...

>Temple of Cod
House Codd will claim the Iron Throne yet!

R8

Why are all the settlements off the rivers?

Explosive tadpoles. (not the guy who did that map)

Personally, one way I come up with names is to take them verbatim (or only slightly changed) from real settlements and locations. Here I've just gone onto google maps and zoomed into a random village in England. Aside from the M4 Low Cost Vans, pretty much every name here could come out of a typical medieval fantasy (my particular favourites are the Cross Keys Inn and Hollow Way). You could even take the map and use it as a guide for your own worldbuilding.

I like this map. The names seem vaguely Irish, and I especially like that you can tell from just the map that Kell denotes a forest. It reminds me a bit of Tolkien's names.

Why is there literally no water on this map?

The UK is really good for getting fantasy names. The fact is that most of our literature, both modern fantasy and historical, comes from England and mining archaic medieval names from there makes a strong psychological impact on the reader.

>Aside from the M4 Low Cost Vans
What are you, some kind of mule-hater?

>Grass hill
>Desert city

I like it.

My nihon-go is weak though. Is that something about squid for the water city and a double cat joke for the archipelago? Cat curry?

>Virtuous Rohan's ha'penny horses

>incarnate
its trash

>Every medieval English town or city had at least one 'Cunt Street' or 'Gropecunt Lane'

Why is this not represented in fantasy?

No, lots of them are generic and unrealistic. They usually feature nonsense placements of untraversables, like mountains or swamps, but don't account for how those things actually shape their surrounding ecosystems.

Ie: "What is a rain shadow?"

Inkarnate map/10

Incredibly bland, looks like literally every other map ever made in this program. Get photoshop or gimp, and practice with that. You'll put in more work, but you'll end up with something so much better because YOU did all the work and not some program

It is in mine

Reminder that people who decided to take a lot of geography classes in college can't find a job utilizing those skills, so will hang out here berating anyone who *didn't* waste their parents money on a useless degree.

It doesn't require a class to go on fucking google and look up how the earth was formed

>t. Logger