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Kemper Boyd posted:And of course since it's 7th Sea, the shape of the continent and the geography makes no sense at all. This is a pet peeve of mine, geography is pretty straightforward and with just a little bit of effort you can get a good understanding of how landmasses, bodies of water, and climates form in the real world and then build believable geography. Also good geography can make great world building and interesting stories. Trade routes, border disputes, cultural migrations, are all influenced by geography, but if your geography is stupid then these things become contrived. I don't think you need to be a slave to real world geography, fantasy worlds should have fantasy terrain, but if you don't have a good reason for something to be out of the ordinary then it should follow the rules that have already been established by the real world. Now time for me to share:  One of the common instructions for *world games is to make maps but to leave blanks, we wanted to do that for Spirit of 77's fictional location "The City". I did it by emulating the the 1970's redesign of the New York Subway map. The interesting thing about the New York Subway map is that it's not geographically accurate, it is only relatively accurate to the subway stations (which confused a lot of people when it was introduced). So it solves our problem of leaving blanks and makes for a really interesting way to look at the city. We were originally going to have these printed poster sized for a backer reward but we didn't reach the necessary stretch goal.
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Dec 14, 2014 11:32
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Grey Hunter posted:Mainly its the mountains - most landmasses run sea level -> mountain in hights, the mountain ranges running up/down on the map are odd, they should be clustered in the centre. Yeah 7th Sea is some sort of non-Europe setting right? It's like they threw stuff down to emulate Europe without any regard for why things are the way they are. The Mountains and rivers all conveniently line up to make nice neat national borders, which makes it look super fake. Rivers are the thing that I see that bug me all the time on fantasy maps. Rivers run from high to low ground to the ocean in the shortest possible way, they never go through or over mountain ranges (like it appears they do in that 7th Sea Map). Even if you've got fantasy formed terrain, water works a pretty specific and predictable way and will form itself around the terrain in the same way every single time. Also massive mostly straight rivers that split landmasses down the middle are awful, rivers are never consistent, they go through floods and droughts, they change over time and change the terrain around them. Rivers are massively important to pre-industrial societies, they're the best method of inland trade and transport, wars are fought over river access, culture is exchanged along river paths, cities and even nations are built upon river banks. Throwing them down willy nilly will give your world an artificial feeling every time. ianvincible posted:Would you mind expanding on this a little? The last geography I had was back in 9th grade, which was a while ago. In particular, what about that 7th sea map makes it look unnatural? The number of thin peninsulas jutting out to the south is weird to me, I guess. Is there like a plate-tectonics reason that can't happen? Something about the distribution of mountains is also screwy? Yeah most of us took Geography in high school, but they're mostly concerned about teaching you where countries are located so you can pass standardized tests. A couple years ago I took a college level geography class and there was no mention of countries it was all about how terrain forms and it's effects on climate. Once you understand all the processes involved it's pretty straightforward to predict what types of terrain and climate a specific area of the world will have. We actually did a exercise where we plotted out all the different climates on an arbitrarily shaped continent. I'm no expert but I know enough to not make major mistakes. I would love to see a fantasy world created by a Geography geek in the way that Middle Earth was created by a language geek. Somebody who really knew their stuff could predict amazing details about a world based on the placement geographic features and natural resources alone.
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Dec 14, 2014 21:30
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Humbug Scoolbus posted:Is it possible to get a high res version PDF so I can get my own poster sized map printed? Yeah I can do that. There are still some things I want to fix/finish on it first though.
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Jan 17, 2015 21:58
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Something I'm working on today, I've noticed players making new characters having a lot of questions about BUZZ (character motivations) and Gear. So I made up this reference page, it's done in the style of old newspaper ads.
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Jan 18, 2015 06:11
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I'm creating some filler images for our rulebook.  
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Mar 31, 2015 23:02
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paradoxGentleman posted:Hello map thread, do you also accept unofficial maps? Because I have a lovely homemade map that I'd like to hear your opinion about : I'm pretty sure that's exactly what this thread is for. I agree with Effectronica's assessment about mountain ranges and such. The other thing you should look at is rivers and water ways. They always flow from high ground (your mountains) to the oceans in the most direct path possible. For pre-industrial civilizations rivers are the lifeblood of the world, they provide water and fertile land for crops and they provide the only method of quickly moving goods inland. Cities and towns build up around rivers and seaports and those are where cultures are born. As for software, I haven't used Campaign Cartographer or at least 10 years, but when I used it, it was very complex and very expensive, more tool than I would suggest for most people. There are plenty of free alternatives to Photoshop that give you much more flexibility than MS Paint. GIMP is always an option, but something like Paint.net might be better for a casual user.
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Jun 1, 2015 21:09
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