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  1. #8

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    This is a pretty nice first foray into digital mapmaking! I agree that the map grain is quite nice, and I like the water stain effect even in the original post, personally; I feel like it adds a lot of texture to the map. I don't know anything about Wonderdraft but I do notice that all your land/water borders seem very pixelated compared to some of the other map elements like the mountains (it's especially visible on inland water features but looks like it's true of coastlines too). I'm not sure what automated antialiasing is available to you (though even then it seems pretty extreme and I'm not sure how much an algorithm can improve it), but if it's something you find concerning it may be worth revisiting if you can find a way to recreate them more smoothly.

    As for the world itself, the broad strokes of the subregion look pretty good. Depending on the size/scale of the subregion (I'm assuming that scale is in miles, kilometers, or a similar unit), some of the coastlines might be a little bit jagged/rough - the northwestern peninsula and northeastern continent's coasts almost look like they're fjords but I'm not sure how likely you'd expect this region to have them climatologically speaking (I could be wrong but the map color scheme and iconograhy gave me the impression of being closer to equatorial as opposed to being more temperate or polar). Though many real coastlines are jagged and erratic, many are also surprisingly smooth until you zoom in rather close. It's easy to have the instinct of wanting to avoid the coastlines being too regular/geometric (which is a good instinct), but at large scales there's more of a mix of jagged, twisting shapes and smooth curves.

    Your notable cities generally look to be clustered around water bodies and rivers which is pretty much on point from the realism angle, particularly for any setting that operates off of pre-modern technology/genre conventions.

    There was one river red flag I noticed on the lake in the southwest of the northeastern continent, where it appears to have two separate drains to the ocean; while it's your world this sort of thing is very uncommon (though not, strictly speaking, unheard-of) on Earth. On the other hand, the larger inland basin behind it that notably doesn't drain to the ocean has elevated regions separating it from the sea to explain that, which is great. The smaller islands are neat although the "sunken island remnants" in the southeast corner of the map have a pretty dense land/water ratio for volcanic island chains (though that's pretty common for fantasy maps in order to visually "read" better). If it was all a single island island sunken in a single great cataclysm or otherwise a very topographically varied island that sunk all at once for any reason, that makes more sense, but if the island sunk and then more natural volcanic processes resulted in the protruding landmasses it seems less probable that the land that emerges from the ocean would be so densely packed in.

    The larger world map you posted a preview of is pretty interesting. The two large inland seas/basins connected by rivers is very unusual and barring more fantasy explanations should probably say a lot about the relative elevations of the surrounding regions (I'd imagine they are centered in a large, mountainous plateau region with the "innermost" basin collecting at a higher elevation before draining through the lowest surrounding point into the other basin, which then does something similar to reach the ocean. Because that's a lot of water collecting there though the elevation can't be too high to the point that orographic lift causes too much precipitation to be lost from wet air before it reaches the watershed that drains into those basins).

    Of course, as always the extent to which realism matters to a world of your own is up to you, and some of these details might not make a big difference if the map isn't being approached from the standpoint of evaluating its realism.
    Last edited by AzureWings; 12-19-2020 at 04:23 PM.

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