How do you make decent world maps without making them look like a bunch of islands/one huge continent?

I play around with a plate tectonic simulator some grad student in Finland made and some other guy added on to. Takes some time to generate since it simulates actual plate tectonics over time, but results are good IMO. I generate several maps, cut and paste sections together and mess around until I get something I like.
That only gives you borders and elevation though, things like biomes and climate you have to work out for yourself. But I find it kinda fun using real-world principles to work out how they go.

Original: sourceforge.net/projects/platec/
Improved version: github.com/Mindwerks/worldengine

Here's my shitty inkarnate one. I'd like to make a better one but I have no photoshop skills.

I know it is very similar to the normal earth world map but that is kind of the point. It is very difficult to come up with local climates (and the cultures that live in them) when you have no real basis for how a particular global climate system works, and no I dont want to go 'because magic'.

Heres the political map of 'not europe' where the setting focuses.

I outsourced it

gifyu.com/images/VelikaJebenaMapacc8f3.jpg
rate.

I tend to base mine on the various continental arrangements that have occurred in Earth's past.

:)

Every place has a bit of lore if you're interested.

I'm sorry but Chiron is exactly the kind of world that OP is complaining about. The west continent has a ridiculous sea in it that isnt connected with the oceans, there's a bunch of large island landmasses everywhere as well as three big blobby continents that are themselves separated by a very short sea trip.

>Silverymoon
really?

All town names are from the dnd books.

none of what you mentioned was what OP complained about so...

Learn about tectonic movements

>krigga passing
What happens here?

I actually quite like this map, visually varied but well-enough balanced. A little cramped and heavy with Eastern Dava though (I get the feeling that it should expand more off-map to the left instead of cutting off at the page boundary). I like the double delta and the swampy mountain basin, too. Overall it feels natural and varied without being a grab-bag of terrain, like you've zoomed in on a decent chunk of a Europe-sized landmass. Really the only feature I don't like is the convenient Silverymoon lake, it looks like something that would appear on a much smaller-scale map, but has been thrown on here out of proportion so we know Silverymoon is in a lake. Just a personal gripe, really, I just don't like the convenient capital-city-on-a-circle-island-in-a-big-circle-lake design trope.

Overall most aspects of the map make we want to know more about the different areas and what happens there, like that Rumnabar corridor, Forerslag with its little endorrheic lake, or the solitary oddly named ruin Xiloscient that seems to have no affinity to anything else.

I do agree with as since I'm a Warcraft fag the name tickles my autism, even though you've sourced it from the original.

And the Inkarnate "N" will never fail to irritate the hell out of me, and the farm squares are disappointing as ever, plus the weirdly overlapped page borders, but these things weren't your design choices.

10/10 would play and write autistic fanposts about cultural and natural history

What's a good and free map making program?

Well, that's one problem I have with map making (I'm OP) so he's not wrong.

Is there any sort of web based program that can predict what the Earth will look like millions of years into the future as the continents continue to drift?

Personally I'd recommend any image editing program, even MS Paint, as with some effort and a consideration of how others design you can easily develop your own style, and I think handmade stuff just feels better regardless of artistic talent. Depending on the program, there should be a plethora of map-specific tutorials.

There are also programs like Inkarnate, used by above, that are free and browser-based. There are also quite a few purchasable programs with much higher functionality for more dedicated GMs, but they're investments and I've never dabbled.

I guess really the question is, what do you want out of a map? I'd suggest starting with pen and paper, and try freehanding different styles (Tolkienesque, contour, Renaissance-style, etc.) to see what you like doing and what your expectations are. And what are you using the map for? For example, hex maps aren't usually particularly aesthetic, but they're very useful for charting out pen and paper campaigns, whereas "atlas-style" maps aren't much help with the nitty-gritty of GMing but are a nice reference or showpiece. Draft a crummy map in a few different styles and see how they'd fit with how you want to use them.

I'd also recommend browsing sites like The Cartographers Guild to see what others are doing, and there should be many resources available for you there too.

I've been working on a setting for 5 years but no matter what I do I get frustrated with my map and trash it

I don't wanna make an earth with the serial numbers filed off, but I also want the climate to make sense

Just do what I did and give a supernatural reason for why biomes make no sense.

Just take a map of Earth and treat the different continents like puzzle pieces.

Like, what would South America look like if an incredibly powerful wizard/a god/some massive earthquake slammed Australia into it?

There are predictions on how the ymight look like.

You could probably modify it by just stretching out the oceans a whole bunch

Frost Giants from Forerslag have control over that passing and the only those brave enough to face Frost Giants can use that valley, hence Krigga meaning "Warrior" in Giant. Warrior's Passing, so he either made it or was dumb enough to try it.

The lake is artificial and exists to protect the City, lest it fall again to ravenous hordes of Hill Giants that destroyed the Old City that lies to the East and have taken over the area now known as Fields of Grolanthor.
Hornraven's Landing and Torunn's Keep keep an eye out for Hill Giant activity.
As for the Rumnabar corridor think of it like a really wide canyon, as for Rumnabar itself it's the last hold of the Hill Dwarves in this area. They are also responsible for building all the Floodgates in the area (The Humans paid of course), to keep out some very special individuals.
Xiloscient is the ancient High Elf capital of the region, now ruins. The people living there moved to Chelon Island, already inhabited by humans and created a society dominated by elven influence. Some also moved to the villages dependent on Peatglade.

Dvergfesting is the city I expanded upon the most, since it has a very diverse population and it's great to make them interact. Pic related is the ground level of the Fortress.

>It is very difficult to come up with local climates
Don't worry about it, it's too complicated to fathom. To quote XKCD:
>This stuff is complicated. In a moment, we'll start using wild speculation to reshape the face of the planet. But first, a brief story to illustrate just how mind-bogglingly complicated this stuff is:
>In Chad, on the southern outskirts of the Sahara, there’s valley called the Bodélé Depression. It was once a lakebed, and the dry dust in the valley floor is full of nutrient-rich matter from the microorganisms that lived there.
>From October to March, winds coming in from the east are pinched between two mountain ranges. When the surface winds climb over 20 mph, they start picking up dust from the valley. This dust is blown westward, all the way across Africa, and out over the Atlantic.
>That dirt—from one small valley in Chad—supplies over 50% of the nutrient-rich dust that helps fertilize the Amazon rainforest.
>At least, according to that one study. But if it's right, it wouldn’t be a crazy anomaly. This kind of complexity is found everywhere. The basic building blocks of our world are crazy.

Fuck yeah Alpha Centauri

How would you guys go about designing a map for a massive megacity that is mostly just ruins?

Basic things that people should take away is stuff like, generally the further inland you go, the drier it gets. Mountains exacerbate that affect. Which way the wind blows also determines that, does the wind blow from ocean to land or vice versa? In North America you see a declining precipitation gradient from the east coast in, to the point where the great plains can be classified as a desert, then a spike in precipitation in the mountains that trap weather events, then on the other side, the immediate foot hills are green as shit but go 50 miles west and you're in Moab which is desert. The west coast winds blow from land to ocean which is why it's so fuckin dry except in the pnw which has fucky effects from mountains. Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan are as wet as they are thanks to the great Lakes.

I want to explore Pangea Ultima.

By making them a giant landmass with a bunch of seas instead

This, you can explain everything away as either being close to the coast, or due to mountains.
>desert
Mountains to the south/east/west/north block the winds that carry rain
>forest
Mountains to the south/east/west/north are so tall that they are covered in frost and snow. This snow melts and flows downhill, keeping the forest alive.
>jungle
Mountains to the south/east/west/north block the clouds coming off of the coast, forcing them to condense and rain constantly

...

George RR Martin's Westeros is a map of Britain and Ireland, with Britain on top and Ireland on the bottom, mirrored.

You don't use awful trash like Inkarnate and actually download a mapping software or learn to use photoshoop/GIMP like someone that actually gives a shit about the world he is creating.

>everything has to be geographically sound
No.

Anyone got that map of europe flipped with notes about how unrealistic it is

Not untrue, but many other things are at play. For example, much of the dry shortgrass prairie in the US has the same amount of annual precipitation as areas in Utah with thick juniper woodland. There used to be many (relatively small) sandy wastelands in temperate Europe, much of Southern California has a subtropical climate but mediterranean biomes, and Yellowstone contains areas of temperate rainforest due to the Pacific-Snake River moisture channel. Not to mention that you don't really need mountains to produce or block rainfall, and their presence doesn't necessarily ensure an obvious rainshadow.

If you're going for realism, other things to consider are:
>altitude
>soil
>wind exposure
>watershed drainage
>sun exposure
>ecology (e.g. grazing effects)
>when does the precipitation come, and how often
>what form does precipitation come in
>is the climate monsoonal or temperate
>what is the climate to begin with
>how have recent events shaped this biome (eg Missoula Floods)
>what species does this land have access to
>any crazy bullshit like said
>etc. etc. etc.

Which is to say, you can justify most anything and it won't be much more contrived than how the Earth actually works, as long as it doesn't flat out violate thermodynamics.

...

This?

Oh, I'd settle for thematically constructed, but random generation doesn't do that either.

Here's a map for a Polynesian-inspired setting I was working on awhile ago.

I plan on putting together a pdf filled with maps (political, geographical, historical, etc.) and other aspects of the setting. I just have to commission someone who's better at writing flavor text than me.

>How would you guys go about designing a map for a massive megacity that is mostly just ruins?
Probably use run Citygen on a giant seed and give that to the players in the form of an ancient map that's not very accurate anymore. They won't be able to see much of the city unless they manage to get to a very high vantage point, so your job describing things will largely be limited to their immediate environment (the building ruins on all sides of them, wrecked vehicles, collapsed infrastructure, things that have been altered since the city's destruction, etc.). Navigating will be a system of the PCs aiming themselves in the direction where they think a specific location is, and you judging how much shit they have to truck through before they arrive.

Once they arrive in a new location, they should be able to roughly understand where they were in relation to where they are currently, so just keep a rough map on your side of the areas they've been in and where they lie in relation to each other (mutant breeding pits are east of the robot factory and northeast of the cannibal farmers, etc.).

I should have specified that the city is basically organic in nature, as in that everything in it is alive and made out of flesh etc. The setting is basically dystopian biopunk focused around the massive decaying organic megacity.

You know how in natural history museums they have those thin slices of cadavers between glass? Look up a bunch of those and start putting them side by side at different angles then start laying boundaries over that

I gave up and made this

That's a good idea, thanks. Any idea what they are called so I can google some pictures?

One idea I was thinking was basing the river network running trough the city and flowing into the sea that the city borders, was to base that network on pictures of blood veins etc.

youtube.com/watch?v=ZP7K9SycELA

No idea what theyre technically called bit a google image search of "medical body slices" brings then right up. And i guess youd have to figure out if your bio city is a centralized singke organism with one single vein network or if its a group of seperate organisms that are side by side and considered their own zones and over lap

Looks like middle earth

CUM MAP
U
M
M
A
P

Lel.
In my setting the bio-city is the only place with life tho. It is surrounded by dead and barren wastes on it's west, and a massive sea to it's east.

>The west continent has a ridiculous sea in it that isnt connected with the oceans
Why is this a problem? Can't it just be a really big lake?