I was setting up my old desktop PC for my children to use during summer break and I ran across some old documents. One of them was the old map for my Toldara campaign. The map below is for just one of the continents. Alex has a different map for another continent; I will let him post his up on his own blog at some point. My map is below.
This is just a rough idea and it is far from final. I am not too crazy about my world map skills but I thought I would post it up and see if anyone had any thoughts on how to pretty it up or any other suggestions or feedback.
Map link: Old Toldara
It seems OK. If you are going with realism, you might need to make a couple of changes. Mountain ranges tend to be produced by tectonic plates hitting each other. The brown section on the bottom left makes sense because it is like India. I can see two large land masses hitting each other.
ReplyDeleteThe X mountains, however, do not make sense to me. But I doubt too many people are going to bother thinking about if the mountain placement makes sense.
As for how to make a map look better. The only thing I can think of is campaign cartographer.
Thanks for the feedback. Yeah, I always worry about realism on these maps but I never feel that I get it right. It was kind of just thrown together so I just know that I wanted some mountains in there somewhere. I may just take another crack at this - any insights into how the mountains should be placed?
ReplyDeleteI've heard good things about Campaign Cartographer.
In terms of the mountains, I suppose I would remove the ones going from the bottom left to the top right. That is the spine that seems the most out of place.
ReplyDeleteThe other thing you can do, which is probably going a little too far, is to think about rainfall patterns. In the US, the fronts hits the pacific coast first. It makes the coast very green. You have mountains there that helps the rain come. However, most of the moisture if now out of the air. Then we have a bunch of desert states. They are desert because they are between two mountain ranges, or more precisely, they are at lower points of a mountain range. The moisture from the gulf stops at the beginning of the Rockies. This results in green, desert, plains.
So, if you assumed that the fronts come from the top left, then when they hit the mountains on the bottom left, you have rain. However, what follows will be desert until you get closer to the coast where you will likely start to have more fertile lands.
But again, that is probably putting too much thought into things.
It all sounds worth pursuing. I may just do some or most of these things when I get some spare time.
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