Tips on mapmaking?

[LastCenturion]

I'm building a world (hopefully one that I can run games in for a while) but I got hung up on how to make continents. I haven't put down anything else because the way I see it, most factors at play in the world are based almost entirely on geography. Can somebody give me advice on sketching out coastlines and whatnot?

I realize that I'm providing very little information here, but that's because I've made very few decisions. If there are specific questions that should be asked please ask them, and I'll give you the best answer I can.

[doc225]

You could play with this for inspiration.

http://donjon.bin.sh/world/

[WhatThePhysics]

Coastlines typically display fractalization as you keep zooming in. On the planetary scale, continents are shaped by tectonic behavior. Plate boundaries on Earth are mainly underwater, with boundaries near continents forming archipelagos. Peninsulas are usually skinny mountain ranges, and tend to have island chains extending into the water.

When in doubt, draw smooth squiggly lines, then jagged squiggly lines, and use those as inspiration for the final products.

[shawnhcorey]

Try the Cartographers' Guild (https://www.cartographersguild.com/). They have all sorts of advice on mapmaking. :smallsmile:

[LastCenturion]

Try the Cartographers' Guild (https://www.cartographersguild.com/). They have all sorts of advice on mapmaking. :smallsmile:

Thanks! There's a lot of really good information there.

[Zorku]

If you're going for realistic Earth scale then the players are never going to see so much of the map that they can put together a sense of the global geography. If your world is much closer to World of Warcraft proportions then you wouldn't even want to bother with realistic climate mechanics.

There's a pretty good chance that you're not going to use all of this, and even if you decide to go for hyper detail you probably make better use of your time by doing details in a fairly small area before you zoom out and pick another one to describe.



So, closer to Earth scale you can play around with plate tectonics if you want, but again, your players are never going to see that so it's just GM masturbation, and it's up to you to decide how much fun it will be and how much time you can waste.

If you want this on a globe the your flat canvas is going to make that kind of a pain, but you can fake it easily enough (especially if the players never get a world map.) I usually just make some blobs to be my continents, then trace the line again but with some wobbles and jitters to it, and then trace my new line in the same way but now I'm doing much smaller squiggles. You can keep doing this like a fractal until your lines are getting too small to work with and you don't ever intend to zoom in closer.

If you do have a good sense of the size of things and want a flat rectangle world map, but can't pull that off very well, play around with this website. (http://thetruesize.com/)

The first big thing that's actually going to matter with a planet, is the Coriolis effect, and the convection cells that sets up. An Earth sized planet at this kind of temperature with a human-y kind of atmosphere sets up 6 convection cells, which means you've got these nice stripes or arid or lush landscape where the air is falling or rising, respectively. You get this simple pattern of arid terrain at the horse latitudes or forests at the equator and 60 degrees from there (and the mighty/wealthy civilizations probably end up around 60 degrees, what with the wheat-like foods and cattle type animals. If you're in the age of colonies it's these guys doing almost all of it, even if they can't conquer all the nations elsewhere.)

The leads into the direction your wind will most often blow (it's got inertia at the equator, and switches direction when you cross the Horse Latitudes.)

Other climate/weather stuff boils down to how these interact with with the landmasses. The dominant wind patterns really come into play here, because of rain shadows. That whole business of forcing clouds up against a mountain makes them lose a lot of water content, so the one side ends up lush while the other ends up comparably barren. Some tall mountains with a lot of land down wind from them are going to mean a very dry desert. Rain shadows also take place on much smaller scales, which you can see if you look at basically any mountain ridge. Now is also a good time to establish your water table, or at least where the major rivers should be. Water always goes downhill, and it cuts a deeper channel over time so rivers only join up (but if you want one to fork, hey, it's magic!) They take relatively straight lines near steep mountains (faster water erodes much of what's in the way,) but by the time you get out into the plains a river will be moving much slower, and probably meanders quite a bit. You can use the same kind of fractal squiggles you use for coastlines, but you want to vary them some depending on the terrain.

All of that sets up which of these biomes (https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/originals/2b/66/f0/2b66f06e2aa1873d811824772a1fd964.jpg) should be most likely in any stretch of land, but you'll notice that no swamps are listed there. Swamps and wetlands are well enough the same thing, with or without a forest growing out of it, and they occur near rivers in plains type terrain, or in areas that otherwise have very low effective drainage. Mangroves are basically your saltwater coast version of swamps. If you want to include any biomes that this doesn't cover, you probably know enough about them to judge where they should go.

At that point you've pretty much got the untouched world. Wherever humans pop up they're going to cut down a bunch of forest for building materials, and then convert the nice flat areas into farmland. A country like France ends up almost 50% farmland while their neighbor Spain is a little more arid (and I think it's not as flat?) so they can't farm as extensively. As you go down into the Horse latitudes you start to have a horrible time growing grain but with some luck you've cultivated something like corn and if you're coastal or otherwise not in a rain shadow then you're definitely growing something, but it probably doesn't last quite so long as rain. You also have to deal with animals like camels, and probably rely on goats, but those just can't plow a field like an ox. By the time you're back to the equator there are lots of edible foods to cultivate, but the ones that you can really rely on can't be stored for a long time and the ones that can be stored have fairly low nutrition or have low yield. Beasts of burden? Nah. You probably still have a few pig farmers around (or just catch those things wild- it's not like you're gonna have population explosions and full land utilization when any year with a failed crop immediately leads to starvation,) and a few weirder food critters to hunt if you decide to travel to nearby islands.

Beyond that, I don't think you can establish global/geology type trends anymore, and it boils down more to the actions of people and the technologies they manage to figure out. As I hinted before, 60 degrees from the equator offers a lot of low hanging fruit for those civilizations, but exactly who figure out what first (or ever) is all kinds of chaotic, and frankly it's about time you got writing your story instead of obsessing over what rocks go where.

[LastCenturion]

Thanks for the advice. What I ended up doing is printing out a map of Pangaea (y'know, the Earth kind), cutting out new continents, and shoving those around on another piece of paper until it looked half decent and calling the rest oceans. I also cut the size factor by ten so that (as you mention), the players might someday have a chance to see most of the world. Thanks again for all the advice; I actually have a good system for figuring out rivers and mountains and things like that but I wasn't sure where to start with the continents.

[Zorku]

Oh, there's not really any magic way to do that (so far as I can tell) so whether you tried to do some simulation thing or just tried to copy and scramble bits of Earth's terrain it all ends up looking same-y.

I pretty much draw distorted bean shapes (maybe smashing a few together,) and then let my hand wiggle while I trace them.

Did you come up with a good way to carve new coasts down the middle of Pangaea?

[LastCenturion]

Oh, there's not really any magic way to do that (so far as I can tell) so whether you tried to do some simulation thing or just tried to copy and scramble bits of Earth's terrain it all ends up looking same-y.

I pretty much draw distorted bean shapes (maybe smashing a few together,) and then let my hand wiggle while I trace them.

Did you come up with a good way to carve new coasts down the middle of Pangaea?

Yes? I just took a pair of scissors and cut out like five shapes.

[Zorku]

Yes? I just took a pair of scissors and cut out like five shapes.

Oh, I always presume people are just transcribing stuff they're looking at onto another piece of paper by hand. Guess I should stop doing that.

Since you've done that, remember to stretch and erode the new shapes a bit where they're pulling away (unless they weren't actually supposed to be a Pangea in the deep past,) so that the coastlines aren't necessarily so smooth and don't quite perfectly fit each other anymore.

[LastCenturion]

Oh, I always presume people are just transcribing stuff they're looking at onto another piece of paper by hand. Guess I should stop doing that.

Since you've done that, remember to stretch and erode the new shapes a bit where they're pulling away (unless they weren't actually supposed to be a Pangea in the deep past,) so that the coastlines aren't necessarily so smooth and don't quite perfectly fit each other anymore.

It wasn't supposed to be Pangaea, but something slightly similar. I meant to do the deforming bit and ended up rushed for time and didn't, but I think I shoved the continents around enough to where it's almost impossible to tell where they came from. Here, I'll put up what I have.

http://i.imgur.com/9ExyGPc.jpg

[shawnhcorey]

...but I think I shoved the continents around enough to where it's almost impossible to tell where they came from.

Don't be too confident with that. :smallwink:

[Zorku]

You were in a rush? Sounds like you were way too close to your game to be working on a full world map.

Also judging by the image you'd probably really like the Inkarnate fantasy maps tool.