Terra Supras [Archive] - Wizards Community

Terra Supras [Archive] - Wizards Community

Post/Author/DateTime Post
loaba
05-26-07, 05:53 PM Been working on my world map, looking for some critiques.

http://i6.photobucket.com/albums/y249/loaba/Perseus10_5x8b.png

I think the scale is wrong. No matter which scale I use, it just seems kind of screwed up.
Araes
05-26-07, 09:09 PM It looks like an incredibly mountainous version of africa with a turnip hanging off the end. I'm not sure how your continent formed, but if its was supposed to be in some realistic way, then those mountains you have are highly unlikely as a product.

Also, if this is the whole world, then its either a really small world, or those mountains are ginormous. Plus, assuming standard weather patterns, you would do well to have some diversity of temperature zones around the equator so that you can seperate your world into some kind of segments on a sphere (like hemispheres).

What I would suggest to give it a more natural look is first start with general plate boundaries. Then decide how those plates are behaving and the directions they're moving. The behavior at the fault will determine a lot about how your topography will look. Two plates coming together will generally create mountains directly on the line or slightly offset from the line in ripples if one plate is being pulled under the other. Plates sliding by one another may leave trails of land where they used to be in contact or sharp edges. Plates moving apart may have large faults, or particularly volcanic areas, depending on how active the planet is. In addition, you can track things like volcanic island chains and hotspots (similar to Yellowstone) by following the motion of the plate and tracking it back over time.

You may also want to diversify your climates some. Not all leeward sides of mountains are going to have pure desert. Instead maybe they're just grassland / savanah with spotted desert mixed in near particularly hot zones. Your forests are relatively ok, but they're a little too uniform around the mountains. In fact, symmetry is probably one of your biggest issues and reducing it with some unsymmetric distributions of forests, grasslands, ect... would go a long way towards making your map look more normal.

Oh, and several of your rivers make no sense. They're basically running uphill in many locations and even cutting through moutains. Water runs downhill to the sea. Draw concentric lines of lowering elevation heading away from any mountains you have and then water is basically going to intersect these lines at roughly perpendicular angles.
loaba
05-26-07, 09:30 PM Thank you, that is exactly the kind of input I was looking for. I've already made several changes, I'll post an update.
Araes
05-26-07, 09:49 PM No problem, I enjoy giving it and hopefully it will help your map improve. If you need some more conceptual ideas, you can check out one of the threads I've participated in recently called Creating a New Campaign World (http://boards1.wizards.com/showthread.php?t=831458). The basic idea was for 20 people to take 20 sections of a world and create landmasses, cultures, backstories, ect... However, the important part is the geography, which has evolved into a rather realistic representation of weather patterns, mountain formation, meridian zones, ect...

Also, from a math and theory heavy standpoint, I have also found the site Creating an Earthlike Planet (http://www.compulink.co.uk/~morven/worldkit/index.html) to be particularly helpful as a numbers and theory reference.
loaba
05-26-07, 09:58 PM Okay - this is the map of a current game world, so I can't make huge changes.

I'll start with the mountains (because I think they pose the most problems. I know the ranges are just too damned big and I think I can fix that. But placement is going to be a problem. What would you suggest? Which ones are just comepletely out of place?

Edit: I'm building this thing in PS, it's frikken huge at 200dpi/16bit. Reason I mention this is because I agree that the world is small, it's just if I go bigger then the resolution will suffer.
Araes
05-26-07, 10:27 PM Hmm, alright. If I assume that the lower section of the map is one huge plate continent, then what I might suggest is reducing the mountains in the middle of the map to more like large areas of rolling hills. Generally, the largest mountains are going to form on only one edge of a plate, and then if it is hit by other plates on its opposite sides, then it will develop slightly more shallow mountains there as its moving away from the impact. Based on your map and the mountains you have shown, I would say that this thing is moving NW. Is it possible for you to maybe disconnect that large chain at the far NW and just turn that turnip thing into a massive volcanic island.

This also brings up another point, does this have to be all of the world? Could you instead say this is just the known world, which would help reduce the scale automatically. Also, that would allow for that turnip thing to be volcanic, which would then logically lead to there being other volcanic islands farther up to the NW that are smaller in size, and you might even be able to make that little extension to the SE of the turnip be a volcanic product as well that is about to crash into the mainland (about being in a million years or so) This assumes that the turnip and the fjord section are part of a different plate moving SE. Alternatively, they could be moving SW, which would mean that the entire area near the poles could actually be semi-volcanic, and that area around the fjord could be the result of one plate pushing into another that is moving sideways, creating both mountains and fissures.

Either of these options would require some redrawing of the moutains and coastline up in these areas to give an implied trajectory to the landmasses, but I'm hoping that most of your adventuring isn't happening up in the frozen north, which might make it easier.
loaba
05-26-07, 10:48 PM This is what I came up with before you posted your first critique.

(waits for massive .psd to load...)

http://i6.photobucket.com/albums/y249/loaba/TerraSuprassmall2.png

Aye, we're not yet into the nortern wastes as of yet, so that is pretty much an open book.

Yes, making the turnip into a volcanic turnip would be just fine. I also think I need to stick with my plan to up the size of the world while still maintaining as much of the original geographic details as possible.
loaba
05-27-07, 01:43 AM http://i6.photobucket.com/albums/y249/loaba/PerseusScale2.png

And the world is still too small... :rolleyes:

I think the problem is that I'm not zooming in for the detail work. I'm just gonna have to break down and do it.
Araes
05-27-07, 04:25 AM I definitely like the last map that you have posted the best. There are several critiques which I can give you, but I'll be assuming some things about weather patterns based on gross geological features. One of the main ones is that wind patterns are going directly west to east. As such, I think that first river on the left should spring from about the midpoint of the central ring of mountains. In general, those mountain formations are going to drive the currents up to the NE as they pass over the continent, and most of the rain is probably going to be dropped in the lower halves of both those open plains areas.

The left edges of the lower sections of all your mountains are probably going to have heavy concentrations of forest and folliage, while the upper edges are probably going to be somewhat more likely to be open grasslands or dry savanah. My guess is that the desert would probably not extend quite as far south as it does in the current map.

With regards to both of the central rivers, unless there is a sharp drop in elevation from the NE side of the continent to the SW side of the continent, verging on a mountain range in the NE, I would say that at least the uppermost river would probably head towards the NE ocean rather than the SW. However, I can also understand why some of these ideas might be hard to implement in an operating campaign world.
Dex
05-27-07, 05:34 AM My suggestion for adding more areas would be to put clusters of islands around the equator, in the empty space on the left. Small archipelagoes and volcanic island chains are excellent for pirate campaigns, and enable you to put lots of different cultures and environments close together.
loaba
05-27-07, 09:41 AM http://i6.photobucket.com/albums/y249/loaba/Gaia.png

This one is fast and dirty, kind of had to be. I took out all the texturing and just went with simple shape and color to define area and terrain type.

light green = grassland
med green = light woodland
dark green - heavy woodland
brown = hills
grey = mountains
yellow = desert
blue = water

Scale is... still wrong. :(
Hochiu
05-27-07, 10:50 AM The problem I see with your map is that the mountains are still unnatural looking. Is there some non-standard reason how they formed, such as through magic or other some other source? I mean, if you look at it, that's a lot of mishmashed tectonic plates all just thrown around.

Don't feel bad about them, if you don't want to. Look at Tolkien's maps. They had mountain ranges going at 90 degree angles for the gods sakes.

I echo the posters prior to me to include other islands off of the main coast, maybe a large island the size of Madagascar or something off of the south western tip, somewhere out in the middle of the ocean, which could be an enigmatic island nation that's fairly isolated but for a few pirates/traders each year.

I mean, its very possible that the winds bring rains up from the south to the north east, hence following the line of mountains and giving a uniformity to the forests and grasslands around them - but thats if you want to continue with this particular map, and the mountains it already has. I'm trying not to push too much real-world physics/geology/etc into your world, since I hate that done to mine, but sometimes an eye to reality helps everything flow together - that is if you're that concerned about it.
loaba
05-27-07, 10:55 AM What would you suggest in order to make them more natural looking? Also, keep in mind that the grey shapes are the mountains, whereas the brown areas are hills.
loaba
05-27-07, 12:03 PM Question: why can't all of my rivers simply spring from the mountain range and then run south by southwest to the opposite coast?

http://i6.photobucket.com/albums/y249/loaba/Gaia2.png
Araes
05-27-07, 01:39 PM In general, I don't have a major problem with the mountains anymore. They do look a little bit unnatural still, and I think the main reason is just that they are perfect bands of mountain running from one edge of the continent to the other. You might add a bit more splitting and wandering to the innner mountains. In addition, you might not have them make perfect walls between areas. Overall though, I think the second to last map you have shown is a large improvement over the first. There's still some strange behavior with the rivers, but in general it works.

As to why the rivers "probabaly" wouldn't all run SW. In general, to have your rivers do what you suggest, the shape of the continent would have to be like a big wedge, with a low side on the SW, and a high edge on the NE. Naturally, such a wedge formation would be a little weird, as it would basically involve 90 degree intersections of high elevation. Also, rivers tend to merge not fork as they run downhill. They usually only fork in incredibly flat areas like deltas.

Using the second to last map, if you were to separate the starting points of those two rivers in the central mountain a little, and change the hills to more closely resemble the detailed ones you drew before (so that they don't interfere with the river as it heads north) then I think you would have a relatively decent map. A bit of rearranging on the mountains so that they don't appear so perfect would also help the appearance.

On the islands, I don't care. Sometimes mountain chains do have islands in line with them in the sea. I don't see this as utterly necessary if you were to shorten and dice up the mountains a bit. Now that the turnip is an island I like it quite a bit better (and are those single mountains / volcanoes on it? or just areas of mountain?)
loaba
05-27-07, 03:04 PM Okay, lemme digest that and then I'll try it again.
loaba
05-27-07, 04:19 PM http://i6.photobucket.com/albums/y249/loaba/GaiaIII.gif

Only did one small section of hills. I'm not sure if I like the way they look and I also want to know what the rules are for placing the rest of 'em.
Araes
05-27-07, 11:45 PM Hmm, I'm not sure the way you've broken up the mountains directly solves the problem of linear bands that I was talking about earlier. I like the fact that you have broken them some, and they probably would have high hills mixed in with mountains in most of those fragmented areas. However, there is still the issue that they are basically perfect arcs. You need a bit of fractal motion to the overall path of the mountain chain. Right now its kind of like the gods took a compass and drew concentric circles of mountain chains heading outward from the SE. Also, having them not stretch completely from coast to coast, but maybe 3/4 or 2/3 for some of them would help as well.

The following picture of N. American mountain chains might be useful for illustrating some of the concepts I'm talking about. Note how the mountains in general follow straight lines or mild arcs, but curve and have distortions along that path.

http://araesmojo.googlepages.com/NAmericaMountains.jpg
Theskippingman
05-29-07, 03:02 AM It's very interesting seeing the work-in-progress refinement of your world map across multiple edit versions and posts!

Here's something just for you, and it's free: http://e23.sjgames.com/item.html?id=XRPFREE2

Theskippingman
loaba
05-30-07, 12:26 AM ^Hey, thanks for that link, man. That's some good stuff, lot's of useful info.

I think I;m gonna play with my map now, kind of been off it the past two days (after working on it practically non-stop for the previous 48hrs).

Post/Author/DateTime	Post
loaba 05-26-07, 05:53 PM	Been working on my world map, looking for some critiques. http://i6.photobucket.com/albums/y249/loaba/Perseus10_5x8b.png I think the scale is wrong. No matter which scale I use, it just seems kind of screwed up.
Araes 05-26-07, 09:09 PM	It looks like an incredibly mountainous version of africa with a turnip hanging off the end. I'm not sure how your continent formed, but if its was supposed to be in some realistic way, then those mountains you have are highly unlikely as a product. Also, if this is the whole world, then its either a really small world, or those mountains are ginormous. Plus, assuming standard weather patterns, you would do well to have some diversity of temperature zones around the equator so that you can seperate your world into some kind of segments on a sphere (like hemispheres). What I would suggest to give it a more natural look is first start with general plate boundaries. Then decide how those plates are behaving and the directions they're moving. The behavior at the fault will determine a lot about how your topography will look. Two plates coming together will generally create mountains directly on the line or slightly offset from the line in ripples if one plate is being pulled under the other. Plates sliding by one another may leave trails of land where they used to be in contact or sharp edges. Plates moving apart may have large faults, or particularly volcanic areas, depending on how active the planet is. In addition, you can track things like volcanic island chains and hotspots (similar to Yellowstone) by following the motion of the plate and tracking it back over time. You may also want to diversify your climates some. Not all leeward sides of mountains are going to have pure desert. Instead maybe they're just grassland / savanah with spotted desert mixed in near particularly hot zones. Your forests are relatively ok, but they're a little too uniform around the mountains. In fact, symmetry is probably one of your biggest issues and reducing it with some unsymmetric distributions of forests, grasslands, ect... would go a long way towards making your map look more normal. Oh, and several of your rivers make no sense. They're basically running uphill in many locations and even cutting through moutains. Water runs downhill to the sea. Draw concentric lines of lowering elevation heading away from any mountains you have and then water is basically going to intersect these lines at roughly perpendicular angles.
loaba 05-26-07, 09:30 PM	Thank you, that is exactly the kind of input I was looking for. I've already made several changes, I'll post an update.
Araes 05-26-07, 09:49 PM	No problem, I enjoy giving it and hopefully it will help your map improve. If you need some more conceptual ideas, you can check out one of the threads I've participated in recently called Creating a New Campaign World (http://boards1.wizards.com/showthread.php?t=831458). The basic idea was for 20 people to take 20 sections of a world and create landmasses, cultures, backstories, ect... However, the important part is the geography, which has evolved into a rather realistic representation of weather patterns, mountain formation, meridian zones, ect... Also, from a math and theory heavy standpoint, I have also found the site Creating an Earthlike Planet (http://www.compulink.co.uk/~morven/worldkit/index.html) to be particularly helpful as a numbers and theory reference.
loaba 05-26-07, 09:58 PM	Okay - this is the map of a current game world, so I can't make huge changes. I'll start with the mountains (because I think they pose the most problems. I know the ranges are just too damned big and I think I can fix that. But placement is going to be a problem. What would you suggest? Which ones are just comepletely out of place? Edit: I'm building this thing in PS, it's frikken huge at 200dpi/16bit. Reason I mention this is because I agree that the world is small, it's just if I go bigger then the resolution will suffer.
Araes 05-26-07, 10:27 PM	Hmm, alright. If I assume that the lower section of the map is one huge plate continent, then what I might suggest is reducing the mountains in the middle of the map to more like large areas of rolling hills. Generally, the largest mountains are going to form on only one edge of a plate, and then if it is hit by other plates on its opposite sides, then it will develop slightly more shallow mountains there as its moving away from the impact. Based on your map and the mountains you have shown, I would say that this thing is moving NW. Is it possible for you to maybe disconnect that large chain at the far NW and just turn that turnip thing into a massive volcanic island. This also brings up another point, does this have to be all of the world? Could you instead say this is just the known world, which would help reduce the scale automatically. Also, that would allow for that turnip thing to be volcanic, which would then logically lead to there being other volcanic islands farther up to the NW that are smaller in size, and you might even be able to make that little extension to the SE of the turnip be a volcanic product as well that is about to crash into the mainland (about being in a million years or so) This assumes that the turnip and the fjord section are part of a different plate moving SE. Alternatively, they could be moving SW, which would mean that the entire area near the poles could actually be semi-volcanic, and that area around the fjord could be the result of one plate pushing into another that is moving sideways, creating both mountains and fissures. Either of these options would require some redrawing of the moutains and coastline up in these areas to give an implied trajectory to the landmasses, but I'm hoping that most of your adventuring isn't happening up in the frozen north, which might make it easier.
loaba 05-26-07, 10:48 PM	This is what I came up with before you posted your first critique. (waits for massive .psd to load...) http://i6.photobucket.com/albums/y249/loaba/TerraSuprassmall2.png Aye, we're not yet into the nortern wastes as of yet, so that is pretty much an open book. Yes, making the turnip into a volcanic turnip would be just fine. I also think I need to stick with my plan to up the size of the world while still maintaining as much of the original geographic details as possible.
loaba 05-27-07, 01:43 AM	http://i6.photobucket.com/albums/y249/loaba/PerseusScale2.png And the world is still too small... :rolleyes: I think the problem is that I'm not zooming in for the detail work. I'm just gonna have to break down and do it.
Araes 05-27-07, 04:25 AM	I definitely like the last map that you have posted the best. There are several critiques which I can give you, but I'll be assuming some things about weather patterns based on gross geological features. One of the main ones is that wind patterns are going directly west to east. As such, I think that first river on the left should spring from about the midpoint of the central ring of mountains. In general, those mountain formations are going to drive the currents up to the NE as they pass over the continent, and most of the rain is probably going to be dropped in the lower halves of both those open plains areas. The left edges of the lower sections of all your mountains are probably going to have heavy concentrations of forest and folliage, while the upper edges are probably going to be somewhat more likely to be open grasslands or dry savanah. My guess is that the desert would probably not extend quite as far south as it does in the current map. With regards to both of the central rivers, unless there is a sharp drop in elevation from the NE side of the continent to the SW side of the continent, verging on a mountain range in the NE, I would say that at least the uppermost river would probably head towards the NE ocean rather than the SW. However, I can also understand why some of these ideas might be hard to implement in an operating campaign world.
Dex 05-27-07, 05:34 AM	My suggestion for adding more areas would be to put clusters of islands around the equator, in the empty space on the left. Small archipelagoes and volcanic island chains are excellent for pirate campaigns, and enable you to put lots of different cultures and environments close together.
loaba 05-27-07, 09:41 AM	http://i6.photobucket.com/albums/y249/loaba/Gaia.png This one is fast and dirty, kind of had to be. I took out all the texturing and just went with simple shape and color to define area and terrain type. light green = grassland med green = light woodland dark green - heavy woodland brown = hills grey = mountains yellow = desert blue = water Scale is... still wrong. :(
Hochiu 05-27-07, 10:50 AM	The problem I see with your map is that the mountains are still unnatural looking. Is there some non-standard reason how they formed, such as through magic or other some other source? I mean, if you look at it, that's a lot of mishmashed tectonic plates all just thrown around. Don't feel bad about them, if you don't want to. Look at Tolkien's maps. They had mountain ranges going at 90 degree angles for the gods sakes. I echo the posters prior to me to include other islands off of the main coast, maybe a large island the size of Madagascar or something off of the south western tip, somewhere out in the middle of the ocean, which could be an enigmatic island nation that's fairly isolated but for a few pirates/traders each year. I mean, its very possible that the winds bring rains up from the south to the north east, hence following the line of mountains and giving a uniformity to the forests and grasslands around them - but thats if you want to continue with this particular map, and the mountains it already has. I'm trying not to push too much real-world physics/geology/etc into your world, since I hate that done to mine, but sometimes an eye to reality helps everything flow together - that is if you're that concerned about it.
loaba 05-27-07, 10:55 AM	What would you suggest in order to make them more natural looking? Also, keep in mind that the grey shapes are the mountains, whereas the brown areas are hills.
loaba 05-27-07, 12:03 PM	Question: why can't all of my rivers simply spring from the mountain range and then run south by southwest to the opposite coast? http://i6.photobucket.com/albums/y249/loaba/Gaia2.png
Araes 05-27-07, 01:39 PM	In general, I don't have a major problem with the mountains anymore. They do look a little bit unnatural still, and I think the main reason is just that they are perfect bands of mountain running from one edge of the continent to the other. You might add a bit more splitting and wandering to the innner mountains. In addition, you might not have them make perfect walls between areas. Overall though, I think the second to last map you have shown is a large improvement over the first. There's still some strange behavior with the rivers, but in general it works. As to why the rivers "probabaly" wouldn't all run SW. In general, to have your rivers do what you suggest, the shape of the continent would have to be like a big wedge, with a low side on the SW, and a high edge on the NE. Naturally, such a wedge formation would be a little weird, as it would basically involve 90 degree intersections of high elevation. Also, rivers tend to merge not fork as they run downhill. They usually only fork in incredibly flat areas like deltas. Using the second to last map, if you were to separate the starting points of those two rivers in the central mountain a little, and change the hills to more closely resemble the detailed ones you drew before (so that they don't interfere with the river as it heads north) then I think you would have a relatively decent map. A bit of rearranging on the mountains so that they don't appear so perfect would also help the appearance. On the islands, I don't care. Sometimes mountain chains do have islands in line with them in the sea. I don't see this as utterly necessary if you were to shorten and dice up the mountains a bit. Now that the turnip is an island I like it quite a bit better (and are those single mountains / volcanoes on it? or just areas of mountain?)
loaba 05-27-07, 03:04 PM	Okay, lemme digest that and then I'll try it again.
loaba 05-27-07, 04:19 PM	http://i6.photobucket.com/albums/y249/loaba/GaiaIII.gif Only did one small section of hills. I'm not sure if I like the way they look and I also want to know what the rules are for placing the rest of 'em.
Araes 05-27-07, 11:45 PM	Hmm, I'm not sure the way you've broken up the mountains directly solves the problem of linear bands that I was talking about earlier. I like the fact that you have broken them some, and they probably would have high hills mixed in with mountains in most of those fragmented areas. However, there is still the issue that they are basically perfect arcs. You need a bit of fractal motion to the overall path of the mountain chain. Right now its kind of like the gods took a compass and drew concentric circles of mountain chains heading outward from the SE. Also, having them not stretch completely from coast to coast, but maybe 3/4 or 2/3 for some of them would help as well. The following picture of N. American mountain chains might be useful for illustrating some of the concepts I'm talking about. Note how the mountains in general follow straight lines or mild arcs, but curve and have distortions along that path. http://araesmojo.googlepages.com/NAmericaMountains.jpg
Theskippingman 05-29-07, 03:02 AM	It's very interesting seeing the work-in-progress refinement of your world map across multiple edit versions and posts! Here's something just for you, and it's free: http://e23.sjgames.com/item.html?id=XRPFREE2 Theskippingman
loaba 05-30-07, 12:26 AM	^Hey, thanks for that link, man. That's some good stuff, lot's of useful info. I think I;m gonna play with my map now, kind of been off it the past two days (after working on it practically non-stop for the previous 48hrs).