Its possible that the person playing that guitar was completely self taught without access to any books or video footage to work from much less a tutor showing 'proper' finger positions etc. In that sense they are playing with a unique style driven from a need to get the best sound out not to pass the next grade. I think thats important.

In terms of purpose I see that lacking a lot in many of the maps here. Sometimes you just have to go wild cos there really would be no reason at all for dwarves / goblins or whatever to drive 90 degree 5ft passages through solid rock with no purpose other than to confuse adventurers but in that same vein its what people expect and enjoy from a gaming session so thats whats driving them to make them like it.

The tutorials are great mainly because many of the people who arrive here cant make a map at all and want one. For those people the tutorials are great. Ok its a cookie cutter - pick your cutter ! But its that or nothing. For those here who are great artists or virtuosos with their apps maybe they should try hard to push themselves out of the comfort zone.

With the rivers and stuff - we always say that these only apply when your trying to get your rivers looking like real physical rivers. Theres a special get out clause for magic in all the policing ! If you want to have a mountain with multiple rivers all flowing down then thats great but its not realistic and maybe that's exactly what your aiming for. We have had maps here of lands floating in space with waterfalls off into nothingness etc. I think its just that many people come here wanting a realistic campaign world to run in.

Also I don't think its just Mordor thats crazy. Andiun rolls about 3000km all down the map with mountains at the top of the map and the Mistys down the middle. It implies that if the water is falling in height then the northerly mountains would be absurdly high. The misty mountains are there purely to get Bilbo underground by necessity and therefore find the ring. Otherwise he would have gone around them, lived a quiet normal life and not had any books written about him.

With apps the problem is pretty simple. Were all too lazy to make up lots and lots and lots of tokens to use so we use the ones that come with the map. The real artists here have the advantage of being able to whoop up with quality whatever they want but though I can by tedium strain out something that's at best a bit naff those are my options. The Dundjinni forums have helped loads of people out there its true and you see some tokens popping up a lot cos they are good. What can we do there - dunno really. But again, most people want some battle maps to run their next session with and will reuse the same tokens for convenience.

The only answer I can give to some of these problems is to use some software that does not draw the map for you but suggests things that you could put in based on realism and maybe to somehow AI up some tokens for required items. But how to do that generally I have no idea at this point. We might be able to do something where the scope is more limited like cities and we have been doing that to some degree with terrain but its not an easy task.