Digimundus Map (aka Sivia)

[Durakken]

Latest map... I tried to put in trees, but the tutorial failed to such a huge level I just gave it up.
The colored areas are "nations" (they're not well defined at the moment in history), the brown things are roads, the white dots are regular "major" cities. The green ones are over ore deposits.
The larger icons with names are the origin city from which people spread.
This after about 200 years of spread.

I'm only focusing on the lower left Continent because at present it is the most important at the moment... With that in mind, is there any easy way to increase the resolution of the map anyone knows of. Right now each pixel is equal to 16 km which doesn't really look right having roads that are 1px and representing 16km...

[groovey]

Aha! So here's your map. This thread doesn't show up when checking from your profile your started threads.

First of all, purely visually, the Pangea like continent looks fine divided and drifted. I guess not many tecnonics plates affected the landmass, so there wasn't much fragmentation even after many millions of years.

I'm far from an expert in the climate stuff to comment on the biomes, so I can't spot anything jarring.

The roads scale... I think it will be hard to fix, since the scale of a world-map is way too big for representing roads in a realistic scale, unless your planet is really small? So they onlyway to get roads to be relative in scale would be to zoom in, in regional maps.

I quite dig the mountains and the biomes colors and texture.

Your project sounds big (from what I get on your last post on my thread), great to see is not overwhelming you, which could easily happen. I would like to hear more about it while you wait to get input on the actual map.

[Durakken]

The project isn't really that big. Its just an on going web novel that I'm planning on writing that I'm building a number of elements for before I start writing.

The issue with the world is that it isn't a "real" world and it is affected by magic. It's a Virtual Reality world with in game lore that says it was built by the gods.
The world, government program, etc in total is called "DigiMundus" and it is essentially what is called a VRMMO like displayed in SAO and .hack.
The world, in DigiMundus, is called Sivia.

The DigiMundus project is, simply put, a United Nations program, with multiple vectors of interest, but the primary one currently is medical research with focus on coma patients. Basically, they take coma (and other cut off type diseases) patients and they hook their brains into the system to allow them to act in a Virtual world.

in the world, the lore probably won't be explored much, but its the following.

- Age 1 -
In the begginning there was Khaos and the World Egg
The World Egg hatched and from it came Kronus and Kosmus.

- Age 2 -
Kosmus and Kronus started fighting and this battle lasted for an eternity until Kosmus was cleaved in 3 by Kronus.
Each of the 3 pieces continued to grow and became the 3 (also gods) worlds...
Morea; The Upper world.
Sivia; The Middle world.
Karna; The Lower world.

From each of the 3 worlds 3 gods were born,
Of Morea;
Gnos, Lord of Knowledge
Ouran, Lord of Justice
Odrios, Lord of Honor
Of Sivia;
Elys, Lady of Love
Sif, Lady of Harmony
Yrica, Lady of Hate
Of Karna,
Vedin, Lord of Power
Erebon, Lord of Sex
Dwardin, Lord of Hunger

Sif didn't like the disorder so she got the other 8 gods to share their power with her to order and balance the universe.
Knowing that Kronus' influence would eventually disorder the worlds again Sif created sentient entities to maintain the order of the worlds.
3 of these sentients held equal power to the original 9 gods (Sun), (Moon), and (Oceans). The others came to be known as Sifans (humans ^.^)
Sif, finished with her plans, returned the powers of the gods to them and fell fast asleep.

note: The names of the Sun, Moon, and Oceans I have not figured out yet, that's why they are in parentathese...
note: The Sifans are divided into 4 races based on the environment that they lived in; Timerans (Forest), Dezolans (Desert), Medans (Steppe), and Kosmans (the Kosmus Spine region which is the link between the 3 worlds)

- Age 3 -
The time of peace for the Sifans.

- Age 4 -
The gods of Karna desired to posess the world of Sivia and the Sifans and so created their own entities, Erebians and sent them to take Sivia.
The Erebians invades through the Kosmus Spine and began attacking the Sifans.
Unprepared for this the Sifans were driven to near extinction while they were taken by the Erebians as slaves and lovers.
Yrica saw what was happening and attempted to stem the Erebians by splitting world apart and swallowing them into the ground.
This allowed for the Sifans to rally and push back the Erebians back to Karna.
Some of the Erebians survived being swallowed into the earth along with their mates. In time, the species that results from this mixing become called Yricans.

The gods of Morea saw what happened to Sivia and they too decided to create their own entities.
And they too were sent to Sivia to aid the Sifans in their fight against the Erebians, but this was much too late as the war was over.
The Ourans saw the resulting world and decided that it and the Sifans were corrupt and so decided they were the only ones that could maintain harmony in the world.
The Sifans needed to be guided and purified.
The Ourans in their beliefs took lovers and waged war in the name of peace and harmony. And they loudly proclaimed that whatever they did was honourable and to be taken by them was an honor.
At first the Sifans were unprepared for this turn of events, but hardened by their war with the Erebians they turned the tide of war back on the Ourans who had never fought a war and full of pride.
The Ourans came with much more individual power, but far fewer in number. They fought as individuals, their vangards often rushing ahead and getting themselves killed in the name of honor.
This lead to the Ourans rethinking their actions. They slowly became horrified by the unjust actions they had realized they had taken and soon pleaded with the Sifans to call a truce.
The Sifans, to the Ourans' amazement conceded. The Ourans would be allowed to returned home, but most impressive to the Ourans, many of the Sifans agreed with the Ouran position to a degree and argued that a home for the Ourans should be built in Sivia from which their console could be sought and the Ourans could look after the world from.

Elys, the Lady of Love had watched what had transpired. She saw that the
Ourans had done what they had out of love. When the treaty was forged she
stepped in, creating a new land in the sky for the Ourans to take as their
home, but only those Ourans who had some relation to a Sifan personally.

The 5th Age begins after this war and is the age in which DigiMundus begins, though some time after the war ends.
At the begining of the age...
The Medans and Timerans have been split into 2 groups.
The Kosmans, on the other hand, being that their home was the most affected by the invasions found themselves split into 5 groups.
The Dezolans are preserved from being divided.
The Yricans, deep under the Earth, have 5 home areas cavern systems they live in.
The pure blood Erebians tend to be old or stick to Karna, being that the Erebians that came to Sivia were either killed, died of old age, or mated with humans or those who had at some point.
The Ourans are much the same as the Erebians, but are less rare openly in public because they aren't seen as "evil", but more rare generally because they find Sivia to be beneath them on some level.
The Elysan are the offspring of the Ouran and Sifans and they about as common as the Yricans due the Ouran heritage making them feel superior to those of Sivia, but not reviled by the Sifans. That being said, there is also fewer of them than the Yricans which ends up balancing out how common they are ^.^

It should also be noted that there are "races" in the other races which are based on different qualities. The Erebians are based on metals for example where as the Ourans are based on Honor, Justice, and Knowledge.
The Sifan races translate roughly to Timer (Caucasian), Kosman (Arab), Dezolan (African), and Medan (Asian).

That epiphany I had that I mentioned in the other thread is that this is a world that is designed and has certain rules, limitations, and cognitions behind it that relate to the game aspects of it. So the world is now divided into 100km hexes. What I'm thinking about doing is trying to figure out some rules and ask a few people to essentially play a game of risk with me where they will take ownership of the centers of a given race and then play out the expansions of the populations. Though I'm not sure ^.^

[groovey]

Wow, your starting lore makes mine blush.

About your map, I know you said you're reworking the political stuff, but for doing that sort of stuff, perhaps a regional map would be better than the world map? For scale purposes, since it'd would allow for more detail. I'm struggling with this right now though, cutting one area and doing the zooming on a new file, since the resolution of the cut out section is low.

[Durakken]

I cut down to the western continent and blew it up 8 fold bringing the resolution to 2km/px. And now I'm going to develop the map with a type of game of risk with the spread of races and nations ^.^ I fear this because it will get tedious, but oh well I'll get it done. But after that is done I'm probably going to zoom in to a much smaller area for keeping track on the detailed level. The larger map is more just so i know where things are than it is for readers once i start going on with the web novel.

[groovey]

Let us know when you have an update, I'm mighty curious about that game like map.

[Durakken]

Part of the issue is trying to resolve the magical elements and such.

Basically, the "game" starts 525 years after the 5th age begins where all the Sifans are in the major cities that are on the previous maps, each with about 10,000 people.
525 years isn't really a long time if I assume starting from the very beginning and no magic like Earth did... As I mentioned in another thread, these starting cultures/civs lasted as a unit for about 1300 years before they split up.
What we end up with is roughly three 1400x1400 km^2 large nation-states around each of the major cities, all of which are unified in one nation in their area and don't interact much with each other.
If I assume the use of magic and a base starting level of iron age we get a much faster growing period and thus i can justify a faster growth and break up, but it is still a stretch as even at double speed it's 300 years shy of the break up point.

Even ignoring that point, I'm sucking at border drawing and making it look like something I like and that I find reasonable. Part of what I've decided is that New Meda is a large empire but is ruled as 2 separate bodies that are ruled by a central authority. And then there are a few nations around it. Galaverte on the hand is a single large empire, smaller than New Meda's empire, but still fairly large. Timer, on the other hand, due to its position can be up to like 4 to 5 times bigger than Galaverte, but it's political structure is feudal and divided up into many little kingdoms, but maintain the same religion... which is sorta odd that there is more than one religion in this world considering that there are really gods in this world ^.^ But Timer and Galaverte as "nations" both stay roughly in those two areas in the previous maps that have states shown... And then I also have to come up with names that I suck at ^.^

The thing that I was trying to do with the risk style attempt at expanding failed due to every time I got like 5 to 10 years in I would realize that there is something not being accounted for and thus this wouldn't work. So back to fumbling about while I try to figure out other aspects like weapon materials, skill lists, mob list, characters, etc... btw Weapon material ranking is way more complex and not simply and well explained anywhere which is highly annoying ^.^

[Robulous]

Gorgeous land map, though those nation colours are way too gaudy. A softer more pastel tone might be better, have a look at atlas maps for suggested colour palettes.

[CarnivorousJellybean]

Durakken, the textures and detail you've given to the landscapes in your map is gorgeous! It would be a shame to cover them completely... if you're using photoshop, you can try setting the nation layers to overlay, multiply, soft light, or hard light with a lower opacity (45-80% depending on the effect). It'll let the landscape show through them more and subdue the colours so they don't clash as much.

If you're using gimp, there might be something useful here (step 2 goes over installing photoshop-like layer styles)

[Durakken]

Thank you, though I just followed the Eriond tutorial for all that stuffs ^.^ His adding trees tutorial didn't work, but oh well I'll be trying another method to add trees.
Also, I should upload the upscaled version without all that on it. I tried a while ago, but something wasn't letting me so I gave up.

With regards to the nation colors. I never use anything that looks right, but I also usually don't care as I'm just throwing them there for my personal benefit for rough drafting. I haven't played much with how they look.

Regardless of that though, that seems a bit superior to how national borders look as they fall on a hex grid which is how they'd be "sorta" in the game world environment so I'm deciding whether I want accurate or what looks better, or some third option.