(WIP) Looking for feedback
I've decided to let go of the world I had created 23 years ago for P&P roleplaying, and start anew.
I used to do everything pen and paper, now I'm using Wonderdraft. Not the most refined tool, but it's easy enough to master, considering I'm no graphic artist.
I'd like to get feedback from the community here, as I'd like to build a reasonably credible map. This is the map of the subregion I'd like to focus on first.
Looks good to me, but I am not that experienced in the realism bit yet. But checks the boxes I know of, the pieces could fit together taking continental drift into account, the islands would be remnants of that time. The further southeast island might be a tectonic hotspot (volcanic produced island / chain).
I like the blue grey ocean, but I would tone down or blur the water stain effect unless you are really going for water stained.
- E
I was going for a partially "sunken" island with remnants above water where volcanoes erupted, where there's a bunch of islands to the Southeast.Originally Posted by eepjr24
I will do my best to tone down the water stain. I haven't gotten around to finding how to do it, though. I'm very new to the software.
Thank you for commenting!
I think we are saying the same thing on the islands. Volcanic activity happened and built up the land into islands, some of which may have sunken back again either due to shifting at the plate level, ocean rise from glacial melt, etc.
I wish I could help you on Wonderdraft, I know nothing about the program at all aside from the fact that Two-Minute Tabletop makes a bunch of assets for it, some of which are free.
- Ernie
Content available for use under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.
Shapes look good to me, and I like the grain you add on it.
Which kind off details are you add on?
The sunken island can be explained by liquefaction of sands during earthquakes, and a posterior resurface by either volcanoes formed by plate subduction, coral reefs surfacing, the tectonic plate shifting due to erosion on one side and sedimentation on the other or the collission of a meteorite big enough to leave on the planet geological scars big enough to last geological ages, even under the different climates.
@Antoine.L I plan on adding forests and elements of human geography for the region, then the continent, then the world.
@4maram Thank you so much for the Coral Reefs idea! That sunken isle was once the home of a human civilization. Their tutelar god gave them waterbreathing to save them, but they had to exile themselves to survive. Now, centuries later, Coral Reefs have grown, and are now inhabited...
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.
@AzureWings THANK YOU!!!! So much feedback and constructive criticism!!!
The reason why the map is pixellated is because, from what I understand, I am stretching a bit WonderDraft's settings regarding scale. Normally, the maps are created 1920x1080 pixels. I stretched it to 8000x8000 to have more space and be able to really go into details. I wondered about going all in, into a Google Earth mode where I'd be able to zoom in so much that individuals buildings would have been visible, toying with the idea of something like a 500,000x500,000 pixels map for that exact purpose. I ultimately decided against it, as it would be an immense amount of work for perhaps a very low return on time invested.
The map will be used for my setting for pen&paper roleplaying (Dungeons & Dragons). Thus, my players could decide they love an area so much that their wanderlust peters out, to stay in a very limited area. I'd be saddled with an extremely detailed map for no real gain. WonderDraft has a nifty feature that allows the creation of "sub-maps", which they call Detail Maps. Basically, I can select an area, choose the zoom level I want, and WD makes a copy-paste, to the desired scale.
You are entirely correct regarding the scale, it is in kilometers. You are also 100% correct regarding the climate: subtropical. And you are also on the dot with my intent of avoiding regular/geometric coastlines. I basically took the huge landmass brush, created big blobs, then took the eraser and removed with progressively small and smaller brush sizes, until I could not make it smaller. My rationale was this: it raised out of the sea, then water-wind erosion would chip away at the landmass, through eons.
Included below are 2 maps: one of Philippines (which, as an archipelago, was one of the models I took), and one of the map, both with an approximate span of 25kms. To my very untrained eye, I am not sure how much of a difference there is in jaggedness? Or do you mean that it's always jagged, and almost never smooth, both of which would alternate in the real world?
Please understand that I am not arguing, nor being defensive. I am new to mapmaking and trying to understand what I can improve. I have very little notions of geology, climatology and such, which are obviously of tantamount importance in world creation, I believe.
Yay! One of the principles I remember from high school geography and history is that boats are very important means of transport and communication and that, often, human settlements are near bodies of water that can support boats. A river does not need maintenance, whereas a road does so until there is enough actual human traffic to create a trail, and for that trail to become a road, boats have been used for a loooooooong time :-)
Fixed one of the two drains.
Redrew the area, so that volcanoes are clearly located, and that the landmasses they created are now verdant forests growing on volcanic ash, almost entirely. After all, I looked up how long it takes for plant life to grow back on lava fields in a subtropical climate. Cataclysm happened a couple centuries prior. See updated region map :-)
I realize that maps "speak". I was thinking of plateaus for that area, which was the seat of a great empire of old. When it fell due to invasions, the plateaus are what made the area defensible and kept the "core" area of the empire to defended. I had to really look up orographic lift and understand it. I'll go for 2 distinct plateaus, which allows me to have the first lake empty itself in the second, in the way the Great Lakes of North America do, which reduces the watershed that would be required. I might also reduce the area of the lakes. They're just placeholders, at this point, waiting to be actively worked on.
While I'm not going to pretend that 100% of the world will be 100% realistic, I intend to make it as realistic as possible, aside from the fantasy elements, of course. I have the sun rise in the East and set in the West, and days have 24 hours, etc. It really helps with the suspension of disbelief, which really helps having fun doing roleplay.
I cannot thank you enough for your feedback. I will post another update once I have worked more on it.
Last edited by Tovanion; 01-23-2021 at 07:27 AM.
I'm guessing the pixelation comes from that Detail Map feature if you drew the world portion first and then that was scaled up to make a detail map (and then the mountains, trees etc. were additions you made on the Detail Map, which is why they're much higher resolution?). That's a neat feature but due to the issue of resolution it seems a little odd for raster art, especially if the default base size is 1920x1080 and portions of that get scaled up (unless I'm totally misunderstanding how WonderDraft's feature works of course).
One little side note how Google Maps, Earth and similar features tend to function is that it's not a single huge image, it's a huge database of smaller map tiles covering different areas at different zoom levels (no one's browser wants to render a 500,000x500,000 image - even trying to open an image with less than a hundredth of that many pixels means my computer isn't going to get anything done for a while), along with mixed use of vector data for certain map elements which can scale dynamically better (and that data still probably loads in tiles on some level to save bandwidth etc.). In theory you could have higher-level world and regional maps and then further zoom only for specific areas of interest (other places just having no data at higher zoom). Actually setting up tiled map display can turn into a deep rabbit hole, though, especially since most of the more approachable instruction out there about it tends to use both pre-available data and be all about mapping of our Earth or parts of it.
What I was getting at about the coastline jaggedness was just that some parts on your map looked very "all jagged" with few smooth sections. The Google map example picture you attached is a good demonstration of this - the Poliqui Bay coastline visible in it has some spots that are quite jagged on a scale similar to what you displayed especially by that inlet on its western side, but also some spots that are very smooth such as on the southern edge of the bay where there are sections that are almost a straight line over 25km. While when you look very close there's usually plenty of small variations and "roughness" to coastlines everywhere, as you zoom out in geographic scale some of the coastlines do start appearing smoother (while others have more macro-scale variations and don't appear smooth once zoomed out). You do have some of this variation in your map (compare the southern coastline of the western continent with the northern coasts of it or with the northeastern continent's coastlines); I guess I brought it up because it seemed a little noticeable that the northeastern continent's coastline has the same kind of noisy edge pattern along its entire length.
It's a little bit like the difference between an actually random sequence of numbers and a person trying to randomly select a series of numbers - there are plenty of subsequences that are entirely plausible in a random sequence but will almost never be created by someone trying to be random because they don't seem "random" enough. Some landmasses have very "noisy" coastlines - many northerly regions and Greece being some examples - and others, at least at roughly the scale of your map, don't (see places like the Arabian Peninsula, which has pretty smooth coastlines at about 2cm = 100km scale).
And the geology, climatology, etc. are of tantamount importance to world creation if you want them to be!
One lake emptying itself into the other was what I assumed that would be. Them being that large and placed like so certainly appears unusual, but I don't think they'd necessarily need to be smaller. While bodies of water like that have a big impact on how the wind and precipitation patterns need to work to make sense, they seem like they'd lead to cool situations on the economic/political/cultural sides of things and end up forming a very distinct region. And there are large inland bodies of water in the world, e.g. the Caspian Sea (which doesn't have outflow to the oceans at all in its case).
Implementing higher levels of realism in worldbuilding can be a lot of fun, too! That said of course, internal consistency can often be more important to verisimilitude than realism itself, strictly speaking. The densely packed islands could have made sense if a mountainous island with a lot of high ridges and low valleys was literally sunken by a cataclysm, even if the sort of cataclysmic event didn't necessarily match up with any real-world types of natural disasters (of course, the new islands look great too and make more sense without the former island having had especially rugged terrain beforehand). You're certainly putting more thought and effort into the geographic realism than in the D&D setting I made a few years ago and am still running right now; I have a bunch of dense forests that should be sitting in rain shadows and a swampy inland basin for which I have no idea how significant amounts of water gets into its watershed.
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