World building Websites

[Saintjebus]

Is there a good website for designing cities, maps, and battlemats? I am starting a campaign, and I'll be worldbuilding while the campaign goes on. I want to be able to be consistent with my towns and nations and such.

[Swordgleam]

The guy who made SeventhSanctum has some good worldbuilding advice here: http://www.seventhsanctum.com/www/index.html

I like to think my generators are helpful for worldbuilding, if not for consistency.

[Saintjebus]

OOOOHHHHHH. Shiny!!!!(sorry, couldn't help myself)

Those generators are going to be quite useful, thank you.

[Swordgleam]

Glad you like them. And if your world needs anything there isn't a generator for, let me know - I manage to make a fair number of the suggestions I get.

[Altair_the_Vexed]

If your setting is at all European-medieval, this website (http://www.rpglibrary.org/utils/meddemog/) has a very well researched demographic generator, based on real world data (and with a few name flavour changes, you can fit this Euro-entric data into other cultural tropes).

This theory of goegraphical placement of settlements (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Place_Theory) is very useful in designing nations. (The "Too Long, Didn't Read" version: certain utilities draw users from a wider area, so there is no need for many specialists of the same field to exist close to each other. Settlements have a zone of influence, from which they draw consumers. These zones overlap with zones of more specialised utilities.)

This website has a whole load of alternative earths (http://www.worlddreambank.org/P/PLANETS.HTM), and other planets - very useful for looking at worked examples of climate and weather patterns, with some good insights into how that will shape cultures, too.