Bohuk, let me start by congratulating you on your first step on the long and tiring road to making better worlds. :-)
Read the Wikipedia article on Plate Tectonics. Do that now. It gives a fairly good basic understanding of how plate tectonics work, with some nice illustrations, too. I always, ALWAYS keep that handy when I work on my tectonics.
Now, I am not a geology specialist, but basically you'll actually have to come up with divergent, convergent and transform borders. Rob's proposal, and I understand it's intended as only a simplistic draft, just isn't really plate tectonics yet.
Rob is right that such fractal maps will never, ever look naturalistic (that's why I reluctantly decided not to use them). They'd work for asteroids, but not for actual worlds. Now, you can have very craggy coasts - look at scandinavia's fjords, or the coast of new england, but the process doesn't involve plate tectonics directly. Fjords are carved by glaciers, the New England coast is a "sunken" coast, that is, where eroded mountains /hills are now the coastline.
If I can give you a bit of advice, you will make your life a LOT easier by drawing the plates first and THEN coming up with continents that fit them. You probably won't quite know what you end up with, but since you are using a random map anyway I think that should be fine. I always draw continents first and then try to figure out what plate tectonics could have produced them, and, boy, that is quite difficult because oftentimes the location of continent A requires plates and plate boundaries that conflict with continent B...
Nomadic, the Rockies are the just the product of previous tectonic activity, not current. They are also not anything like a fractal noise map generator would produce. ALL mountains are the product of either volcanism, or plate collisions, while large hills can also be the product of glacial deposits. Any other type of unevenness in the earht's surface would have long since been eroded away.
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Originally Posted by Midgardsormr
