The World Map of Aerda

[Skyeshard]

Here is my first WIP draft of my world map. I thought I should post it here for a critique before spending hours delving into this map.
Tell me your thoughts. Do these coastlines make sense? Does it make for an interesting world? It's for a game.
After this step, I'll work on geology and division of provinces, states, territories, kingdoms, etc...

[Rongar]

Hi there!

I'd say go for it. The landmass itself is nothing special but that definitely shouldn't worry you. As long as you fill it with interesting content it's all good. One thing, though; I think you should get rid of the top and bottom horizontal line and of at least one of the three archipelagos in the corners, They are very similar in shape and this, together with their corner positions, makes the overall map somewhat unbelievable. Keep the top left one and perhaps the bottom right, but you can do without the small one in the top right corner.

Otherwise you're off to a good start.


Regards,

~~Rongar

[Mapsburgh]

Going on the assumption that the only real forces at work are equivalent to those on our earth, the three circular archipelagoes seem kind of implausible.

I would say that it would be worth your time to sketch out the plate tectonics behind this -- where are your cratons, where are your plate boundaries, what directions are things moving, etc. That will help you determine if the current arrangement of stuff could plausibly have arisen from standard tectonic forces, and if not, what you should change.

[Charerg]

The thing about tectonics is, that if you really want it to be accurate (well, reasonably accurate, an imagined world probably will never be quite 100%) it takes a lot of work. In fact, I'd go so for to say that you pretty much need to build a GPlates model to get it right (which can take a few days, depending on the complexity of your tectonics). If you're interested in doing that, Astrographer has a few tutorials on his blog (namely this one and that one). However, the archipelagoes are actually possible even in the context of Earth. In this case it could be a piece of submerged continental crust, like the Kerguelen Plateau or Zealandia. Or ancient Europe, for that matter, which used to be a bunch of islands before Africa started colliding with Eurasia and uplifting the land.

That said, having three more-or-less identical (in overall shape) archipelagoes is a bit repetitive, I guess. Although I'd like to also point out that it's a good idea to draw the map in an equirectangular projection (2:1 Widht/Height ratio) and using Map to Globe to see how it looks in 3d, so you can get the polar areas right (their size and shape is distorted badly on a 2d surface). Another useful tool is GProjector, which allows you to switch between different projections.

Hope that helps, and welcome to the Guild!

[Skyeshard]

Thanks for all the advice everyone. About the archipelagos, in the story, they were all full continents at one point, but were all destroyed by (for lack of going into detail as to how or why) by a super weapon of sorts. Perhaps if i placed them differently instead of in the corners? How common are archipelagos?

Thank you Charerg for the links. I'm sure they will be an enormous help!

[Charerg]

Thanks for all the advice everyone. About the archipelagos, in the story, they were all full continents at one point, but were all destroyed by (for lack of going into detail as to how or why) by a super weapon of sorts. Perhaps if i placed them differently instead of in the corners? How common are archipelagos?

Thank you Charerg for the links. I'm sure they will be an enormous help!

Large archipelagoes occurring in the middle of the Ocean are very rare. Close to continents they can be reasonably common (if there are large areas of submerged continental shelf).

[Mapsburgh]

If the archipelagoes have a non-mundane origin (e.g. a superweapon), then all bets are off in terms of plausibility by real-world standards! Without knowing any of the details of exactly what happened, I would say the concentric rings style of the northeastern one looks particularly "blasted by a superweapon."

[Skyeshard]

Here is an update. My first attempt at using GIMP. It's definitely not finished yet.

[Tom]

Really colorful! I like the water texture, but maybe you should desaturate a bit the green of land..

[Charerg]

I forgot to mention this in my prior comments, but if you're making a world map (and you plan to depict the surface of a planet instead of a flat surface), you should use an equirectangular projection (2:1 Width/Length ratio). Here's an example of your map scaled to equirectangular (in this case 4000x2000):



Furthermore, you need to remember that a flat surface doesn't accurately depict a round object. The poles are, in reality, a single point. For example, here's the previous equirectangular map projected into a globe, and viewed from the North Pole (using Map to Globe, a very handy website):



Edit: looking back at my previous post, it seems I did mention it (I just forgot about it), so this is a bit repetitive, I guess. Anyway, I think it's a point worth mentioning twice. Of course, you could just decide that you want to map a single continent using an "arbitrary projection" (in other words, ignore projection) as is common in fantasy mapping. However, in that case, I'd choose to get rid of the top and bottom landmasses, as they give an impression of either sheets of polar ice or a polar continent like Antarctica.