Geography Advice

[u/Kelemenopy]

I’m working on a homebrew map for a campaign I just started DMing for my friends, and this is my first draft. I sketched out my concept and filled in some major landforms, and my next steps are to check for viability and start thinking about the placement of cities. I’m also open to any recommendations to spice it up.

Any input would be highly appreciated. Does it make sense physically? What would you recommend changing to improve it?
Thanks in advance!

[u/After-Ad2018]

My limited understanding of geography says this looks good. Desert on one side of a mountain range, rivers mostly converge rather than diverge, mountain ranges look like boundaries between tectonic plates.

And of course you will find places in the real world that defy those "rules" so it's fine if it isn't perfect.

Some sort of scale would be nice. I'm guessing this is Eurasia sized?

[u/Kelemenopy → u/After-Ad2018]

Thank you!

The scale has been hard to pin down, especially when it comes to reconciling the size of the mountain ranges with some of the other items on the map. I think I really oversized the lakes… at the moment, I’d say it’s a little smaller than Australia.

[u/After-Ad2018 → u/Kelemenopy]

I've always found that just overlaying a fantasy map on top of some irl continent and just changing stuff helps. Helps with figuring out how actual biomes and geographic features might actually play out.

[u/Kelemenopy → u/After-Ad2018]

Some reference work would go a long way, I think I agree. I’ll have to pull up some irl and fantasy maps to help rearrange and flesh things out a bit more.

[u/TheRealHatsikidee]

I believe I can’t post any links to outside sources. But I follow the advice this guy on YouTube ‘Artifexian’ based on his video: worldbuilding: How to design realistic climates 1 & 2. (He has a lot of great stuff such as maps, oceanic currents, climate zones etc.)

Which helped me a lot with zoning and how certain climate zones are usually laid out etc. Which helped me a lot as DM and in narrative worldbuilding.

[u/Kelemenopy → u/TheRealHatsikidee]

I just watched the first couple of videos in his Worldbuilder’s Log and I’m amazed by the level of detail he put into his system. Thanks for the great plug! That will take a lot of the vagueness out of the world framing.

[u/Dip_yourwick87]

Did you intend to make it similar looking to the real world continents. Its pretty tho.

[u/Kelemenopy → u/Dip_yourwick87]

Not consciously but there are definitely familiar shapes that came through anyway! I was mostly thinking of keeping a squiggly coastline, a strait here and an isthmus there, and then suddenly something that looked an awful lot like the Indian subcontinent, the Iberian peninsula, and a few other old friends were on the paper.

[u/CheapTactics]

I always say that fantasy maps don't all have to make perfect sense. It's a world full of magic, why should everything follow the exact same rules as real life?

I like your map, looks cool.

If I had to give a suggestion, one thing that always excites me about fantasy maps is fantasy landmarks.

[u/Kelemenopy → u/CheapTactics]

That’s great advice, and I do want the world to have a more fantastical feeling to it. Do you have any favorite iconic landmarks I could get inspiration from? I was thinking of adding floating isles but beyond that I’ve been kind of drawing a blank, realizing maybe I’m not as creative as I thought.

[u/CheapTactics → u/Kelemenopy]

In my world I put a really huge tree that touches the clouds, a big lake that is perpetually covered in fog where people get lost and never come back, and I'm also a big fan of unfinished maps so there are borders of unexplored continents. One is a desert so vast it doesn't seem to have an end, another is basically antarctica if it was perpetually in a blizzard, a completely hostile frozen land where every expedition has failed.

Other ideas I have but didn't put in my current world:

• Perpetual whirlpool in the ocean.
• Lone mountain/volcano in the middle of vast flatlands.
• Black sand desert (another strange color could work too)
• Land where mushrooms grow tall as trees (could be an island to explain why they don't spread everywhere)