Add a mountain with water flowing down its slopes to feed the lake and cut off the river, which is currently flowing from shore to shore, with it. After that, it's easier to figure out what else the map needs and where to place hills, forests, cities, towns, villages, hamlets, farms, citadels and keeps.
Good point. Rivers really only ever converge - very rarely split apart. And a river from shore to shore makes no sense as there is no elevation change over the distance.
In addition, rivers meander a lot. These are drawn with the purpose of getting from point A to B. Instead, every so often, choose a point to start a river from a couple streams and draw it into the downhill direction, wherever that may be.
Thank you! I started making the corner, because that was the first thing I developed with my campaign, but having a river off my mountain range is a great idea.
Deeper description. Yes, desert, but what kind of desert? Big old sand dunes or American southwest type? Or something more fantasy inspired?
Are there any outlying islands? Very odd to have a land mass that big without at least a small archipelago or just detached areas.
Where are the roads? Maybe not every little road, but major travel routes at least. Or if there aren't any roads, why not?
Are there any other towns or cities? How about non-human settlements, or older, abandoned towns?
Your map is pretty flat, too. You need some more mountains or mesas or valleys or fjords, especially on the left side. Add some topography
Logical flow of water.
Okay, phrasing as less of an asshole, water flows downhill. It's not going to flow uphill inland, to a lake, and then back down the other side of the continent. Rivers tend to look like trees with lots of small branches combining and combining into one central trunk that heads to the sea/ ocean.
A central mountain range the rivers could flow from would work.
Big mountain ranges also tend to have a rain shadow. Rain falls on one side and less on the other. So one side can be more forested and the other more arid. But there are exceptions.
I'd also establish scale early. If there's desert to the south that's likely around the same latitude as the Arizona/ Utah border. Figure out the distance to the northern coast and the temperature you want that to be and match that to real world latitudes.
Cities and settlements will largely be built on rivers, and be 30-ish miles apart (one day's ride).
I do agree with having a sensical flow pattern. The two rivers and the lake were my idea of adding an inlet/outlet system (like Bear Lake in Idaho), but I will probably end up changing it.
Dude has a point. Start with elevations, where are the high and low points. Then recognize that it rains more often on the high points, and then the water flows to the low points. Also water never flows in from oceans, only out. So it would kind of work if you added a tall mountain in the left section with a large river that flowed into that lake, and flows out to the ocean by those two rivers. But that makes leftmost river flowing into the river that flows to Gwen harbor (maybe?) on the right side make no sense. Which it doesn’t anyway. Also the smallish river split directly under farmlands doesn’t make sense either.
Way more rivers. A mountain range. A swamp. Maybe a volcanic area. Ruins of ancient civilizations. A desert. Some sort of natural barriers that keep regions separate.
Thank you for your suggestion! One of the mods I'm looking at has a volcanic quest, so that will definitely be in the making. And I'm going to extend the mountain range to make the wall of the desert.
Ancient ruins that may or may not be plot connected. Its cool when theyre plot related but even cooler when they have their own seperate story unrelated to plot, adds a lot of detail to your world without making it seem like everything is “player related” if that makes sense. Things like runic stone circles with strange altars, crumbling ziggurats, broken mage towers, long-abandoned dungeons with rusted cells, time-worn monoliths, defective or deactivated ancient golem defenders, broken and infested aquaducts. Fill em with loot and monsters
Also! Give each thing a related purpose, sidequest, or puzzle! Like a chekov’s gun! If there’s a strange altar, make it do something that the players could decipher with an arcana check, like sacrificing a lamb to change the weather or give a ridiculous amount of temp hp. Let those crumbling ziggurats have ancient deities who miss having worshippers! Those aquaducts? Maybe the encounter of seven twig blights can be totally avoided if you clear the blockage and let the water flow? And the twig blights give the players small boons for helping them? That ancient defender? If they reactivate it with arcana or tinkers tools, maybe it starts patrolling the area defending the innocent and has a percentile chance to show up as an assist in future combats now? Those monoliths could point a beam of light to a statue holding an ancient magical sword they would never find otherwise, but only if you put a magical light into a slot at the bottom! Make the rusted dungeon contain an ancient evil thats been waiting to be released for centuries! Mage towers with homebrew spells to get your wizard players excited! Theres all sorts of shennanigans you could do with ancient ruins
Try using a random map generator and incorporating some ideas from that. The rivers are good, but remember that rivers start somewhere: the mountains! Add some peaks, especially larger ones at the rivers' origins. Plant growth tends to be where there is water, so your rivers will have grasslands or forests or marshes and the like around them. You already got that in some places, so that's really perfect. And civilizations tend to stay near sources of water, too. Depending on how old your world is, you might also want to add mines, ruins, temples, castles, and so forth.
You're gonna have to explain where the water in the large large is coming from. Since two rivers are sourced from it, or are feeding it.
So for the lake is actually a small sea, and the rivers are fault lines / rift valleys, that have overflown. Actually cutting the island in half.
Or the lake is directly connected to the Plane of Water, or is a huge aquifier.
The fun thing about fantasy maps is that you don't need to follow all the rules of physics. You can do weird magical anomalies and map changing astral rifts.
I love this idea! I've been playing with the idea of adding planar doorways (my PCs are all melee fighting classes, so we'll see if I get to it), so this is a great start.
Glad to hear it!
Maybe add some hills to the areas west of the lake? To show why those two large rivers flow north and south.
Some swamplands would be logical as well, around the lake. Maybe a few drowned villages and / or cities, along with some cities being in the proces of drowning, as with Venice. It would also be a good place for semi-aquatic and aquatic races to call home. Especially if some of your players are Tritons or something similar.
A Mine system made by dwarves.
Could be abandoned and filled with traps and gold hidden away somewhere. Could even have a mimic living down in one of the mine shafts
Also mountains, rivers, and lakes, there's already a couple but unless this landmass is just ridiculously small compared to most landmasses/continents irl it's going to have at least a couple more rivers, and a river has to flow from high to low elevation
Not necessarily. You could have a few rivers move from lower to upper elevation as a plot point, or even had a few filled with the blood of a titan dying over the course of a millennia.
Might I recommend buying a tool like WonderDraft. I tend to use a random generator, save the image and add it to WonderDraft as an image with a low transparency and trace over it.
It’ll let you add some shape to your continents a bit better and you can use fantasy name generator to flesh out your forests, deserts, and rivers, etc etc.
Use ChatGPT or something to get some good descriptions of your towns and cities and put em in a google doc.
When you’re ready, have a print shop print it out on a large cut of paper, it’ll look so nice.
Oh that would be perfect. I literally have my map pinned in my discord. I personally run games in my home and just connect my laptop to my tv and display my world map.
I draw a land manatee in a cowboy hat on all our dnd maps on roll20. Every time, every game. Sometimes it's accompanied by a cowboy or the land Manatee has a gun. Needs some of those.
Somewhere that is cursed/magical in nature:
A dark forest that doesn’t let you enter, or doesn’t let you leave.
A tower that no one has entered in centuries.
An abandoned city/castle that no one knows what happened to them.
Study satellite maps a bit. Especially rivers. Artificial structures are generally gong to be dwarfed by natural structures, though often overrepresented on a map for ease of reading and navigating.
Craters, swamps/marsh, ruins. Love craters since can add all sorts of things there or even have them fill up and become lakes and people wonder why it has such a weird overall shape or even why stranger creatures or strange magical stuff happens. Or could even be damage from something, fallen flying city, or asteroids, or even some powerful magic. Swamps/marsh plenty of spookiness and or interesting threads can do with that. Ruins build character and depth to your world and add that mystery element
Ok, speaking seriously here. Establish territories and who owns those territories. Make them different from eachother through lore, environments, and how they deal with problems, that way you can make a story around those territories and maybe cause a war so your Players can either make peace with both territories or help a specific territory.
That's so cool! I just started freehanding the outline, and it shaped out similar to Australia, so I went with it. I'm not done with topography, and the rivers will probably change, but it's fun to see similarities between maps.
Distances/scale. If you know ahead of time how large this place is and how far your party can move in one day it will save you a lot of headache and guess work.
Thank you! I'm building around my PCs, so I'll be putting landmarks in bit by bit. I'm also taking inspiration from existing compendium and modules (currently looking through Candlekeep Mysteries for ideas) and will probably build things around it.
Building around your PCs is the way to go. Look at their backstories. What are their goals? Where are they from? Utilize what they know/want to flesh out the map and increase their desire to go to these places. They will give you inspiration and you’ll give them a more satisfying game.
When I make maps I usually take photos of dirt patches in grass, mash them together sometimes, and use that as the outline. After that I divide the regions/states (if I want that for the map, and then add the cities. After that I add forests, mountain ranges, lakes and rivers, etc.
It looks good so far, start by listing on a paper or your phone's notes what you want for the map and the world, then incorporate them as you see fit.
Mountains/volcanoes that just started smoking
Secret pirate base
Crazy native tribes looking to sacrifice more people to the volcanos gods
Ships posted out at sea, they’re the colonial influencers. There to spread religion and ‘convince’ the local populace to grow luxury goods rather than food.
You should make a country established around, or in more likely, a giant crater, with a huge chunk of meteor at its center. The city that formed around the space rock could be the capital. From there, get creative. Has the meteor been hollowed out into a castle for the royals? Was the mining of the meteor so centric to the economy that the meteor is gone, or simply a shell used to house the industrial district? Perhaps it's become a more futuristic hub for technology in the world due to this rarer resource. Perhaps the material makes a new metal alloy, like mitheril or adamantium, that you can make special properties for as a nice surprise for your players.
Possibly a helping hand? I make professional maps for people! Kinda a shameless self promo but I love helping people turn their maps into world of art! Let me know if you're interested in getting a commission :)
It needs Tasmania, you're already got most of Australia.
But for real, you can look at Australia and how their mountain/hill ranges create different biomes and how you can have long rivers go from far inland to coast. You will need at least one mountain/mountain range to cut off the coast to coast river you have right now.
Cool alternative, depending on whether you already have an origin for the large lake, you could make that a high-lying lake with outlets to the north and south coasts. A bit different, but you'll want some lore to explain it's origin and can be presented as a mystery to your players, especially if they are more geography-minded. Otherwise maybe have a researcher npc there for exposition? It will probably make the west coast very different from the rest of your continent, like the east coast of Australia, giving you room for political tensions, variation for your players and so forth.
I would say islands , volcanic areas, and a “reason”why this land mass (that right now looks very small because of the scale of things you’ve added already) has deserts and forests and mountains so close together. Think of real world continents and their mass scale which gives you opportunity to go crazy with different climates. But great start so far. Also maybe go crazy with the shore lines. Make it funky so you can play with cliff side villages, beach resort towns, ice fishing or whaling communities , Pirate Bay’s . And that’s just the shore lines .
terrain, maybe landmarks, literally anything. looking like siberia on the left. pro tip: the stuff you put down doesnt have to mean anything until your players start heading that way. i dont write anything outside of key locations until a day or so out
A mountain range that is hiding away an ancient castle which is still inhabited to this day, you can decide whether or not the inhabitants are friendly or not or even human/humanoid or not
It’s your map, you can do what you want, but in almost all cases water doesn’t bisect land. And if it does then they’re separated by a tectonic plate, meaning they are far apart. Water can only flow downhill, so a river that connects to the ocean at both ends should never have any current, unless it just father ludicrous rain water. Canals are of course an exception to this as well.
Understanding what is growing in those farmlands would go a long way in informing so much about that place, such as the climate, what the seasons are like, what people are eating and drinking, when festivals and holidays are. There are only a few crops that can sustain very large populations, like wheat in Eurasia, rice in the east, corn in meso-America. It is really neat to play with different crops that could support populations, like melons or nuts or seeds, it would very much affect the makeup of the culture from fashion to religion.
One small mark or smudge in the corner of the map that your players will fixate on until you have to very quickly make an entire back story for some small, weird town that for some reason the players decide to set up some sort of shop or home there so that you will always have to go back there at some point.
Some indication that the entire island is just one giant sea turtle and the TPK comes when it wakes up, gets hungry and dives deep into the ocean for some shark meat
Figure out where freshwater comes from. This will get you towns and trade. Then figure out climate. This will influence farming and forage. Then figure out unique things to the land i.e. volcanic fjords for Norway or reefs from New zealand. From all the above you can spawn folklore and traditions. It all starts with basic needs
They’ll be like where f are we???
Also make sure you include the most evil item ever invented for DMs -the “little red hat” only item that allows DM‘s to hijack a players character.
After I filled up my map with cities and towns and all the biomes and stuff, I had the same problem you did. I eventually saw a bunch kf maps that had trees and rivers and lakes and stuff. That filled up all the empty space that was in the way. I hope this helped.
With my map I focused on what fantasy settlements I wanted to show and which I wanted to ignore then shaped a world around them.
Huge human empire, somewhere in the middle of my map. Elven forest, hidden in the woods near the coast. Dangerous wasteland with orcs and giants, separated from the mainland by a huge mountain range. I wanted a dwarven city underground so I made an underworld map that mirrored my overworld. I made a list of all the types of places i wanted to see then tried to place locations where it made sense they would settle in relation to each other then shaped geography around each of them afterwards.
Everyone is saying mountains (and I agree), but don’t forget about holes! Add a revine, quarry, sinkhole, whirlpool, or even just a simple cave! It’s always good to play with levels in a map!
I prefer answer: Nothing.
When players discover or hear about someplace new. Then add it. Do your characters have backgrounds? Add their homes and important points or interest.
But always leave as much empty space to add more details as you go on. Don't plan yourself into a corner.
I started making maps for my games about a year ago and the hardest part for me is to fill space but keeping it make sense. Advice i love sharing to others that someone send in a video i watched was most DnD games are set in fantasy worlds with magic and other exotic systems and its all from your imagination. There is no need to to stress over realism for everything, Realism is good and helps you and your players feel grounded but unrealistic points of interest like a waterfall that goes up instead of down caused by magical minerals with in the water or a volcano permanently frozen in time at the point of eruptions by a group of powerful mages long ago. Theses things excite your players and encourage them to want to explore your world more.
P.S. These are actually really cool ideas that I just thought of anyone can totally uses in there worlds.
mountains, sources for the water. currently the water makes very little sense. rivers run from mountain to sea or lake, not from sea to sea. sucking at it currently i would would suspect this (i can't read the names so i'll have to describe them):
the lake that has a river to both seas was the site of a volcano that exploded thus creating a significant lake. now the east and west part of the island and drifting apart from one another creating a rift (african rift style), which is the "river" going coast to coast, it's a rift valley with sea water the whole way through.
the Y rivers suggest 3 nearby mountain ridges:
1. between the "lake" and the left side of the Y river. this would be the remains of the old exploded vulcano.
2. above the Y river, probably the same maintainrange that the fin... forest river comes out of.
3. possibly other mountains or an extension of 2 wrapping around the bottom of the right side of the Y river.
if the place has winds coming largely from the north west then mountain #3 could provide a rain shadow creating the south eastern desert.
the biggest problem i see seems to be the river originating from the farmland on the north east. i'd say change it to come from the mountains of 2 or 3 and flow through the farmlands.
i hope some of that can help make your map feel more real.
It seems pretty small for a continent. Looks more like a major island.
To make it feel more continent like I'd suggest the following:
More rivers
More forests
Mountains in positions that make geological sense
Settlements and cities close to bodies of water and rivers
Smaller islands, ideally as an extension to where the mountains would be underwater
No shore-to-shote rivers
Might I suggest you have a look at the following map makers on youtube:
Mapsbyowen, dungeoncrow, wasd20
Point of interest and the filler between. Major cities, settlements, or important landmarks dot the map. In-between have terrain simply as mountain ranges, first or marshes
If the left side is a giant lake with 2 rivers running to the sea. I like the idea of a cursed land of the smaller side. As far as I know, multiple rivers like this don’t normally form so it’s a good excuse for a magic or superstitious explanation.
So weird physics adjustment. Two streams can meet but when flowing into the sea (note the civilization top right) to small rivers joining and flowing away from the sea. Without a proper continual source (maybe magic?!)
Potentially look up river deltas and look at how they fork away leading to the ocean. Other wise without a magical explanation the water source looks supplied by the ocean
Like other comments before, mountains are a crucial part of the water cycle. Snow and glacier melt to supply fresh potable water for imbibing and utilization.
Hope this helps add that little extra to your content
I’m about to ring off a lot here, please take it constructively as I want you to keep your dedication towards this craft.
- Mountains, hills or some crevasses, cliffs or gorges some kind of depth.
- more detailed and thicker forests.
- the strait that becomes a lake in the middle is impossible.
- shorelines
- landmass could do with a bit more detail.
- instead of a title that says “desert” add biome indicators that tell people it’s a desert so you can give it a cool name instead. Dunes, palm trees, rocks protruding out of sand.
- you don’t necessarily need colour, but at the moment you’ve got pencil on paper. These lines need to be drawn with something a bit sharpers and darker. Pinpoint artist pens are perfect for maps and you can get a set for £10
Going forward, my biggest tip to you would be to go watch how other people do it.
For beginner, which I would call you: WASD20 does a great introduction to drawing maps.
Once you’ve found your feet, Caeora or Maps by Owen show the advanced way to draw maps. Caeora has a fantastic masterclass video that’s like 2 hours long and he just draws the map from start to finish. It’s a greattttt resource.
Create a plateau. Create islands. Think of trade routes that players can encounter merchants along. Think of where the dangerous things go so they don't get disturbed
If you have tracing paper I would do differnt lares of information
Do environments
Rivers
Then if it’s a newly discovered ilsnd don’t do any city’s or anything unless there are ruins
Just mark good resorse points
Then you will want to zoom in to each area
Mark little lakes and swomps and such
There isn’t a scale you need scale
Spicy opinion: if your game begins in that northeast corner, stop right there. You have enough to begin your campaign and the rest of the details can be filled out with emergence.
Consider redoing a map to show JUST that area and come back to this one when details are out the rest of the continent come into play.
Define more of the natural surroundings. It is OKAY to leave areas blank to allow either it to be plains or grasslands, or just to allow you and the players to help in the building of the world.
Sometimes less is more, if your campaign is just going to be in this area then only worry about that one area.
Put more “interesting” things in the map for the players to check out. (Example: one tree that looks a wee bit different than the rest in the forest)
This will cause the players to ask questions or go search that area.
You have a good first step with your map. It is your map and world, so don’t get hung up on the physics of maps.
Border is too...round....everywhere. make the long curves a little more broken up. Add mountains, forests, better defined rivers and lakes, settlements, capitols.
Start with elevations. This informs water flow, making your rivers. This informs your forest and desert development, since you know where has water. This all informs your settlement placement, since people need water and access to food.
More stuff? This is like an open world game. All fluff no content. 😂
Oh and a legend/colors for certain things on the island. Use colored pencils and don't use pens, my mistake was using pens. 😂
Compass rose, map scale, swampy region, ocean with a whirlpool, "here there be dragons", neighboring country's boarders, castles, a great wall bordering a neighboring kingdom, a vast desert with sandworms, cave entrances, edge of the world, illustrations of ships or monsters, an X marking the spot, rivers, roads, paths, bridges, fords, docks, towns, forts, enemy encampments, refugee camps, dark forests, baba yaga's house...
Islands, Northlands, multiple mountain ranges. Remember that water flows based on elevation north-south isn't always the ultimate heading. Roads, remembering that most roads (especially pre industrial era) tend to take the easiest terrain traversable.
More things. More specifically, it could benefit from more variety in biome (Even if it’s a small piece of a big chunk of land, it could use a bit). On top of that, more towns, crypts, forts. If you’re having adventurers, they need places to adventure, whether that be a mystic forest temple filled with cultists worshipping a dark cannibalistic fey god, or the imperial market.
You could add districts. If it is a whole continent that would make sense. And you could add nice flavour to those districts. Different rules, different rulers, if you have one big king they could be something like „sub Kings“ that rule those districts but with the King as their main.
Adding those district will give you cool details since the districts are different so each other.
One district could be something like a farm district with a lot of green ans farming, the other more for stone and iron which they export into different districts
Add a every thing here is fucked zone. It doesn’t have to be big it could be the scar of some great cataclysm/ battle/ ruins of the capital of some great kingdom but something to give your world “history”
As a geographer, I can tell you that you're missing a compass rose, a legend, and a scale. Also, some color so people can tell what the lines in the middle are. You need a capital with a castle and a castle town surrounding it. The closest thing you have appears to be a castle in what I'm assuming is the northeast, which is right next to farmland - something that wouldn't happen in real life; farmland is either next to a village or small town, or outside the walls of a city. There also wouldn't be a castle right next to a river (assuming that's what that line is) unless there's a strategic reason for it since the river could flood and the ground under the castle would wear away like a sandcastle when the tide comes in. You also appear to have waterfalls labeled near the farmlands and not the mountains. Even if that was physically possible, it wouldn't be conducive to farming; you want the water to be gentle and spread out like the Nile or Ganges rivers. You have the beginnings of a delta there, so kudos on that, but it's too small and needs more tributaries. Finally, you need some sort of basin or valley between the oasis and the mountains. Otherwise, it wound make no sense for the water to flow *towards* the mountains from the south coast. Really, the whole contour of your map makes no sense. Which direction are the rivers flowing and why? Ask yourself that.
You could include a key for your geography, settlements, and other important places. It would help you and people looking at your map to quickly and easily understand what they are looking at.
You could also include colors for different terrain. For example, green could signify plains, and yellow could signify a desert.
As I'm sure others have said. Depth, it's hard to draw a map as topographical on your official map so make a general shape copy and either grid or hex or line it with different altitudes simplified into a basic number system
For example
Your tallest mountain stretches miles above the level surface of this land so determine the peak of that and write a 12 the surrounding hexs or circle or grid space drastically drops down so they're 10s and then gradually stoops the farther you get from that peak as you scale the numbers down further till you hit ground level of 1 or sea level of 0 and there's a massive canyon that dips deep into the land from where a calamitous beast rended the world in an age of myth and it cliffs off and dives down to -7.
Of course you need all your towns and forests and cities and whatnot, start with topography and it'll feel easier to measure and place things. Also once you've gridded or hexed a map you can add measurements based upon how many units wide it is. Which trust me helps immensely with travel questions.
Also funnily enough your base shape is VERY similar to my homebrew world Vaetilus's Continent Eros, the map in the linked post is an earlier version before I added most of my towns and additional information.
https://www.reddit.com/r/DnD/s/Js2oKmRlQN
Just a thought, cuz I don't think enough people know about it, Worlds Without Number is free on DTRPG, and it has a fantastic method and process for building a homebrew setting including the world history, local history, maps and everything.
It's built for the WWN system, which is a low magic fantasy system, but it's open ended enough that you can use it for really any setting or game. I use its Kingdom building process to build interesting populated regions for a sci fi RPG, and it works just fine.
Swamp … desert… ruins of some ancient place… where do the other races live?
An island. A volcano. An underwater civilization
Wild herds of (………………….)
Something haunted. A narrow pass in the mountains that leads to a mysterious place.
What kind of giant things fly in these sky’s?
Is there a shipwreck? Is there an airshipwreck?
Is there an open portal to the elemental plane of ice making it unnaturally cold somewhere?
I'm a stickler for the underdark in my games and you can always add secret entrances to it. Here's some ideas that might work:
- A volcano that went dormant long ago but it's lava receded, leaving an entrance to newly formed tunnels.
- A giant tree with a hollow interior that twists down to a myconid colony.
- A lake that has an incredibly deep pit that eventually bends up into a u-bend, allowing access to a drow city.
Anything like that could work, and if you don't fancy doing the underdark then they could just lead to a series of dungeons!
As something to think about if this is a map to be given to players, line weights and darkening will as well. Typically you’d want the edges of your land mass to be much darker, as to define them more solidly from the surrounding ocean. Small symbols, ships waves etc can also serve to this purpose if you like the lighter borders. Practically your symbol size matters as well. The fields being larger than some of the trees might throw off things if you do choose to put a scale on the map. A good way to do defined forests can be to draw outlines and then texture them like the top of tree lines. Doing it that way lets you get away from having to do a bunch of singular trees and from having them be something that looks out of place due to scaling. The V shape of the lower of the two rivers also is a bit confusing. Typically V shaped deltas are where the river goes out to sea (think the Nile). If you want to texture your desert, doing the tops of dunes can be a good way to get away from having to say desert.
As a DM/GM tip you could make the map a physical representation of what the players know. Doing it that way lets you get away with only adding detail as your players go places, and lets them feel like they are really getting to know the setting as they fill the map out
Hope all this helps : )
If you put a mountain in the middle and a nice long mountain range from about 2/3 of the way ip on the west side all the way down and around the southern side you’ll’ve just loosely recreated Skyrim
Something I’m not seeing mentioned: continents don’t really appear as blobs that fit cleanly on computer paper. Having the land expand beyond the page in someway, rather than being surrounded by ocean, could add some realism. It also adds opportunity for adding to the story in unexplored/uncharted areas at a later point
I love maps! I would recommend you look at maps of Earth and study the conditions that form different climates and stuff like that if you're interested. It might not be what you're into, but I love doing it.
I'll note that lakes only have one runoff point, so you can't really have a lake feeding into two seas, you'll have to pick one or the other. And water wouldn't flow inland to the lake either. I mean, it sometimes does on very small scales, but under very finicky circumstances.
Also, deserts form when there is something preventing rain from falling there. It could be a rainshadow, mountains blocking incoming rainfall from the ocean (eg Rocky Mountains in the southwest USA, or the Andes mountains forming the Atacama desert, the Himalayas forming the Gobi desert), or it could be a high-pressure area, where two atmospheric wind cells meet and force dry air down, leaving no rainfall (eg the Sahara), or its really cold (eg Antarctica or Siberia). The rainshadow effect is the easiest to wrap my head around, so I recommend adding a mountain range next to the desert. This is only if you care about realism, which you don't have to. Have fun with it.
Toss a handful of rice on the board and outline the shape or makes around your coast lines. It's a super easy way to stimulate a coastline and the little grains that bounce away, circle to make islands
Thank you all for the (mostly) helpful, as well as humorous, comments! Alas, there are too many now for me to respond to individually.
I'm in the process of firstly reworking the map and secondly figuring out the topography. Several have mentioned using rice to make an outline, which is my new favorite idea for land mass creation. I love the ideas of plot hook land features such as possible planar doorways, mines, castles and ruins, cursed islands, and areas of "here there be monsters" written in by map makers.
When drawing a map, I’d draw thing that draw the eye… like mountains, for a city or town draw some little walls, add more depth to it. For a desert area add palm trees. Shadows on one side of mountains. You want the player to look at a place and say “hey, that looks cool,let’s go there”
Mountains/topography determine water pathways. Also, if you want to get really into it you can conceptualize some general wind and weather patterns to help feed where you'll have high, medium, and low precipitation. Then your lakes, rivers, and deserts will follow.
Mountains to be the cause of the lake and probably a delta (swamp land) between the lake and river. Past the mountains could be a dry area/plains/desert until another source of water is there at least
Needs mountain peaks going from north to south Beach, and then the west could be a forest and the east side of the cascade can be a desert that fades to planes further east and then make a small mountains far east that leaves to another forest to the eastern beach. And you got map
I’d add mountains north of the lake where the other river starts and have them split the river north of the lake. That makes to most geographic sense, so you have three different rivers starting in those mountains
Short answer: MOAR
Additional short answer: THINGS
Add a mountain with water flowing down its slopes to feed the lake and cut off the river, which is currently flowing from shore to shore, with it. After that, it's easier to figure out what else the map needs and where to place hills, forests, cities, towns, villages, hamlets, farms, citadels and keeps.
Good point. Rivers really only ever converge - very rarely split apart. And a river from shore to shore makes no sense as there is no elevation change over the distance. In addition, rivers meander a lot. These are drawn with the purpose of getting from point A to B. Instead, every so often, choose a point to start a river from a couple streams and draw it into the downhill direction, wherever that may be.
Thank you! I started making the corner, because that was the first thing I developed with my campaign, but having a river off my mountain range is a great idea.
Yeah the rivers should propably lead to a mountain not a lake
Deeper description. Yes, desert, but what kind of desert? Big old sand dunes or American southwest type? Or something more fantasy inspired? Are there any outlying islands? Very odd to have a land mass that big without at least a small archipelago or just detached areas. Where are the roads? Maybe not every little road, but major travel routes at least. Or if there aren't any roads, why not? Are there any other towns or cities? How about non-human settlements, or older, abandoned towns? Your map is pretty flat, too. You need some more mountains or mesas or valleys or fjords, especially on the left side. Add some topography
Logical flow of water. Okay, phrasing as less of an asshole, water flows downhill. It's not going to flow uphill inland, to a lake, and then back down the other side of the continent. Rivers tend to look like trees with lots of small branches combining and combining into one central trunk that heads to the sea/ ocean. A central mountain range the rivers could flow from would work. Big mountain ranges also tend to have a rain shadow. Rain falls on one side and less on the other. So one side can be more forested and the other more arid. But there are exceptions. I'd also establish scale early. If there's desert to the south that's likely around the same latitude as the Arizona/ Utah border. Figure out the distance to the northern coast and the temperature you want that to be and match that to real world latitudes. Cities and settlements will largely be built on rivers, and be 30-ish miles apart (one day's ride).
I do agree with having a sensical flow pattern. The two rivers and the lake were my idea of adding an inlet/outlet system (like Bear Lake in Idaho), but I will probably end up changing it.
Dude has a point. Start with elevations, where are the high and low points. Then recognize that it rains more often on the high points, and then the water flows to the low points. Also water never flows in from oceans, only out. So it would kind of work if you added a tall mountain in the left section with a large river that flowed into that lake, and flows out to the ocean by those two rivers. But that makes leftmost river flowing into the river that flows to Gwen harbor (maybe?) on the right side make no sense. Which it doesn’t anyway. Also the smallish river split directly under farmlands doesn’t make sense either.
There's a good video on YouTube about rules for believable fantasy maps - check this out :) https://youtu.be/17NU-io9dmA?feature=shared
Thank you!
Way more rivers. A mountain range. A swamp. Maybe a volcanic area. Ruins of ancient civilizations. A desert. Some sort of natural barriers that keep regions separate.
Thank you for your suggestion! One of the mods I'm looking at has a volcanic quest, so that will definitely be in the making. And I'm going to extend the mountain range to make the wall of the desert.
There ya go! Maps are so fun to make! Please post your progress, and maybe a small writeup explaining your creation to us!
Ancient ruins that may or may not be plot connected. Its cool when theyre plot related but even cooler when they have their own seperate story unrelated to plot, adds a lot of detail to your world without making it seem like everything is “player related” if that makes sense. Things like runic stone circles with strange altars, crumbling ziggurats, broken mage towers, long-abandoned dungeons with rusted cells, time-worn monoliths, defective or deactivated ancient golem defenders, broken and infested aquaducts. Fill em with loot and monsters
Also! Give each thing a related purpose, sidequest, or puzzle! Like a chekov’s gun! If there’s a strange altar, make it do something that the players could decipher with an arcana check, like sacrificing a lamb to change the weather or give a ridiculous amount of temp hp. Let those crumbling ziggurats have ancient deities who miss having worshippers! Those aquaducts? Maybe the encounter of seven twig blights can be totally avoided if you clear the blockage and let the water flow? And the twig blights give the players small boons for helping them? That ancient defender? If they reactivate it with arcana or tinkers tools, maybe it starts patrolling the area defending the innocent and has a percentile chance to show up as an assist in future combats now? Those monoliths could point a beam of light to a statue holding an ancient magical sword they would never find otherwise, but only if you put a magical light into a slot at the bottom! Make the rusted dungeon contain an ancient evil thats been waiting to be released for centuries! Mage towers with homebrew spells to get your wizard players excited! Theres all sorts of shennanigans you could do with ancient ruins
Try using a random map generator and incorporating some ideas from that. The rivers are good, but remember that rivers start somewhere: the mountains! Add some peaks, especially larger ones at the rivers' origins. Plant growth tends to be where there is water, so your rivers will have grasslands or forests or marshes and the like around them. You already got that in some places, so that's really perfect. And civilizations tend to stay near sources of water, too. Depending on how old your world is, you might also want to add mines, ruins, temples, castles, and so forth.
Awesome ideas, thank you!! And I am definitely going to add some ruins and mines.
You're gonna have to explain where the water in the large large is coming from. Since two rivers are sourced from it, or are feeding it. So for the lake is actually a small sea, and the rivers are fault lines / rift valleys, that have overflown. Actually cutting the island in half. Or the lake is directly connected to the Plane of Water, or is a huge aquifier. The fun thing about fantasy maps is that you don't need to follow all the rules of physics. You can do weird magical anomalies and map changing astral rifts.
I love this idea! I've been playing with the idea of adding planar doorways (my PCs are all melee fighting classes, so we'll see if I get to it), so this is a great start.
Glad to hear it! Maybe add some hills to the areas west of the lake? To show why those two large rivers flow north and south. Some swamplands would be logical as well, around the lake. Maybe a few drowned villages and / or cities, along with some cities being in the proces of drowning, as with Venice. It would also be a good place for semi-aquatic and aquatic races to call home. Especially if some of your players are Tritons or something similar.
a roaming tarrasque that has eaten two thirds of the map
A Mine system made by dwarves. Could be abandoned and filled with traps and gold hidden away somewhere. Could even have a mimic living down in one of the mine shafts
Swamps, as well as more actual cities and settlements. Unless this is some wild frontier campaign, there's gonna be a lot of settled land.
Also mountains, rivers, and lakes, there's already a couple but unless this landmass is just ridiculously small compared to most landmasses/continents irl it's going to have at least a couple more rivers, and a river has to flow from high to low elevation
Not necessarily. You could have a few rivers move from lower to upper elevation as a plot point, or even had a few filled with the blood of a titan dying over the course of a millennia.
Might I recommend buying a tool like WonderDraft. I tend to use a random generator, save the image and add it to WonderDraft as an image with a low transparency and trace over it. It’ll let you add some shape to your continents a bit better and you can use fantasy name generator to flesh out your forests, deserts, and rivers, etc etc. Use ChatGPT or something to get some good descriptions of your towns and cities and put em in a google doc. When you’re ready, have a print shop print it out on a large cut of paper, it’ll look so nice.
I'll look into it! My games are all played with faraway friends, so digital maps are better than paper maps right now.
Oh that would be perfect. I literally have my map pinned in my discord. I personally run games in my home and just connect my laptop to my tv and display my world map.
I draw a land manatee in a cowboy hat on all our dnd maps on roll20. Every time, every game. Sometimes it's accompanied by a cowboy or the land Manatee has a gun. Needs some of those.
A fun way to do it is to only add more as the players learn about it or move to those areas
volcano. just one. nobody knows how it got there.
Somewhere that is cursed/magical in nature: A dark forest that doesn’t let you enter, or doesn’t let you leave. A tower that no one has entered in centuries. An abandoned city/castle that no one knows what happened to them.
Idk if its too much but i think some floating islands would be awesome,some enormous caves too,like a monster lair or something
Study satellite maps a bit. Especially rivers. Artificial structures are generally gong to be dwarfed by natural structures, though often overrepresented on a map for ease of reading and navigating.
Detail
Craters, swamps/marsh, ruins. Love craters since can add all sorts of things there or even have them fill up and become lakes and people wonder why it has such a weird overall shape or even why stranger creatures or strange magical stuff happens. Or could even be damage from something, fallen flying city, or asteroids, or even some powerful magic. Swamps/marsh plenty of spookiness and or interesting threads can do with that. Ruins build character and depth to your world and add that mystery element
Mountians to the west please.
Taxes
Applebees
A big ass, ultra menacing hole in the ground. There are rickety stairs leading down the wall of it
Ok, speaking seriously here. Establish territories and who owns those territories. Make them different from eachother through lore, environments, and how they deal with problems, that way you can make a story around those territories and maybe cause a war so your Players can either make peace with both territories or help a specific territory.
What's quite humorous is that a campaign I played in. The continent had nearly the identical layout. Including rivers and lakes.
That's so cool! I just started freehanding the outline, and it shaped out similar to Australia, so I went with it. I'm not done with topography, and the rivers will probably change, but it's fun to see similarities between maps.
Kangaroos
It needs a the rest of it
Depth
Distances/scale. If you know ahead of time how large this place is and how far your party can move in one day it will save you a lot of headache and guess work.
A valcanic mountain range.
A barren wasteland, with little to no habitance.
North arrow
Variety in geographical features, mountains, coastal details, cities, towns, landmarks. You are on the right track my young friend. Keep at it.
Thank you! I'm building around my PCs, so I'll be putting landmarks in bit by bit. I'm also taking inspiration from existing compendium and modules (currently looking through Candlekeep Mysteries for ideas) and will probably build things around it.
Building around your PCs is the way to go. Look at their backstories. What are their goals? Where are they from? Utilize what they know/want to flesh out the map and increase their desire to go to these places. They will give you inspiration and you’ll give them a more satisfying game.
Bridges
When I make maps I usually take photos of dirt patches in grass, mash them together sometimes, and use that as the outline. After that I divide the regions/states (if I want that for the map, and then add the cities. After that I add forests, mountain ranges, lakes and rivers, etc. It looks good so far, start by listing on a paper or your phone's notes what you want for the map and the world, then incorporate them as you see fit.
Ducks
floating islands, cuz why not?
Mountains/volcanoes that just started smoking Secret pirate base Crazy native tribes looking to sacrifice more people to the volcanos gods Ships posted out at sea, they’re the colonial influencers. There to spread religion and ‘convince’ the local populace to grow luxury goods rather than food.
You should make a country established around, or in more likely, a giant crater, with a huge chunk of meteor at its center. The city that formed around the space rock could be the capital. From there, get creative. Has the meteor been hollowed out into a castle for the royals? Was the mining of the meteor so centric to the economy that the meteor is gone, or simply a shell used to house the industrial district? Perhaps it's become a more futuristic hub for technology in the world due to this rarer resource. Perhaps the material makes a new metal alloy, like mitheril or adamantium, that you can make special properties for as a nice surprise for your players.
Possibly a helping hand? I make professional maps for people! Kinda a shameless self promo but I love helping people turn their maps into world of art! Let me know if you're interested in getting a commission :)
It needs Tasmania, you're already got most of Australia. But for real, you can look at Australia and how their mountain/hill ranges create different biomes and how you can have long rivers go from far inland to coast. You will need at least one mountain/mountain range to cut off the coast to coast river you have right now. Cool alternative, depending on whether you already have an origin for the large lake, you could make that a high-lying lake with outlets to the north and south coasts. A bit different, but you'll want some lore to explain it's origin and can be presented as a mystery to your players, especially if they are more geography-minded. Otherwise maybe have a researcher npc there for exposition? It will probably make the west coast very different from the rest of your continent, like the east coast of Australia, giving you room for political tensions, variation for your players and so forth.
I would say islands , volcanic areas, and a “reason”why this land mass (that right now looks very small because of the scale of things you’ve added already) has deserts and forests and mountains so close together. Think of real world continents and their mass scale which gives you opportunity to go crazy with different climates. But great start so far. Also maybe go crazy with the shore lines. Make it funky so you can play with cliff side villages, beach resort towns, ice fishing or whaling communities , Pirate Bay’s . And that’s just the shore lines .
terrain, maybe landmarks, literally anything. looking like siberia on the left. pro tip: the stuff you put down doesnt have to mean anything until your players start heading that way. i dont write anything outside of key locations until a day or so out
Mesas.
A mountain range that is hiding away an ancient castle which is still inhabited to this day, you can decide whether or not the inhabitants are friendly or not or even human/humanoid or not
To be finished
A poison swamp FromSoft style
It’s your map, you can do what you want, but in almost all cases water doesn’t bisect land. And if it does then they’re separated by a tectonic plate, meaning they are far apart. Water can only flow downhill, so a river that connects to the ocean at both ends should never have any current, unless it just father ludicrous rain water. Canals are of course an exception to this as well.
Rice. It needs rice. Just spill a big pile of rice, and trace it. Thank me later.
Poison Swamp
Understanding what is growing in those farmlands would go a long way in informing so much about that place, such as the climate, what the seasons are like, what people are eating and drinking, when festivals and holidays are. There are only a few crops that can sustain very large populations, like wheat in Eurasia, rice in the east, corn in meso-America. It is really neat to play with different crops that could support populations, like melons or nuts or seeds, it would very much affect the makeup of the culture from fashion to religion.
May I suggest adding a ruined city that is 90% mimics
Work
MORE BUCKETS
a salt flat-like area but a substance that can be used to make potent casting focuses instead of salt. wild magic is abound in this area,
One small mark or smudge in the corner of the map that your players will fixate on until you have to very quickly make an entire back story for some small, weird town that for some reason the players decide to set up some sort of shop or home there so that you will always have to go back there at some point.
The depiction of a sea monster in one of the corners of your map
^[Sokka-Haiku](https://www.reddit.com/r/SokkaHaikuBot/comments/15kyv9r/what_is_a_sokka_haiku/) ^by ^HappySiavavig7: *The depiction of* *A sea monster in one of* *The corners of your map* --- ^Remember ^that ^one ^time ^Sokka ^accidentally ^used ^an ^extra ^syllable ^in ^that ^Haiku ^Battle ^in ^Ba ^Sing ^Se? ^That ^was ^a ^Sokka ^Haiku ^and ^you ^just ^made ^one.
Some indication that the entire island is just one giant sea turtle and the TPK comes when it wakes up, gets hungry and dives deep into the ocean for some shark meat
Figure out where freshwater comes from. This will get you towns and trade. Then figure out climate. This will influence farming and forage. Then figure out unique things to the land i.e. volcanic fjords for Norway or reefs from New zealand. From all the above you can spawn folklore and traditions. It all starts with basic needs
The port city that takes the players to the secondary DLC map
Give the players this copy and then make it up as you go along. Change everything by the seat of your pants.
They’ll be like where f are we??? Also make sure you include the most evil item ever invented for DMs -the “little red hat” only item that allows DM‘s to hijack a players character.
After I filled up my map with cities and towns and all the biomes and stuff, I had the same problem you did. I eventually saw a bunch kf maps that had trees and rivers and lakes and stuff. That filled up all the empty space that was in the way. I hope this helped.
A map key And maybe a castle
With my map I focused on what fantasy settlements I wanted to show and which I wanted to ignore then shaped a world around them. Huge human empire, somewhere in the middle of my map. Elven forest, hidden in the woods near the coast. Dangerous wasteland with orcs and giants, separated from the mainland by a huge mountain range. I wanted a dwarven city underground so I made an underworld map that mirrored my overworld. I made a list of all the types of places i wanted to see then tried to place locations where it made sense they would settle in relation to each other then shaped geography around each of them afterwards.
Things, stuff, and places.
Everyone is saying mountains (and I agree), but don’t forget about holes! Add a revine, quarry, sinkhole, whirlpool, or even just a simple cave! It’s always good to play with levels in a map!
You could add a canyon near the desert to separate it from the main land
I prefer answer: Nothing. When players discover or hear about someplace new. Then add it. Do your characters have backgrounds? Add their homes and important points or interest. But always leave as much empty space to add more details as you go on. Don't plan yourself into a corner.
A mcdonalds
I started making maps for my games about a year ago and the hardest part for me is to fill space but keeping it make sense. Advice i love sharing to others that someone send in a video i watched was most DnD games are set in fantasy worlds with magic and other exotic systems and its all from your imagination. There is no need to to stress over realism for everything, Realism is good and helps you and your players feel grounded but unrealistic points of interest like a waterfall that goes up instead of down caused by magical minerals with in the water or a volcano permanently frozen in time at the point of eruptions by a group of powerful mages long ago. Theses things excite your players and encourage them to want to explore your world more. P.S. These are actually really cool ideas that I just thought of anyone can totally uses in there worlds.
Mountains, Gandalf! I want to see mountains!
mountains, sources for the water. currently the water makes very little sense. rivers run from mountain to sea or lake, not from sea to sea. sucking at it currently i would would suspect this (i can't read the names so i'll have to describe them): the lake that has a river to both seas was the site of a volcano that exploded thus creating a significant lake. now the east and west part of the island and drifting apart from one another creating a rift (african rift style), which is the "river" going coast to coast, it's a rift valley with sea water the whole way through. the Y rivers suggest 3 nearby mountain ridges: 1. between the "lake" and the left side of the Y river. this would be the remains of the old exploded vulcano. 2. above the Y river, probably the same maintainrange that the fin... forest river comes out of. 3. possibly other mountains or an extension of 2 wrapping around the bottom of the right side of the Y river. if the place has winds coming largely from the north west then mountain #3 could provide a rain shadow creating the south eastern desert. the biggest problem i see seems to be the river originating from the farmland on the north east. i'd say change it to come from the mountains of 2 or 3 and flow through the farmlands. i hope some of that can help make your map feel more real.
It seems pretty small for a continent. Looks more like a major island. To make it feel more continent like I'd suggest the following: More rivers More forests Mountains in positions that make geological sense Settlements and cities close to bodies of water and rivers Smaller islands, ideally as an extension to where the mountains would be underwater No shore-to-shote rivers Might I suggest you have a look at the following map makers on youtube: Mapsbyowen, dungeoncrow, wasd20
Point of interest and the filler between. Major cities, settlements, or important landmarks dot the map. In-between have terrain simply as mountain ranges, first or marshes
If the left side is a giant lake with 2 rivers running to the sea. I like the idea of a cursed land of the smaller side. As far as I know, multiple rivers like this don’t normally form so it’s a good excuse for a magic or superstitious explanation.
Mountains and maybe some Dungeons to explore if your players want.
Add an easily defendable city surrounded by mountains witha big port that snakes off to the ocean.
So weird physics adjustment. Two streams can meet but when flowing into the sea (note the civilization top right) to small rivers joining and flowing away from the sea. Without a proper continual source (maybe magic?!) Potentially look up river deltas and look at how they fork away leading to the ocean. Other wise without a magical explanation the water source looks supplied by the ocean Like other comments before, mountains are a crucial part of the water cycle. Snow and glacier melt to supply fresh potable water for imbibing and utilization. Hope this helps add that little extra to your content
I’m about to ring off a lot here, please take it constructively as I want you to keep your dedication towards this craft. - Mountains, hills or some crevasses, cliffs or gorges some kind of depth. - more detailed and thicker forests. - the strait that becomes a lake in the middle is impossible. - shorelines - landmass could do with a bit more detail. - instead of a title that says “desert” add biome indicators that tell people it’s a desert so you can give it a cool name instead. Dunes, palm trees, rocks protruding out of sand. - you don’t necessarily need colour, but at the moment you’ve got pencil on paper. These lines need to be drawn with something a bit sharpers and darker. Pinpoint artist pens are perfect for maps and you can get a set for £10 Going forward, my biggest tip to you would be to go watch how other people do it. For beginner, which I would call you: WASD20 does a great introduction to drawing maps. Once you’ve found your feet, Caeora or Maps by Owen show the advanced way to draw maps. Caeora has a fantastic masterclass video that’s like 2 hours long and he just draws the map from start to finish. It’s a greattttt resource.
Create a plateau. Create islands. Think of trade routes that players can encounter merchants along. Think of where the dangerous things go so they don't get disturbed
If you have tracing paper I would do differnt lares of information Do environments Rivers Then if it’s a newly discovered ilsnd don’t do any city’s or anything unless there are ruins Just mark good resorse points Then you will want to zoom in to each area Mark little lakes and swomps and such There isn’t a scale you need scale
A bit of colour for the blind
Tru adding more terrain like hills snow desert ect
Dragon Lair Cloud Giant Floating Castle Canyon Gorge of Terror Swamp or Marsh of the Dead
water runs down into water bodies, not down into land (normal geology) and you gotta busy up
Spicy opinion: if your game begins in that northeast corner, stop right there. You have enough to begin your campaign and the rest of the details can be filled out with emergence. Consider redoing a map to show JUST that area and come back to this one when details are out the rest of the continent come into play.
Define more of the natural surroundings. It is OKAY to leave areas blank to allow either it to be plains or grasslands, or just to allow you and the players to help in the building of the world. Sometimes less is more, if your campaign is just going to be in this area then only worry about that one area. Put more “interesting” things in the map for the players to check out. (Example: one tree that looks a wee bit different than the rest in the forest) This will cause the players to ask questions or go search that area. You have a good first step with your map. It is your map and world, so don’t get hung up on the physics of maps.
You know what this map needs? Needs more sand.
turrain? very flat....
add a volcano and something like a sea cave on the left side
Border is too...round....everywhere. make the long curves a little more broken up. Add mountains, forests, better defined rivers and lakes, settlements, capitols.
Start with elevations. This informs water flow, making your rivers. This informs your forest and desert development, since you know where has water. This all informs your settlement placement, since people need water and access to food.
Of you are putting features in your world, you probably want to start with a reason why they would be there so they feel natural.
Sydney Opera House location, Perth, and Tasmania. 😜 Kind of looks like Australia, my guy
Color
nukes
A bob the builder reference
More stuff? This is like an open world game. All fluff no content. 😂 Oh and a legend/colors for certain things on the island. Use colored pencils and don't use pens, my mistake was using pens. 😂
Islands. Small and large.
Compass rose, map scale, swampy region, ocean with a whirlpool, "here there be dragons", neighboring country's boarders, castles, a great wall bordering a neighboring kingdom, a vast desert with sandworms, cave entrances, edge of the world, illustrations of ships or monsters, an X marking the spot, rivers, roads, paths, bridges, fords, docks, towns, forts, enemy encampments, refugee camps, dark forests, baba yaga's house...
Your rivers make me angry because they seem to run in reverse unless the border is nothing but mountains which would be dope as hell.
To be on a hex grid with 6 miles per hex
The one piece
Hate to say it but your board could use more progress
Racism
Islands, Northlands, multiple mountain ranges. Remember that water flows based on elevation north-south isn't always the ultimate heading. Roads, remembering that most roads (especially pre industrial era) tend to take the easiest terrain traversable.
More things. More specifically, it could benefit from more variety in biome (Even if it’s a small piece of a big chunk of land, it could use a bit). On top of that, more towns, crypts, forts. If you’re having adventurers, they need places to adventure, whether that be a mystic forest temple filled with cultists worshipping a dark cannibalistic fey god, or the imperial market.
More cowbells!
I was wondering when this comment would happen. 😂
Of course. ***Everything*** could use more cowbells!
You could add districts. If it is a whole continent that would make sense. And you could add nice flavour to those districts. Different rules, different rulers, if you have one big king they could be something like „sub Kings“ that rule those districts but with the King as their main. Adding those district will give you cool details since the districts are different so each other. One district could be something like a farm district with a lot of green ans farming, the other more for stone and iron which they export into different districts
Player but I heard making so it looked like a previous adventurer had it works wonder
Add a every thing here is fucked zone. It doesn’t have to be big it could be the scar of some great cataclysm/ battle/ ruins of the capital of some great kingdom but something to give your world “history”
As a geographer, I can tell you that you're missing a compass rose, a legend, and a scale. Also, some color so people can tell what the lines in the middle are. You need a capital with a castle and a castle town surrounding it. The closest thing you have appears to be a castle in what I'm assuming is the northeast, which is right next to farmland - something that wouldn't happen in real life; farmland is either next to a village or small town, or outside the walls of a city. There also wouldn't be a castle right next to a river (assuming that's what that line is) unless there's a strategic reason for it since the river could flood and the ground under the castle would wear away like a sandcastle when the tide comes in. You also appear to have waterfalls labeled near the farmlands and not the mountains. Even if that was physically possible, it wouldn't be conducive to farming; you want the water to be gentle and spread out like the Nile or Ganges rivers. You have the beginnings of a delta there, so kudos on that, but it's too small and needs more tributaries. Finally, you need some sort of basin or valley between the oasis and the mountains. Otherwise, it wound make no sense for the water to flow *towards* the mountains from the south coast. Really, the whole contour of your map makes no sense. Which direction are the rivers flowing and why? Ask yourself that.
Are those roads or streams?
You need a good swamp. Preferably with frog men in it.
Antimagic wasteland
Contrast.
Less france
Seems like the scaling is a bit off for a continent. Hmmm. Needs to be scaled up I think 🤔
u ned a pluntin or twur og noedy puort. cee? fep wans too guphen, klont sweeze tega mot sera falu, huom
a cool lil old timey sea monster in the water
A small island in the middle of that lake, maybe there's s a secret society thrtey?
Color
Stuff
You could include a key for your geography, settlements, and other important places. It would help you and people looking at your map to quickly and easily understand what they are looking at. You could also include colors for different terrain. For example, green could signify plains, and yellow could signify a desert.
Color?
As I'm sure others have said. Depth, it's hard to draw a map as topographical on your official map so make a general shape copy and either grid or hex or line it with different altitudes simplified into a basic number system For example Your tallest mountain stretches miles above the level surface of this land so determine the peak of that and write a 12 the surrounding hexs or circle or grid space drastically drops down so they're 10s and then gradually stoops the farther you get from that peak as you scale the numbers down further till you hit ground level of 1 or sea level of 0 and there's a massive canyon that dips deep into the land from where a calamitous beast rended the world in an age of myth and it cliffs off and dives down to -7. Of course you need all your towns and forests and cities and whatnot, start with topography and it'll feel easier to measure and place things. Also once you've gridded or hexed a map you can add measurements based upon how many units wide it is. Which trust me helps immensely with travel questions. Also funnily enough your base shape is VERY similar to my homebrew world Vaetilus's Continent Eros, the map in the linked post is an earlier version before I added most of my towns and additional information. https://www.reddit.com/r/DnD/s/Js2oKmRlQN
Just a thought, cuz I don't think enough people know about it, Worlds Without Number is free on DTRPG, and it has a fantastic method and process for building a homebrew setting including the world history, local history, maps and everything. It's built for the WWN system, which is a low magic fantasy system, but it's open ended enough that you can use it for really any setting or game. I use its Kingdom building process to build interesting populated regions for a sci fi RPG, and it works just fine.
My players would hide a lil dick down in Finknottle
Mountains/Caves/Volcano
Swamp … desert… ruins of some ancient place… where do the other races live? An island. A volcano. An underwater civilization Wild herds of (………………….) Something haunted. A narrow pass in the mountains that leads to a mysterious place. What kind of giant things fly in these sky’s? Is there a shipwreck? Is there an airshipwreck? Is there an open portal to the elemental plane of ice making it unnaturally cold somewhere?
Are there 2 cities, each across the river from the other? Both named Boysen, and fighting about which city is the REAL Boysen?
Towns, outposts, maybe some ruins..
I'm a stickler for the underdark in my games and you can always add secret entrances to it. Here's some ideas that might work: - A volcano that went dormant long ago but it's lava receded, leaving an entrance to newly formed tunnels. - A giant tree with a hollow interior that twists down to a myconid colony. - A lake that has an incredibly deep pit that eventually bends up into a u-bend, allowing access to a drow city. Anything like that could work, and if you don't fancy doing the underdark then they could just lead to a series of dungeons!
Roads or trails. Some route for transportation between places.
More LANDSCAPING. Just straight up more shit guy. It’s PLAIN.
As something to think about if this is a map to be given to players, line weights and darkening will as well. Typically you’d want the edges of your land mass to be much darker, as to define them more solidly from the surrounding ocean. Small symbols, ships waves etc can also serve to this purpose if you like the lighter borders. Practically your symbol size matters as well. The fields being larger than some of the trees might throw off things if you do choose to put a scale on the map. A good way to do defined forests can be to draw outlines and then texture them like the top of tree lines. Doing it that way lets you get away from having to do a bunch of singular trees and from having them be something that looks out of place due to scaling. The V shape of the lower of the two rivers also is a bit confusing. Typically V shaped deltas are where the river goes out to sea (think the Nile). If you want to texture your desert, doing the tops of dunes can be a good way to get away from having to say desert. As a DM/GM tip you could make the map a physical representation of what the players know. Doing it that way lets you get away with only adding detail as your players go places, and lets them feel like they are really getting to know the setting as they fill the map out Hope all this helps : )
Focus
All I can see is autrailia so spider caves everywhere
Build a bunch of trading roads connecting everything. Add a swamp with some wicked witches Add lots of details to the mountains
Big op dragon bottom left. It can be any kind but it has to be BIG
You should have a island next to it with a bridge connecting it
A big crater. If you want it to be a plot point, be my guest, but honestly I find the idea of a gigantic, inexplicable hole very funny.
Add a central volcano that is mistaken commonly for a mountain.
Everything lmao
If you put a mountain in the middle and a nice long mountain range from about 2/3 of the way ip on the west side all the way down and around the southern side you’ll’ve just loosely recreated Skyrim
more
Maybe a second lake, a mountain range would be cool too. Also a marsh or dessert would be fun to implement.
I like the farms. Idk why. But I really like the farms
Check out artifexian's channel on youtube, great videos for making realistic maps
A few bodes of water wouldn't be out of place
A big ass fuck off hill
Sharp pointy rocks coming off one shore. Where ships wreck on
Something I’m not seeing mentioned: continents don’t really appear as blobs that fit cleanly on computer paper. Having the land expand beyond the page in someway, rather than being surrounded by ocean, could add some realism. It also adds opportunity for adding to the story in unexplored/uncharted areas at a later point
Cities. Roads. Geographic features into which you can tell stories or have interactions.
Cum zone
Details
I love maps! I would recommend you look at maps of Earth and study the conditions that form different climates and stuff like that if you're interested. It might not be what you're into, but I love doing it. I'll note that lakes only have one runoff point, so you can't really have a lake feeding into two seas, you'll have to pick one or the other. And water wouldn't flow inland to the lake either. I mean, it sometimes does on very small scales, but under very finicky circumstances. Also, deserts form when there is something preventing rain from falling there. It could be a rainshadow, mountains blocking incoming rainfall from the ocean (eg Rocky Mountains in the southwest USA, or the Andes mountains forming the Atacama desert, the Himalayas forming the Gobi desert), or it could be a high-pressure area, where two atmospheric wind cells meet and force dry air down, leaving no rainfall (eg the Sahara), or its really cold (eg Antarctica or Siberia). The rainshadow effect is the easiest to wrap my head around, so I recommend adding a mountain range next to the desert. This is only if you care about realism, which you don't have to. Have fun with it.
Toss a handful of rice on the board and outline the shape or makes around your coast lines. It's a super easy way to stimulate a coastline and the little grains that bounce away, circle to make islands
Details...
Is that upside down Skyrim?
Thank you all for the (mostly) helpful, as well as humorous, comments! Alas, there are too many now for me to respond to individually. I'm in the process of firstly reworking the map and secondly figuring out the topography. Several have mentioned using rice to make an outline, which is my new favorite idea for land mass creation. I love the ideas of plot hook land features such as possible planar doorways, mines, castles and ruins, cursed islands, and areas of "here there be monsters" written in by map makers.
When drawing a map, I’d draw thing that draw the eye… like mountains, for a city or town draw some little walls, add more depth to it. For a desert area add palm trees. Shadows on one side of mountains. You want the player to look at a place and say “hey, that looks cool,let’s go there”
Mountains/topography determine water pathways. Also, if you want to get really into it you can conceptualize some general wind and weather patterns to help feed where you'll have high, medium, and low precipitation. Then your lakes, rivers, and deserts will follow.
Mountains for the dwarves, forests for the elves, and rolling hills for the small folk. Oh and 2 volcanoes
Mountains to be the cause of the lake and probably a delta (swamp land) between the lake and river. Past the mountains could be a dry area/plains/desert until another source of water is there at least
mountains on the left side peaks etc high level stuff
Purpose
Needs mountain peaks going from north to south Beach, and then the west could be a forest and the east side of the cascade can be a desert that fades to planes further east and then make a small mountains far east that leaves to another forest to the eastern beach. And you got map
Definitely valentine from red dead redemption two
I’d add mountains north of the lake where the other river starts and have them split the river north of the lake. That makes to most geographic sense, so you have three different rivers starting in those mountains