Rate my map, Veeky Forums. Will answer questions as necessary, just wanted to see how shitty it is when people poke it

Since that compass rose has no labels, perhaps the right side of the map is the West?

While we're at it, why not just say the sun sets in the east here?

DESERTS TYPICALLY FORM IN RAIN SHADOWS. Rain shadows are areas where mountains block the path of rain. Your desert doesn't make sense, because it should theoretically be getting tons of rain in from the ocean.

YOU NEED MORE MOUNTAINS. All over the place. Mountains usually form the spine of continents.

A GIANT RANGE OF MOUNTAINS BETWEEN TWO TECTONIC PLATES WOULD BE AN AWFUL PLACE FOR DWARVES. Constant earthquakes would annihilate their elaborate mountainhomes.

THE INLAND SEA DOESN'T APPEAR TO HAVE A SOURCE. Why doesn't it evaporate? Which rivers feed into it? Lakes and such often form in valleys and at the base of mountains, where rivers pool together in basins.

Ama about this world/map for which I've autistically written over 2000 years of history

I love the originality of this map, it has me interested in the setting already. Well done.

Idk if you've finished this map or not, but it seems lacking filler. Everything looks empty and quite generic desu.

I recommend at least roughing up the little islands of the sunset isles and the exile union. It looks unnatural as is now.

Not finished yet. Rough it up how?
Mountains will be done. Inland sea is connected via rivers, haven't casted them yet.
How would I make the barrier mountains better for dwarves?

>Elflands
You couldn't have thought of a more cliche name?

reminds me of this( not that this is necessarily a bad thing), maybe some coastal mountains or some such to help justify the desert in the south. Also a spur or smaller chain in the east of the nothern cotinent would help explain the forest to high plain transition. smaller copse or forests should exist in the western part of the continent also. Need at least one massive river system to fill the inland sea. also some hills somewhere or a dune sea would give some variety to both the islands and the trackless desert.

It's good to hear that other people also overdo written history for fun.

What is in the white area? What about the grey area in the south-west? Do the nations that have boxes around their symbol have some kind of relation to each other? Why does cyan have no symbol?
Also, consider using a different color for the dark blue nation in the lower middle area, it's hard to see between the ocean and the lake.

I'm more interested in geography, flora, and fauna than politics. Have you written anything unique for that map?

The biggest problem I have is that I'm using inkarnate- the map tools aren't subtle enough for making tiny rivers. I am trying to put mountains and the likes, but it's proving somewhat difficult.
I greatly appreciate the feedback though.

>WORK IN PROGRESS

Just removing a bit more of the coastline, making it more irregular. Now the coasts perfectly match, which is a big no no. IIRC i did it in this map.

White area is still fully unsettled.

The grey area in the south west, as well as cyan and two other blobs have no central government, and are mostly tribal. The color instead indicates people of a specific culture inhabiting the place.

The symbols in each nation represent the name of the nation in their native writing system. The one with the boxes is one of the 4 I've used. The countries using these systems are culturally somewhat closely related, and mostly worship the same Gods.

Good catch on the dark blue one. It's not that special a nation so I tend to overlook it, but I'll make sure to change it.

Are those supposed to be rivers? If so they make no sense

Rules for rivers:
1. They always flow downhill. Usually they start at mountains, move down the mountain, and into the sea.
2. Rivers converge together to form a single big river. A large region will have hundreds of tiny rivers that all converge together into one big river, the one big river goes to the sea.

I see. Thanks for correcting me!

If you look at the Giant Plains region of this map (), you can see how many small rivers merge into a single large river. You can also see how the rivers are flowing in between the hills.

How do you organise your history, user?

I normally do a bulletpoint timeline but I feel like its hard to put details in or remember a small scale event that I should reference

Some progress with the rivers- I'm trying to follow what I'm told. Will add hills and such if this is satisfactory.

Durr, image.

>How do you organise your history, user?
Not him, but I made a wikia.

Yeah, the rivers look a lot better now. Rivers are also the main routes of trade since it is easier to move heavy things on waterways. The northern continent has very good trade networks between the humans, dwarves, and elves.

The bottom continent has no rivers right now. You could put one or two large rivers through, but not too many. It really depends on what kind of desert you imagine it as. Is it a totally sand desert? Or is it a dry scrubland where things can grow?

Either way, the lack of rivers in the bottom continent presents an opportunity to create a magical or fantastical explanation for how trade is possible through that continent. Maybe there are rivers of sand that flow like water. Maybe there vast networks of naturally formed underground lava tubes. Maybe there are large predictable sand storms that move across the continent, and people use massive gliders that can transport tons of goods around on.

Sideways mountains and forests because I decided I liked it the other way as I was making it.

I've got quite some notes, though most of them aren't written in a way that makes them easily readable. I do have a few presentable fragments though, mostly considering cultural practices and war. Here however I've got a tiny fragment concerning several of the most dangerous species of wildlife in the setting.

"First of all, there's the Karlassian dogs. They're a breed of dog only bred in the Karlassian mountains of the Myrtle Commonwealth, and they're truly humongous. They're like a hybrid between an Alaskan Malamute and a St. Bernard, but definitely addicted to liquid testosterone and bath salts. They're truly humongous, think the size of a decent bull and you're pretty close. They refuse to be ridden by anything but children, but they're known to kill horses in a single bite of their powerful jaws, though those ones used in the Myrtle War were actually still even larger than the regular ones. They're actually used for hunting mostly, laying in ambush whilst the humans chase boars or deer towards them.

Burying vipers are shit, as they dig themselves into the desert sands without leaving a trace, and their venom paralyzes for days, even weeks. Many people have died of dehydration or starvation in the desert because their legs just stopped working. The cruel patriarchs of the Three Kingdoms even use them in their cruel slave races, to watch their contestants suffer even more.

Lastly, there's the southern mudsharks. They too, dig themselves in, waiting for something to appear above them. Usually it's fish, but sometimes it's swimming kids or even small boats that fall victim to these creatures that sometimes grow to incredible sizes."

I've got a large notepad file in which I write every happening, as well as an excel file for prominent characters, religion and culture.

And, of course, I've got a lot of maps sorted. Here's a (somewhat outdated) gif with them. Really helpful sometimes

The southern continent is supposed to be comprised of city-states that banded together into what's technically a republic but is more accurately a magocracy/plutocracy. The Domain and the Republic already went to war on this, because the Domain sees mages as dangerous tools and the Republic's nobility is mostly mages and the wealthy.
I can see a big river, maybe some Eberron-like solutions to the trade problem. I could also use my idea of an ancient magitek percursors that the Republic studies.

I'd recommend not having the Arabian Niiiiights be so massive, maybe a break to the left. Pull the mountains in a bit and have an opening, maybe a shorter one, that allows easier passage. It could break up some monotony if the 'goddam hero types' can head West and enter some human-based desert culture on the coast acting as a reprieve from the sand. Maybe an offshoot from the larger culture or something. It also allows for the desert to not look like a bowl.

Something like this, user?

+ valiantly fought against incarnate and won some acceptable coastline fractals
- boring monotonous names
- no points of interest
- no transition landforms/biomes
- boring aesthetic of geography, lacks contrasts
- doesn't communicate the setting in a compelling way
- random remains of hex grid
- grid pointless without points of interest to travel between

reflexive scroll past
lacks even interesting badness

Fair enough, user. if you'd look I'm actively trying to improve this.

I'd say put it lower, since the effect is to break up the desert a bit. Hard to break it up if the offshoot connects so closely to the main of the continent.

A note-able point that was made constantly in similar threads is branching rivers... they don't happen often. This map is replete with the type. Branching rivers shaped like a 'Y' only happen if two paths are perfectly the same ease of flowing down for a long time. And even then, commonly the two paths return to each other after a couple hundred feet.

The first thing that really sticks out to me is that the two big archipelagos are pretty obviously larger landmasses carved up by water sluicing over. Even just taking out some of the islands to give a little more space would help greatly to give it a more natural look, as opposed to the present jigsaw-puzzle mass.

>branching rivers... they don't happen often. This map is replete with the type

Those aren't branching rivers, they are converging rivers. They appear to be flowing from the mountains down into the sea at the center.

No, no, he has a point. Some of these rivers actually do branch.

White circles: rivers split
Yellow circles: River's don't seem to flow downhill

To be fair, the lower yellow circle originated in mountains in a previous iteration of the map, he just took the mountains out and didn't update the rivers yet

Is this an improvement?

I think I would switch the exile union and weeb islands around. Doesn't make much sense the elf brits are so far from the elf yanks, that and the brit elves cut off the weebs from other humans which is kinda weird.

That...
Is actually a really good idea, thanks, user!

"East" by definition means "the direction from which the sun rises", if you look at the etymology and historical usage of cardinal direction nomenclature. The tendency to think about cardinal directions primarily by their relation to north is an artifact of navigational practices, because in the northern hemisphere you navigate by relation to the North Star. Even the use of compasses is influenced by this history of stellar navigation; a compass needle is oriented on a north-south magnetic axis, so if you make a symmetrical compass needle it really points south just as much as it points north. The tendency to emphasize the north end of the needle is directly because of the primacy of north as the direction of reference for navigation in the northern hemisphere.

Proabably would be more appropriate to say that the convention is to orient maps with the south up, rather than north. Which would probably mean your region there is in the southern hemisphere: They rely on a southern pole star as a fixed point for navigation, so they orient their maps south side up. That would put east on the left side of the map, rather than the right as in the maps we're used to in the real world.

Any more suggestions, anons? I'm having a really good time right now and I like how this looks.

...

While I'm not sure how the orcs are in the world, having a trade system they run between the Germanic humans and the Arabian humans could be cool. A Germanic city or village placed above the western islands could be a trade port that works it's way up and down the continent through them or against the orcs.

It also is a good stranglehold if something is capable of attacking and cutting off trade between the peoples.

Captcha: Eastwood Farm

*above the western inland islands

rip old inkarnate

this is absolute dogshit and despite the best efforts of many brave anons not salvageable

just play WFRP and accept you are a shit cartographer

The orcs are (Slavic-based) Nomads that have the stereotype of picking a fight with everything and everyone. They're tolerated in places and are known to produce excellent mercenaries (a mage theorized is that the orc people, as a whole, have a subconscious connection to ancestral memories), so it's not too out there to assume they have some trade routes between the two kingdoms.

I actually had this massive idea about how humans came via an Illithid Spelljammer slave ship that crashed, and how most of the races (besides Dwarves, who are the native species here) are just humans that got affected by something (elves were touched by the fae [in more ways than one], the orcs bound their collective souls to an ancient entity to be the best warriors in existence, drows are the surviving Illithids' puppets, etc....)

Thank you for the constructive criticism

OP, shall I make my own take on your world? It's easier for me than pointing out everything wrong, and you might learn something from it.

Not very comfortable with the new inkarnate though, so things might be a bit sloppy if i use that

Feel free, I'm here for good fun and at worst I'll just use yours and give you credit.

looking better already, maybe try to add a mediterranean like culture in the inland sea? warring city states and the like

Sounds like a good idea. Something pseudogreek, maybe multiracial?

Remember that if there's no outflow from the inland sea to the ocean, the only meaningful way water can leave it is evaporation, and it'll turn salty. If you intend it to be a freshwater lake/sea for worldbuilding reasons, add a river again.

It's also good to remember that the flow rate of outbound rivers from it should be no more than the flow rate of inbound rivers minus evaporation (lest it dry up), but that wasn't a problem with previous versions of the map.

Warring city states? Triton/Merfolk and Hill Dwarves?

Maybe the Inland Sea supplies the Republic with the few precious rivers it needs?
Hill dwarves.

Or maybe the whole area is orc "territory".

Picture is the cosmology of the world. It creates several interesting effects:

1. Sometimes artefacts from one earth spike will fall / travel to other earth spikes. One of these arefacts is a massive chrome ball that is actually a spaceship intended to find out what happens at the very bottom of the world.

2. Eclipses in this setting take the form of massive vertical shadows caused by one earth spike getting between the Sun and another earth spike.

3. Saltwater rains happen when the winds push falling ocean water from one earth spike to another earth spike.

4. The most interesting effect of all is that it gives the DM an excuse to have fully formed races, cultures, and technology without having to create whole civilizations and cities and politics because he can just say that the player characters are settlers that got cut off from the Old World when their piece of land shattered apart at the edge of the known world.

i want to know more about this, it looks truly Unique.

Waht programs do people use to make these maps?

Added rivers- The Republic's City-states are where rivers merge. Mages prove valuable in ships.
Same here!
I personally use Inkarnate. It's free to use, browser-based. Apparently it used to be a lot better.

It looks like shit. Would probably look better if you just draw a sketch for your players on a sheet of paper.

Thanks, user.

I think you should change some of the names. Having a 'the' in front of everything just makes it all seem generic. Like, why call it "The Illuminated Republic" instead of just "Illuminated Republic"? I'm assuming all of this is named by the humans or whatever, because I don't think elves would call their homeland 'Elfland' anyway. It'd be like if the human country was called mankindland

Elfland is supposedly a placeholder. I'm not entirely sure what language the elves use and if it's what their land's known by.

On a related note, if anyone could suggest me a good Elvish language (that isn't Sindarin), I'd be very glad.

>arabian nights
>republic
Fucking explain yourself

>i want to know more about this, it looks truly Unique.

I have nothing else, that is pretty much the extent of what I've written for the setting, besides the finer details of the small zoomed in region that the players are sitting on.

Either way, the storyline will resolve with the players figuring out how to leave the piece of land they are on, either by flight, throwing themselves over the edge of the world, or ???.

You've got rivers flowing across the southern continent from one ocean to another. That does not happen, period. Rivers flow to the ocean. Think about it, which direction are those rivers flowing, north or south?
Also note that lakes (and similar) generally only have at most a single river flowing out of them.
Personally I'd turn the western river into a channel connecting the Inland Sea to the outside Ocean, like the Straights of Gibraltar. It'd basically be your Mediterranean - it pretty much is already, that'd just make it more consistent/believable.

The Inland Sea is not an ocean. it's a saltwater lake.
That's what they call themselves. It's not a republic by any means- their whole election system is rigged and the term is vestigial.

Either upscale and make the map bigger so you can use the riverbrushes so rivers dont go cross-continent like the Russian railway OR pull the South Half down till it touches endscreen and make it look like the meeting point of North and South America so it feels more like a closeup of a continent than a weirdly-tiny UK-sized coninent

Also what riveranons said.

Also WFRP sucks, go play classical Mordheim like a normal human being.

After actually fucking reading, I removed the extra river and turned the river into The Great Canal.

>The Inland Sea is not an ocean. it's a saltwater lake.

Even so, lakes typically only have a single outlet.

also how is it saltwater

You don't need to draw all the tributaries. It will look better if you just draw the main rivers. That's what irl maps of that scale do.

So it is a saltwater lake. Interesting choice, that could lead to a lot of quite unusual circumstances.
Though that does mean the elevation of the land around it, especially the peninsulas, should be quite high.
My point about the rivers still stands though. If it's saltwater then there likely isn't a river flowing out at all, and there definitely should not be rivers flowing from the ocean to it.

I'm working on it right now. Feel free to mark the ones that definitely do need to be removed.

Looking at how civil this thread was now I feel like shit, but the drawing of a sheet thing is an actual good advice. Inkarnate as it is now works better for a smaller scale.

I agree but I noticed it way too late and I'm a big idiot who can't call it quits.

>That's what they call themselves. It's not a republic by any means- their whole election system is rigged and the term is vestigial.
Explain yourself a bit more. Arabic culture isn't exactly the one I would choose for a republican country, and republicanism (corrupt or not) isn't exactly the niche I would choose for an arabic-like country. But please don't take this as a criticism but as a desire to know more. How arabic are they beyond aesthethics? Can you tell us more about this republican past? Who is actually ruling if they're not a real republic?

I say this as a man with a setting with mongols and japanese trying to spread the revolution like they're Robespierre. Don't be shy.

Dunno man, I'm a dumb phone poster, can't really mark em. I'll say just remove all tributaries unless they're long and important enough to be mapped

Removed the tributaries.
Basically, back when the human survivors of the Spelljammer crash went their own merry ways, these folks went south into the desert, forming little city states along the rivers.

One of them (the most western one), a few years in, discovered the ruins of an ancient magitek empire that ruled itself via a more traditionally democratic society. Styling themselves after said ancient empire, they went on a little crusade, uniting the city-states under the Illuminated flag, forming their republic.
Roughly five hundred years ago, the Domain, which is incredibly anti-mage, invoked Tarkus' Wrath on them- Basically saying their God of War fucking hates these sissy witch-people and that they're going on a crusade to whoop their asses. As a result of the wars, the power structure came to be built less as a democracy, but more like a pluto/magocracy- the richest men and the most powerful mages are the ones in charge right now, and the leader is usually the current archmage.
But since old habits die hard and traditions are really important, they still hold elections (that are incredibly rigged) and have a council (that's basically a rubber stamp or people who throw their money around).

Unrelated, their religion is called the Stanza of Koss, or Koss' Stanza (after Koss, the first leader of the western city) and says that life ultimately has no meaning ("Your life is about nothing") and that you should strive to make it the most meaningful it can be.

It's got salt in it

Looking good, looking good.
But that river in the southwest is absolutely killing me, a river just can't connect seas/oceans across a continent like that.

Should it well up into a lake?

Why are nomads placed in best trade place on the continent?
Inland sea connects north and south and is good way for east-west trade.
It is great trade for major trade routes and so would be likely contended grounds between civilized nations that would exterminate the nomads to profit from trade.

Nomads tend to live in fucking nowhere, not at the major trade route of the world.

Acceptable

That's a good point. Where should I put them? Or should they just... Wander around everywhere?

No, it should be flowing into the Inland Sea, not out of.
Looking at it right now, what I'd do is probably have the river originate out of the mountains in the west, around/just inside where they jut into the continent. Could have another short river flowing south in the dark brown-grey area. That would mean you basically have a topographical divide connecting the west and south mountains, about where the map colors change, which seems pretty realistic to me.

Seems to me you could have the Orc Nomads living around the eastern Isthmus and across the northeast chunk of the southern continent. It may have a nice location, but the terrain could easily be quite hilly and water-sparse plains. Makes sense with the general geography too. Very similar to the situation of west-central Asia - great location, but the terrain and environment means it's dominated by nomads for thousands of years even while on the border of great empires.
Given the location, said nomads would likely be both expert traders and raiders.

Desert? Between Germans and elves? West coast?
Don't know your world.

Or at the second glance maybe leave them as Republic is oriented southwards so maybe it does not trade with the north for some reasons.

Also as other user said do something about western river that goes from Inland Sea to South Ocean.
Don't bully psychics, rivers can't travel up.
You can split it in 2 and have one flow south and one north into inland sea to give Republic extra reason for northbound trade.
Also other great river of south is weird near it's end.

Water should always take the path of least resistance downwards.

Now that the inland sea is connected by a channel to the ocean, they're at the same level, and that western river in the Republic cannot flow across the continent. Choose whether if flows northward or southward from its headwaters in the mountains and delete the other connection.

>Don't bully psychics
All psychics are frauds, they deserve what's coming to them

Update: Fixed rivers. Put two tribes of Orc nomads- one in North continent, one in south. Both somewhat similar but have their differences, both really hate each other.
No idea what to put in that southwest corner- my (actually not at all evil) necromancers live in the frigid north.

Haven't got the time to finish everything, but here's what I came up with thus far.

Most notable change is those sailor lads now inhabiting the cliffs, isles, reefs and dangerous waters that connect the inland sea to the ocean.

Is that a swamp? You should have some transition between it and the desert then. And put some really fucked up evil shit there

Greenland is full of snow and rarely green. Vikings named it Greenland to drum up the number of visitors.

Would make sense actually to name your island after the opposite side of the main continent so dumbass raiders sail the opposite direction.