Imperiana (tectonics onward, advice appreciated)

[Jean-Abdel]

I think your low pressure zones should be rounder like the north western one the January map

[Eldresh]

I went and rounded off a lot of my low pressure zones, making a few smaller in the process. In the July map I'm also playing around with the idea of having it be one big LP zone on that big mountainous continent to the west instead of three smaller ones, mostly because I feel like its more realistic (judging based off of Asia in July). Bit better?


EDIT [10/12/18]: I didn't like what was going on with my previous pressure/wind maps so I decided to start from scratch. I like these a lot better. They feel a lot more realistic than the craziness that was going on before, in part because I remembered to account for the ITCZ. Feel free to ignore the red/blue arrows, those were the prevailing winds and I forgot to hide that layer when saving these, and the white area for the ITCZ is meant to be more of a general guide than a precise marker of the thing.

January


July

[Peter Toth]

Hello Eldresh,

I highly admire the realism in your mountain ranges; they truly make your map stunning and spectacular. Because I also desire to impart more reality into my fantasy maps, I am wondering if you could tell me where I can download real-world high-resolution height maps for free or low-cost, other than GTOPO30, which I already have. Thank you so much.

[Eldresh]

Hello Eldresh,

I highly admire the realism in your mountain ranges; they truly make your map stunning and spectacular. Because I also desire to impart more reality into my fantasy maps, I am wondering if you could tell me where I can download real-world high-resolution height maps for free or low-cost, other than GTOPO30, which I already have. Thank you so much.

Honestly, I just searched on google for "earth height map" and "earth elevation map" and under tools I set 'larger than' to the minimum I was willing to accept. The images I used were from Nasa and Wikipedia, if I remember correctly.

[nwisth]

Hi, Eldresh! Great job on the height map - I've dredged the web for earth height map data myself, and while I found tons of freely available GeoTIFFs from all over the globe, finding the right details can be quite time consuming - so kudos on a good result!

The winds and pressure patterns look realistic to me - it's fun to see someone else going through the same process. It will be interesting to see how you will let that enormous equatorial mountain range do to the precipitation map, which I presume will be coming next. I'm not sure if a giant range like that would bend the winds, or if it would just go across unimpeded, like you've drawn, since there aren't any valleys for it to howl through - but undoubtedly, there's going to be a lot of water dumped on the eastern side as the air rises and cools.

So, tell us a little bit about your world! There's obviously going to be tons of jungle and savanna, desert and steppe - but very few temperate zones. Looks to me like you're going for something different than the usual medieval european fantasy tropes for your D&D campaign. I'm reminded of the old Maztica boxed set still sitting in my shelf (which I never got around to using). Is the name of Imperiana a hint?

-Niels

[Eldresh]

Working on temperature maps and getting the start of rivers and lakes done between banging my head on a wall over temperatures. As for the winds and those huge mountains in the middle, yeah I wasn't quite sure what it'd do to the winds either, so I figured they'd go over them for higher up winds and the lower down ones would probably mostly break apart. I expect those mountains to do all sorts of things to the precipitation maps though, yeah.

The world is intentionally built very warmly with a lot of equatorial climates, and the main species is reptilian instead of human, though humans are present. A lot of 'normal' fantasy races (see: orcs, goblins, giants) aren't though. The setting takes a little after spelljammer, in that this is a space-faring magical civilization (using mostly gateways to other planets and primitive ships that rely on teleportation, not the safest method of space travel) and the dwarves and elves are going to end up other, more advanced civilizations that are still present, but awkwardly far away. Imperiana is kind of a hint, in that this is the capital planet of the empire and will be where the vast majority of the upcoming D&D campaign will be taking place. Dealing with the heat and the weather will be a new thing for the players to keep in mind, especially with the lack of temperate areas which ends up making the planet a bit of a planet of extremes. Its definitely a step away from medieval european. I know I wouldn't want to be walking around in any sort of metallic armor in the kind of climates I'm expecting here.

[nwisth]

That sounds like a great premise for a campaign! I remember being very fascinated with the Spelljammer setting back when it came out, but never got around to playing any of it. I especially remember "Practical Planetology" by Nigel Findley, with all its diverse world maps. Trying to wrap my head around the toroid-shaped world of Torus was interesting, to say the least!



Portals and teleporting is probably a lot more realistic than the old "magical sailing ships in space"-thing. Sounds like a less primitive version of the Slann/Lizardmen from Warhammer.

Will your players be playing local humans struggling under the scaled heel of the Reptilian Empire, foreigners from more temperate worlds, or reptiles? A mix maybe? I guess it might be too early to say, most players like to have a say in the matter. If you have them come to Imperiana from somewhere else, you can have both players and characters struggle to deal with the new climates - compared to having them play locals, where the characters will be used to their environment, even if the players aren't.

Getting the temperature zones right can be tough - I had to run many different temperature and precipitation maps through the GIMP scripts before I got my world of Theia to have climates I wanted. I hope you Learn From My Fail and remember to avoid anti-aliasing at all costs when making up your diffferent geryscale influence maps. I've never used the Pencil tool that much before!

-Niels

[Eldresh]

I'm allowing the players to choose if they want to be natives or off-worlders, and so far its looking like I'll get a mix of the two. In the meantime, I've finished the temperature maps. I'm still trying to decide if I want to further simplify them or leave in the gaps and stuff in the mountain ranges, but I'll probably wait and see what it does during biome calculation before I make up my mind.

Temperatures - January


Temperatures - July


EDIT 10/24/18 - finished precipitations

Precipitation - January


Precipitation - July

[Eldresh]

Got my biomes finally. I can already tell this is going to need a lot of tweaking, but I'll get around to that soon enough. I feel like all that tundra and ice on those mountains is somehow wrong... I'll probably play with it some more.

[Jean-Abdel]

Look at the wikipedia page of Snow line it will be helpful, as well as the ones for other alpine climates