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Doomboy911
2016-02-15, 12:41 AM
I'm working on a sky pirate's game with a water world style set up and I'm looking for any maps that might work.

Lvl 2 Expert
2016-02-15, 01:31 AM
How similar to water world? Because that map would consist of a few dots for large stationary objects. No land masses, coast lines, mountains. The most difficult things would be finding the right scale and a good map projection.

weaseldust
2016-02-15, 12:48 PM
There are few things you might want to show on the map.

One is currents and climatic zones. You can do that with arrows and colours like this (https://baynature.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/currentMap-gfcb_climate_impacts_060310.jpg). By 'climatic zones', I mean things like "area where the water is shallow and full of submerged reefs", "area where the water is full of icebergs and whales", "area where storms are very common", "area with lots of volcanic activity and dragons", etc. Even if almost everything is water, there can still be geography like that, in the same way that your typical map will have bits that are swampy and full of trolls, bits that are forested and full of goblins, and so on.

For a sky pirate game, you might want to show prevailing winds instead of currents. In a fantasy world, you can have them do all sorts of weird things, so there can be places that are hard to access because the winds always blow away from them, or because they are at the eye of a perpetual stationary hurricane, and so on.

Then there are islands, artificial or natural, and possibly other surface objects like giant jellyfish or flying dockyards. I think something like the way they colour and label the islands in this (http://www.nationsonline.org/maps/micronesia_map.jpg) would work quite well. You can also show large groupings, like empires that span many islands, or the undersea kingdoms of the fishmen, or whatever, with outlines like the ones in this (http://www.theodora.com/maps/new9/pacific_island_forum.png). If there are fixed submerged locations (sunken cities, for instance), you can just have them marked with an X.

EDIT: I found this site (http://ageofravens.blogspot.co.uk/2015/01/islands-maps-and-world-building.html) where someone describes and presents maps of their homebrew ocean world (not my work). Perhaps it still has too many islands for you, though.

sktarq
2016-02-15, 04:42 PM
Well, you'd want

Rough water depth

Shallow (shallow enough for reefs/kelp/etc (light easily reaches bottom),

Medium/continental shelf where some light reaches the deep water and/or enough transference between the surface and the seabed exists)

Deep (Abysal plain-no light reaches the bottom and the chemical rich water of the deep rarely comes in contact with the energy rich zone of the surface)

And very deep (Trenches etc)

Any islands would also count here-I'd divide them between low and high based upon if they are high enough to disrupt cloud movement and thus generate their own rain.

Currents Be sure to designate surface currents (which will determine how floatsam (like a floating wrecked ship/lifeboats) acts vs deeper currents

Winds This is where things get really complex. You can find old wind charts and I recommend you look at them for inspiration -note how they are often marked with months as things change over the year. Plus with air pirates you need different altitude wind charts. The jet streams can be key story drivers for example

Civilization undersea towns of water breathers, Gyre patch circuits of floating towns, floating rocks with imperial sky navy base-all would go here. I'd mark altitude/depth too

Resources where you get sailcloth-and where are the fiber plants-or are they all leather? Where is metal available? Where in the seas does food become plentiful and when (as many in the ocean places get huge plumes of life for a few weeks and are otherwise rather empty)

You may want to do the currents/winds/etc on transpacencies that fit over the regular map btw

Beleriphon
2016-02-15, 04:57 PM
If I might: http://skyrates.net/