Thoughts? How could I improve the map?

>Stop using Inkarnate.
This. It's like learning to draw by using HeroMachine

Why such a stark difference in climate on either side of the mountains? Is there some geographical thing I don't know?

Barrier islands.

Port towns.

Open up the mountains for the desert and just make it a mapless wasteland where trade caravans go through to some unknown city on the other side. This gives you the option of adding more regions without having to make another map.

That peninsula way the fuck up north could use a point of interest.

Republic of Hyhill relations with the Empire of Convoia and/or Ivundi are as tense as they've ever been as more of their island has been claimed by the sea over the centuries, driving them to carve living spaces into the mountain and use the land almost exclusively for farming and trading ports, the latter becoming more and more valuable as crops on coastal farmlands are more vulnerable.

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rate my map

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Make the map bigger to add in more details
Maybe some lakes, volcanos with Ash land, and make the north part colder than the southern part.
I personally love haunted grounds(Forests, temples, former battle grounds)

protip: every map sucks initially. This is no exception.

The names are very generic and disposable, but at least they aren't English conjunctions like Moonshire. There are too many dozens of maps posted on Veeky Forums with naming styles indistinguishable from this. There isn't much sense of any cultural transition based on the names alone, it feels monocultured or not cultured at all. More detail (regional names within these areas and/or settlement names) would help with that.

I would assume that little/no work has been put into the lands beyond those mountains and not shown on the map, which is a really big (and common) mistake. This is the signal for the world being contrived and artificial.
Where did the crops and livestock of this region come from? Where did the people come from?
Where do these civilizations descend from (e.g. western civilization can be traced to Sumer), or did civilization develop independently here?
Who are the Convoians trading with to grow so powerful? How are those far-off civilizations affected by this trade?
These questions are important because from this map I can tell that none of that was planned out and these civilizations were just thrown on there artificially.

Study history and remake the world with a greater sense of interconnectedness and causation. Get a general idea of your whole world over time instead of this small excerpt. Stop using Inkarnate and learn a drawing/editing program, you can do so much more with it and it is a useful skill elsewhere. In future iterations of the map, get a much higher res image so you can put in tons of regional/landmark labels.

>OP's dubs

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OP please evaluate what your goals are before following any advice given in this thread.

If you're just making the map for a campaign, and will slowly refine it over time but need it fairly soon, maybe just follow stuff like or
If you just really love mapmaking and want to do it for its own sake, could be fine advice.

Everyone always suggests using the most open and artistic option, which is usually use something barebones and very slowly learn to make great art, but few people in the world have the time to do that with more than a few hobbies. If this is just a supporting effort, taking the time to studying geography will help you more than learning to make pretty maps.

CHECKED.

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>checking dubs with dubs

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my sides have left this plane

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Rotate it 90 degrees.

>That giant fucking moutain barrier against the desert and potentially sand people
Europe is not the only continent on Earth that you can draw inspiration from

Looks like a great setting I'd like to explore. You may want to name the desert behind the huge mountains, if they know there is a desert there. I especially like how the rivers are made. Very natural-like. Same for mountains. I'll try to take a look at yours as I fix my map.
>Have hundreds of locations, with their own traditions, history, lore, creatures and even language and magic schools.
>Have the looks of the map in my head.
>It looks horrible once you look at the map
Why does this keep happening?

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Remove a section of the eastern mountain ridge and add a valley, removing wilderness from the immediate area around it. This can serve as an important exploration target during the campaign. A sizable body of water could help to break up the heavy forests in the north, maybe connecting to the existing rivers, and consider a chain of islands far out to the west, possibly as the peaks of an underwater mountain ridge.

Basics first-
>compass
>scale
>key
>marked borders
>marked rivers
>what lands belong to whom
Ie- dwarven mines, mixed race city, goblin mountain town etc

I like the idea of a lake smack dab in the midst of the southern half, right near the marshes. If I may brainstorm a bit:

>settlements from all around the lower half of the map meet at the lake bi-monthly for trade
>rumors persist of merchants and sellswords being abducted in the night by a horrible creature from the marshlands
>caravans traveling from Caitlm Docks skirt around the marsh, often choosing to take the long way around and head west from Defaroth

Unless you have something going on with the roads already

The meeting at the lake thing sounds great. I'm keeping it.

The rest you kind of nailed it. The part about the marshlands already happens, since it's kind of a place where you wouldn't normally go. Bad terrain, bad reputation and even though the necromancers living there were expelled centuries ago the land remains somewhat tainted. Which is why Defaroth became a relevant city, and the reason why caravans stop there for supplies and spare sellswords.
I recently read about false hydras and I want to add some horrifying horror of that sort.

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>settlements from all around the lower half of the map meet at the lake bi-monthly for trade
That's how towns form, user. There would be a town there.

try not using garbage online software

Not if
>the surrounding areas make it too dangerous to be settled, but all the settlements travel through it and set up a halfway point so it's fair to everyone (no one settlement can get away with avoiding the danger so it's in everyone's best interest to pitch in for protection), lending itself to a more eventful version of your standard "guard the travelling merchant" job
or
>it's a sort of holy site they all agree not to settle at where they were instructed to make "sacrifices" to each other rather than to some god
or whatever else you can think of

Towns are boring, and there are plenty of them already. Do something creative.

As a matter of fact there is: Beln. I just didn't put everything on the map because it would be overcrowded.
South of Falan pass you can find many small communities filled with hairy cows in a snowy yet cozy valley, Bavaria tier. It was created by settlers of both North and South, and it's one of the safest zones in the map. Away from monsters and war, though Falan pass and the highlands remain an important strategic location, as it's the most direct route to the South, and Gree, Pourene and Defaroth don't get along all that much.

I may make a thread about organizing stuff and all. I'm relatively new here. Veeky Forums is a beautiful place.

What do you recommend? I can't draw all that much.

>Implying a boot shaped peninsula could ever form naturally

You can go on a hurr durr evil goblins in muh town quest or find a town where fat rich farmers are backstabbing each other for more land, all while pressuring some impoverished noble house who still defends them from beastmen raids and used to guard them against the now extinct necromancers, one of which happens to be the wife of one of said rich farmers and is secretly controlling the horrors of the night to make her husband richer just so she can kill him and inherit everything.
And perhaps I forgot to mention the cults of the goddess of life, which practice vampiric rituals to drain the life of things and enhance the harvests, with a mysterious side effect: attracting a malevolent, unfathomable entity which is slowly creeping into your world.

You can make anything interesting, user, even if you use only cliches.

I meant to say that the concept of yet another town in a map full of towns is a missed opportunity. All of those things you mentioned can still take place in literally any other town on the map, nothing of value is added if you throw in another town for some of that to take place in. There's an opportunity for something more unique with that idea and it'd be a bit of a shame for it to be reduced to another town.

Why not both? The lands of an inhabited kingdom are inhabited, but shit still happens.
When travelling IRL you find places to stay and towns to sleep in, so that you can visit that shrine, dungeon or whatever you may think of.
Of course there are areas in which little to no population lives, and so only the "dungeons" remain.

I'd like to have opinions on my map for a non linear campaing I'm working on (which is my first), it's almost finished for now and I'm about to clean it up. I've already run a prologue with a couple friends and I've been cooking this up for a while.

I don't want to be a dick to OP either, I started with incarnate too, but since then I have access to photoshop.

For now I've been thinking about present and past civilisations (since it is a major plot point in my game) The pointed lines are trade routes used by an overseas empire and it's allies.

I have a couple of dungeons/ruins/monsters lairs in mind but of course the party shouldn't know about those so they're not explicitly shown.

Is there any part of the geography that could be improved upon?

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>interesting shape
>rivers are good
>coastline is very smooth. perhaps compare to real world coastlines
>consider adding a chain of small islands between Andialonia and Invumdi as their mountain ranges look like they are one, with part of the range submerged

>multiple rivers branching. real rivers rarely do this outside of alluvial fans and braided rivers
>coastline shows variation, has a few islands. overall looks good except for that straight bit at the bottom
>trade routes pass through areas where people would most likely live (near water), and use passes to get through mountains
>mountains in the east could perhaps have a few passes in them through which people move, albeit with difficulty

Could I have some help here as well? You seem to know about mapmaking.

Stap! We have been over this yesterday!

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Posting the bigger picture so it doesn't look that flat.

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what did you use to make this

inkarnate maps.

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tyvm

what happened with the orange dots?

That was just an example map I found online. People on Veeky Forums don't seem to like inkarnate much but so far I haven't found anything better.

what did you use to make this?

See

Rate my map.

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goddamn didnt even see that. Thanks

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You know nothing of the altitude of the area. Any stream is possible.

This, reminds me of a world of warcraft zone border.

But that's literally how mountains work.

What prevents Comvoia from conquering Hyhill and Ardarth?

Thanks for the support, I'll try to work on the rivers a bit.

The ''straight bit at the bottom'' is supposed to be this way. It's actually a massive worldwide illusion and there is some landmass behind it, it's just that nobody sees it so everyone has been calling it the end of the world for quite a few centuries.

The mountains are dwarf territory and have quite a few passes in them, the thing is that even if they regularly trade with humans, they dont let them use their tunnels. The way up the mountains is also very dangerous.

Quick questions, I've seen a few videos on inkarnate maps and they have a shitton of stuff like new textures, snowy mountains and more. Why doesn't my version have it? Do I have to pay or something? because I would

Cut down on the three billion rivers, especially ones that combine from several mountain streams without a significant increase in size and then end in the sea without the slightest indication of a delta.

Sorry mate, you're asking the guy using photoshop I haven't touched inkarnate in a while. Here's what I did with it a while ago.

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>monocultured
Nothing wrong with that.

There are a lot of assumptions there.
And there is literally nothing wrong with English conjunctions, as many languages do just that. I bet you go to IKEA and think "oh wow so many cool fantasy names!" But a lawnchair is a lawnchair in English or in Sanskrit. Murkwaters, Rivermoore and Buttguard are perfectly fine names.

Nothing wrong with monoculture either. Your world doesn't need to be special-snowflake tier. You could make a whole world based on Persians with little variation and still have a lot of fun. Mountainous walls happen in real life. Not every empire needs to be carefully positioned between rivers and mountains. And finally there is also literally nothing wrong with "unknown beyond this point" parts of the map.
Oh and
>dude where did you put crops and livestock?
If you are going to be this autistic remember this is a different world. He may as well go full Morrowind or live on fish alone. Who the fuck knows if you don't even give him the chance to explain himself?

Most of those points were just autistic.

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this is a rough draft, and still working on names, but what do you guys think of this?

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>inb4 branching rivers

I was depressed as fuck. Thanks for the laugh m80

The rivers look really good, pretty natural. What I really don't like is roads.
I'm trying to find a way or a texture to make them actually look good. Mines look horrible as well.

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With this I say goodbye for tonight. Only thing I'd change is roads. Other than that I consider it finished.

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>Poolesbury

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what

But what if I don't want to learn how to draw, just have a reasonable visual representation of my character?