The lay of the land. designing the land masses

[frost890]

So I am in the process of fleshing out my world and want to start making a map. The problem is. How do you shape the land masses? How do you know if it is too much or too small?

[Vonwalt]

One way is to think about travel time and how far you want your PCs to be able to go. for instance, D&D says an average person can walk about 25 miles in a day, so base it on that.
Another way is to look at real-world continents. Earth has a 70/30 split between water and land, and the various continents vary wildly in shape and size. north america is about 3000 miles across, for instance.
And of course, there is the approach I favor, which is to draw something that seems cool and work out the details later. How important is it to you that your world follow real-world rules exactly?

[VoxRationis]

Are you starting from the world's perspective or the game setting's perspective?

[Mechalich]

Are you actually planning on mapping the whole world? If so, I suggest using software to get an outline that fits the parameters you want (land/water ratio, elevation, moisture, etc.) and then tweaking at the margins or simply running enough iterations that until you get something that fits your vision.

However, since mapping an entire fantasy world is a massive undertaking and most settings take place in a small part of any world (the Forgotten Realms fits nicely into Europe, Dark Sun's tablelands aren't that much bigger than the US Great Basin region), you probably don't need to map the whole thing. If that's the case, just draw something you think fits your goals - or, again, use software until you get something that you think fits your goals and tweak it. Any tricky relationships with distant lands can be smoothed out later, though it is important to determine if your setting is isolated by sea, or if it has land access to areas that are not considered part of your setting.

[redwizard007]

There is something to be said for software that will automatically generate a world but I have never been happy with the results I have gotten from them. For me, pen and paper are the primary tools with a copy machine to reproduce multiple copies at each stage (sketching terrain, political and population info, wind, current, and weather patterns, etc.) Drawing by hand gives you the freedom to be as detailed or rough as you want and to get rather creative with land masses.

Remember, rocky coasts are usually rough looking while smooth coast lines can indicate more pastoral terrain. Mountain ranges generally follow coast lines. Coasts are often wooded, as are mountains (especially on the windward side,) terrain generally changes gradually, weather patterns can be altered by mountains and proximity to water, remember the horse latitudes and their lack of rain, and the effects of the trade winds and westerlies, as well as possible locations for monsoon cycles.

That's all before we start getting into populations and civilizations with their trade routes and migrations...

[frost890]

For now it is just a portion of a continent. I do not want to spend a bunch of time on something that wont be used but I also don't want to be caught with my pants down. I might try a mix of the software program and modifying it from there. Thanks all.

[VoxRationis]

How important do you want geography in determining the movement of people and cultures? Do you want things to be like Europe, where there's a whole mess of small seas, peninsulae, and mountain ranges, or more like Africa, where there's much simpler geography by comparison?

[Admiral Squish]

Know what I'd love to see? A program that would generate an entire planet. Something that would simulate geography, oceanography, and meteorology to develop realistic continents, with mountains, lakes, and rivers that are where they would logically be, and even ecoregions! Not just 'desert', but, like, would it be a sandy desert, a scrubland desert, a cold desert? Would this big green area be rainforest, evergreen forest, temperate woodlands, temperate rainforest?
Basically, just a blank canvas of a world upon which to paint civilization.

[Stellar_Magic]

This is a pretty good one for making an entire planet... but it doesn't have rivers and so forth, as the scale is too big for them.

http://topps.diku.dk/torbenm/maps.msp