Maps

Discuss rivers splitting, square coasts, cliche names, unrealistic biomes on maps.
Show your own maps, ask why they're bad and get criticised for all of the above.

Other urls found in this thread:

procgenesis.com/WorldGen/worldgen.html
fantasticmaps.com/2013/03/how-to-design-a-town/
twitter.com/SFWRedditVideos

I apologize for the absolutely Space-Tier Autism I'm about to unleash, but this type of building would typically be made like Pic Related instead.

Currently working on this map.
The Southeast corner that's a little bit lighter green is supposed to be swamplands, but I'm having a hard time making a color gradient that symbolizes this well.

bump

>The Southeast corner that's a little bit lighter green is supposed to be swamplands, but I'm having a hard time making a color gradient that symbolizes this well.
Swamplands from "above" look mostly smoothly dark green with a tint of blue, and the rivers there are sepia from all the mud they are carrying.

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Define unrealistic biomes on maps. My country runs the gamut from sub-tropics and sugarcane in the south to tundras and huge snowfall up north, but I'm pretty sure its big enough to support both.

Or are you talking about tropical paradise and frozen hell being right next to one another?

Reposting a map I made, and asking for advice on cc3 again.

Best advice/guides for creating somewhat realistic maps? I've been holding off drawing any for my campaign setting because I don't have enough of an idea what makes sense.

Mountains form when two tectonic plates collide, but you can get away with putting them where you want most of the time (pic related, they can be coastal, inland, close to each other or isolated).
Water flows downwards, so your rivers will start in mountains and highlands and generally end in the sea or occasionally a lake. Rivers follow the downwards path of least resistance which means they often join up and rarely split.

If you just want a 'somewhat realistic' map a rough idea of biomes would be:
Forests: You will most likely have a lot of these. Boreal closer to the poles, tropical at the equator and temperate in between.
Steppe/grasslands: When it's too dry for a forest.
Desert: When it's way too dry for a forest.
Tundra: When it's too cold for a forest.

It can be pretty hard to tell where it's realistic to put what since temperature and rainfall depends on winds and ocean currents (Note that this means stuff on the same latitude does not necessarily have the same climate). Guidelines for placing deserts would be in the rain shadow of large mountain ranges and/or around 30 degrees North or South of the equator, you have an Earth-like world. Just like mountains you can get away with a lot of things here just don't have sudden transitions like from desert to rainforest without anything in between.

I don't know if any of this helped or it was too superficial.

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How did you make this?

every thread til user is back from the dead

I will never understand why people like this map

its just me. And I just think it looks cool

Thank fuck. Finally finished up some political borders. Spent about 4 hours tonight staring at this map, trying to get everything to fit right. Now I need to do a key for all of this crap, it's going to be fiddly as fuck, but hopefully it won't end up looking too shit.

It's from a site thet lets you create your own map by customizing sea levels and climate but unfortunately I can't find it

I'm not too happy with the colour, but hey, experiments. They don't always end up good.

It's procgenesis.com/WorldGen/worldgen.html for the curious. There are some other tools there which can be useful for worldbuilding too

That's the one, thanks

You can do really cool stuff with it

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this is some retarded border gore user, kys

b-but muh war to end all wars

Here's my reference map--I'm having some confusion about the specifics of climate.

( if you feel like helping another user, but I'm more than open to anybody)

I THINK:

-that the area marked Warm Mediterranean Climate should have something similar to the south of France--warm summers and cool, rainy winters.

-that in the cradle of the mountains it'd be wet all year changing it from a Mediterranean climate to a Subtropical one, with similar temperatures but more consistent rainfall.

-the northern half of the peninsula, marked Oceanic Climate, being on the west coast of the continent and generally lying above 45 degrees North, would have an oceanic climate similar to the UK or Northern France.

-that yellow zone would have a hot Mediterranean climate like most of California, probably more mild in the north but growing hotter as it goes south

-and the very south, being at 15 degrees North, would probably be pretty hot and moist.

Sorry for the wall of text and shitty map but is there anything big I'm missing about climate? an user in /wbg/ helped me figure out the biomes but I don't know much beyond that

ok here it is haha

WIP continues
almost done with detailing the coastlines, still need to figure out what the fuck i'm doing inland

>all those random ones clumped together in the middle of the north-east continent

Who drew this crappy map?

I like the normal mapping you can do, makes it look pretty legit.

Nah, everybody here thinks it's cool, just give it a break here and there with posting it.

It looks fine to me. What kind of watercolor are you using?

It takes a while to load but there's a planet view too

Can someone enter this seed and post the results? It crashed for me
>1517448617570

Here you go. I scrolled the map a bit so that none of the land wrapped around the edge.

Thanks a bunch. It ended up looking pretty cool.

why exactly do all the rivers fall short of the mountains? I would think most rivers originate in the mountains and flow downhill to the sea

Not the mapmaker, but streams of water don't tend to actually become big enough to call a river until they're out of the mountains and in flatter terrain where all the water will freely flow to the lowest point. I assume that's what he was going for.

>is called the war to end all wars
>didn't end all wars

This series is such a hack job.

Makes sense

Thanks mate, this is pretty fucking cool!

Van goghs. But the paper is bad, obviously it wasn't meant to handle watercolours.

I made the rivers in Wilbur and it doesn't seem to want to start the rivers too high in the mountains.
The other user had a good reason for it I guess, but I might extend them manually to make it look better.

Seems fine to my untrained eye, but I'm getting triggered by that lake with 3 outflows.
If it's a temporary thing because of overflow or manmade canals then it's fine but normally a lake will empty from just one river.

Made this one last thread for a weird fantasy setting. Still trying to figure out names for everything.

This isn't me trying to put you guys down, but why do you guys obsess over the shape of the geography when it ultimately does not really do anything for the setting?

>g. Altmark
>galt mark
>fucking Galt, Ca
You cant fool the local yokels, user.

It's fun and helps with immersion, especially if most of the guys in your group specialize in land nav

>implorando it isn't Gross Altmark
To be honest I added "G." to center the text.

>when it ultimately does not really do anything for the setting?
>aesthetics arent real guise only information affects our perception

What a wonderful coincidence. Neumark over on the east is even where all the new development in galt is. It even has the silly little "island" of city boundaries. The highway follows the mountain range pretty well, diverting only where the fictional map ends.

Its the little idiosynchrocies that make life wonderful.

Because I just love maps. Maps in all shapes are amazing. If I could, I would rub maps all over my body every morning.

>If I could, I would rub maps all over my body every morning.
What stops you?

My mom doesn't let me.

Shape conveys meaning in ways you're missing man. If the world is a disk with continents like spokes on a wheel, you've got a clear indication of cyclical nature. If it's a mountain or a pit, there's a hierarchy and a sense of descent or ascent, and likely a struggle to climb. If there's lots of ocean you get a sense of exploration, or strange shapes like rings of islands like a crescent or fairy circle you get a sense of magical events and history since something did that: it puts questions in your mind. If there's strange blurred areas you add mystery to your map. If it's edges are ocean there's a sense that it goes further or loops back around, while if it's land in any direction the map seems like it must be small, either to be comfy or cramped and feuding, since you're dealing with 1 continent or island.

This to say nothing of the ways the size of a continent, the bays, the rivers and seas and islands and terrain shape the way people live there and thus help inform culture. It's an important part of world building. Or how a culture can change how maps are made, thus giving you another potential mode of communication for your world's details.

The style reminds me of adventure time or something, I like it though

Hold me /maps/, I'm scared.

MODS, ban this filthy shit!

Seriously, can somebody explain this to me?

Agriculture

California's unnatural wrongness is imbued even to the topography of the landscape.

I make smaller scale maps with the players at session zero and as new areas come up. Gets everyone more involved, gives me ideas and things to riff on.

Beyond the Wall/Further Afield is specifically good for this, but there's some others.

Otherwise, people probably put effort into making a map because they enjoy it? Fun. You know fun right?

Are there any programs people would recommend for map creation? I'm trying out Campaign Cartographer at the moment, but it seems very finnicky.

If you're ok with random generation try this

Campaign Cartographer?

A program I saw mentioned a while back, it's pretty feature rich but the control scheme is weird and quite unintuitive, at least for me. It might be the best option, but I figured I'd still ask around.

bump

inkarnate is workable if you have no skills

I made in Paint.NET.

I have essentially negative skills. Manual dexterity impairments which make fine motor functions really difficult for me, to the point of not being able to handwrite properly, let alone draw. So I'll give that a try, thanks!

Man, that's honestly impressive for using such simple tools.

Haha, mapfags aint ever heard of WET LANDS BEFORE!
>banjo playing intensifies.
Honest to god, i think Galt is the site of an ancient evil. Rainstorms SPLIT IN HALF and divert to go AROUND the city. Its fucking ridicules. I once saw it raining in small patches with clear blue skies. Tjere was a circle of rain fall on my back patio roughly the size of a manhole cover, water comibg straight down but with everything else dry

Im glad you guys are enjoying the wonderful geography of my home town, its a really fun hike.

I literally just followed the advice from fantasticmaps.com/2013/03/how-to-design-a-town/ and I found that by googling "how to draw a town map"

Which one of these is better?
This one,

Or this one. I can't figure out which one to use for my campaign.

where on here is ?
or are they separate worlds that you did not make?

I made neither, but I'm making a new compaign and these are my two favorite maps right now. So I'm trying to decide which one to use

top one

Sorry, forgot to say that you should ignore the towns, and labels. I haven't been able to get an unmarked version of the top one yet.

Trying to put together a better map for my campaign.
What biomes would you expect in the different regions of this map? It's meant to be in the Northern hemisphere, approaching the tropics at the bottom.

How did you draw those coast lines? Just eyeballed it and drew it freehand?

reminder that straight line political borders shouldn't exist without a really reason for it (OCD leaders, AI borders, etc.)

Depends on the setting. Straight line borders would be stupid in a medieval setting without a really good explanation, but they're fairly ubiquitous in the modern world and you can do what you like with sci-fi.

>his wizard kingdom doesn't have polyhedronic borders

Yeah, vague pencil shapes and then freehand with a black pen, bearing in mind where I wanted more mountainous areas with fjords and the like.

Close to done with pencil now except I'm not final on the rivers and settlements yet
I think I need to rework the rivers in the east because it's supposed to be swampass central, and I'm not sure if I want to do the real short ones like on the top right island or not

I should probably figure out roads too, but I think there's not going to be a lot because 90% of the land is rainforest, mountain, swamp, or all of the above and boats exist

Drawing coasts is pretty damn simple in my experience. It’s meant to be rugged and unpredictable so not much planning is required.

Is this good inspiration?

>aniSearch

I can see it work.

Pomeranian bump

Yes user, you should always turn to God when you've lost your way

Bumpin'
I'll soon re-draw your work with minor tweaks, thanks again user

River meandering, attempts to use levees to farm swampland, and the resulting flooding when one fails.

An area being really flat or already at sea level is the one common circumstance when rivers will split, or appear to. The water is still all going the same place ultimately, as a delta like the San Joaquin/Sacramento is basically an insufficiently filled lake or bay.

Most obviously, one is a regional map and the other is a world map. If you see the ambitions of you and your players leaving the edges if the first map, then it will expand anyway.
By comparison, the best way to keep PCs on either map is to never show them the whole map.
Because most groups have someone who will point to an edge and ask "what's over there?"

Fuck me, did you draw that by hand? Whats your method user?

The request is mine, the work is done by the OP of this thread, I'd like to know the answer as well. (Also, any methods to draw the same thing by myself?)

>campaigning in a fantasy realm with magic, gods and dragons
>caring about realistic geography

bump

>campaigning in a fantasy realm with magic, gods and dragons
>implying

Historical maps bump

Also border gore. Would you be so bold to have something like this in your setting?