My first real Map

[Midgardsormr]

You'll need to wait until he's posted five times (I think? There was talk of bumping it up to ten to deal with spammers) before he can send or receive private messages.

[tairon]

Haha that means I'm only one count away from that! :-)

@eilathen: Let's talk via PM or e-mail, way more convenient. I am starting to wonder who you are though...remarkably many things you mention that strike me as familiar, I know a lot of people into fantasy books and rpgs from around Zurich...you got me wonderin'. And yeah, I do speak swiss-german, so if that's easier for you, feel free Cheers

[Eilathen]

Yes, only one reply away from pm-abilities...come on, you know you want it

Funny that...it IS possible that we know each other...that would prove how small the world is ^^ OTOH, I am sure we would have talked about your worldbuilding if we knew each other...because it would have definitely come up...trust me
Also, los, Beitrag 5 und dann chömer los pm-ä

[tairon]

haha, here we go with post no. 5, pm-ing incoming!

Now i'm getting back to work on that map, rivers start looking like rivers now :-)

[tairon]

Hello again. First of all I wanted to thank you all again for the great tips an suggestions. I've mostly been working on the details of my world recently, and while writing down some historical and cultural details I realized that I wasn't really happy with my map. My main problem is that I've got a whole lot of very different cultures very close to each other. The further I delved into the history of these nations/cultures the more I found myself making up excuses and finding solutions to explain the present state of the world. Meaning I realized that many of these differences would've more or less disappeared in time given the proximity of the various countries. And on the other hand I found that some things just didn't work out climatologically/geologically (Yeah, thanks to my sister who studies that stuff at university... ) So after I did some thinking I decided to redo the map on a greater scale and spread all the ideas I have on more land (more continents, actually) , as well as increasing the distance inbetween those land masses.

What I wanted to ask was whether anybody had any great idea as to how I should design this world. In the past I tried to draw the coastlines by hand and then scanning/importing it into photoshop. Problem is, I usually end up with highly unrealistic coasts and geologically impossible land masses. And yes, that's quite important to me, I'm trying to create a world as realistic as possible, so this would not do. Does anybody know whether there are any programs, tools that could help me with that, or else if there are any hand drawing techniques that could help me create more realistic land shapes.

I'll try and do some experimenting, but if anybody got an idea I'd appreciate the input.

Thanks in advance!

Cheers
Tairon

[Gidde]

I really like starting with a planetgen map, and then tweaking it to get rid of the telltale fractal-world issues. Planetgen is free, very simple, very fast, and useless for anything but a starting point. But I find that it gives pretty darn good starting points. From there I usually blow it up and then use OldGuy's coastline tutorial on it. Then I chuck the original mountains (in fact, I tweaked the settings on planetgen so that all it outputs is a black and white land/sea pic) and do all that from scratch. OH -- and if you can, buy "A Magical Society: Ecology and Culture" which is a 160-page pdf, available from all the usual RPG suspects for around 10-20 dollars if I remember correctly. It will take you step by step through a simplified yet reasonably realistic way to build a world that actually works.