Quote Originally Posted by the931stsoldier View Post
Ok my question goes out to anyone who can awnser especially to the veterans i was wondering what were the steps you used when making your map from scratch? what general ideas did u have when you made your world into a physical ? did u make the map first then the rest of the story? how did you come up with all the names for the places you wanted and how did you decide what to name what? like right now im looking at the rough draft ot my map and i seas. gulfs. ithmuses, straits, peninsulas,bays, islands and i feel like they ALL need names.. and perhaps a story behind the area: basically i was wondering what was your method of map making, deciding where to put mountins deserts etc and how you named them?
For me it depends on for the circumstances behind the map. Often, especially in my younger years, I would just draw a map because I was bored, then come up with the story. Often I would do a series of chronological political maps going back and forth in time showing how things changed (Especially in my Sci Fi universe), then come up with the reasons why they changed.

Other times I had a need to create something on the spot and would do so, then go back and draw the map to fit in with what I had come up with, often I did this in gaming sessions because I generally dislike Campaign settings I didn't create (except Eberron).

Still other times I was inspired by something I saw or heard and sat down to draw something based on it. This is the least common way I do maps though, at least direct inspiration.

What I have done now that I have decades of maps filling up cabinets is I have begun to go through the maps and create worlds by meshing multiple smaller maps together, redrawing them to fit into the same world but using the old maps as inspiration. The current world I'm running/writing in is the culmination of roughly 12 years of work I did, mostly in my high school and early adult years.

What this has allowed me to do is give a very different feel for the various parts of the world while keeping a fairly uniform set of laws that govern all of the physical aspects of the world.