[WIP] The Isle of Wywich

[Bombastus]

I'm working on a setting for a D&D game I'm DMing, and to help myself visualize the island the players are going to be on I decided to make a map. I'm a very novice mapmaker in general, and I'm still pretty new to GIMP, but I was hoping to get some feedback on my work. In particular, I'm trying to figure out where different biomes should be.

The island isn't continental-scale. It's something like 200 x 300 miles at its longest points (or 325 x 475 km). Climate-wise, I was going for something like Scotland. The island is dreary, rainy, and cold. Unless it doesn't make sense, I was thinking it would be mostly coniferous forest and bogs. The island lies to the north of the main continent, and its climate is influenced by a northern polar wind.

I haven't yet put much thought into the watershed or settlement placement.

Anyway, this is what I have so far:


This is what I started with for biome placement. It's very rough, and I'm not too sure how accurate it is.

Would the forests and such go inland, with the bogs towards the coasts? Also, what kind of biome would the area to the west of the mountains be? I'm thinking something wet, since the mountains would be expected to catch much of the moisture that comes from the northern winds.

Anyway, please let me know what you think. Thanks!

[JonathanCR]

Yes, the areas to the west of the mountains will be wetter - but more so in the south, because colder air holds less moisture (which is why the mountains cause precipitation in the first place). So I think the northwestern coast will be drier than the southwest if it's getting all that cold polar wind blasting it. If anything that sounds colder and drier than the Scottish coast! So I think this coast would, naturally, be forested, but perhaps more sparsely in the northern part.

The bogs would happen where there's lots of water standing about. If you want to make the northern/northwestern parts particularly cold, so they're basically tundra, that can result in lots of bogs because the ground is too frozen to absorb the water properly. Otherwise, anywhere that you've got lots of rain/lots of rivers and flat ground would be somewhere you could plausibly put bogs. Given what you're doing this for, it might make most sense to think about where you want bogs to be, for gameplay purposes, and then just make those areas flat and have rivers go through them, and decree that the drainage is poor there.