Hey fellas, discovered this community yesterday and thought I would drop in some maps I did for a homebrew 5E setting I made.
Included 2 world maps (one labeled by land mass, the other denoting territories), a town map, and a couple battle maps.
They were built using a combination of wonderdraft and affinity photo.
Had to upload via imgur since I seem to be getting a json error when trying to upload to Lemmy directly.
Let me know what you think. Thanks!
Pretty… what software did you use?
Thanks, I used Wonderdraft and Affinity photo. I used a couple free resource packs I found online for various elements in them, and then some of the other stuff was drawn in manually.
They look great. Personally, I do all my maps by hand because I can’t figure digital out but maybe I’ll buy Wonderdraft. Didn’t realize it could look this good tbh.
Wonderdraft is worth it for large/medium scale maps I find. For battle maps I still like to assemble them from modular resource packs in Affinity photo alone, but you can do them in wonderdraft as well.
If you go look at https://www.reddit.com/r/wonderdraft/, it is really incredible how much variety people get out of it stylistically.
One of my favorite things about it are the tools for creating rivers/bodies of water/roads. So much cleaner and easier than trying to draw them in by hand.
Thanks, I might. I don’t have a drawing tablet of any form, do you think this will be fine?
Oh completely, I did not use a tablet for anything I posted, it was all mouse and keyboard.
Cool, thanks
Hi.
I’ve checked the maps, but if you had a link for the files in a higher res’ that would be great. Especially the world map it’s kinda hard to see what’s what.
I like the overall feel of the map, it feels clean and well thought of, you have overall variety an some distinctive features too. Seeing that this is 5E’s medieval fantasy setting however, there are a few things that could use some consideration.
First, the size of the territorial entities. If this is a planetary sized world, then each individual territory spans tremendous stretches of land, despite the massive geological features within themselves.
Of course, if we are talking biomes rather than countries it is more plausible, though some of the larger ones could clearly and logically be fragmented (mainly through relief). I we are talking countries, then not only it is harder to believe that in this era you would have as many “empire level nation states” capable of unifying great stretches of land, but I also feel that it “robs” you of the opportunity to create emerging power dynamics and instability from the map alone. Everything feels very balanced and neat, which will make it a bit harder to create natural points of tension for the story.
This also has to do with the overall map design (from a solely visual perspective). Though the biomes are diverse, they are somewhat monolithic, with few diversity within biomes. Also, there is a strong sense of simmetry between the four central blocks (west and east, then the two islands). The two big ones are basically of similar size and shape (a large landmass thinning out towards the south, divided by a main mountain range). Same goes for the middle islands, apparently having a single biome or being countrolled by a single entity. They are also of similar shape and basically very centred in the ocean. The southern block breaks the equilibrium a bit, but not enough in my opinion, ans you have very few small islands (1), fragmented peninsulas or city states (none) that could bring a bit more variety.
If I were to give any advice (from my individual perspective of course, it can be discussed), that would be to break simmetry and disrupt balance. Have countries or biomes of more various sizes, and likely more of them. Reshape landmasses to avoid the " left half right half" feel that makes it feel less natural. Bring more randomness!
The intention of the territorial map/labeled map is to paint a broad stroke of the world and to show in what realms which nations have the most power as well as what biome is dominant in each area.
My reasoning for territories when it comes to the leftmost continent and the islands is that due to the mountainous nature of the world, these areas are highly defensible which resulted in them becoming their own domains. Same for the islands as they are also highly defensible.
These areas have claim laid to them by each nation, but that does not mean that each nation has the resources to fully control the areas they have laid claim to. There is disparity in each country and as a result there are many opportunities for emerging power dynamics.
The biomes at this scale do appear monolithic, but only as monolithic as the real world. There would be some environmental disparity in these areas, but the point of the map is to show “most of this area is desert/water/plains/forest”. On closer scale maps, more disparity would appear.
If you zoom out on google maps and look at the continents, they appear much more monolithic in this regard than they are in reality at the same scale.
Each hex is 600 miles, so to cross the great lake central to Kos, it would be about that distance. This is comparable to the size of Hudson Bay in Canada. Furthermore, if you compare the scales of the forests, deserts, plains etc to Earth in something like google earth, using the measurement tool, you will see that they are relatively comparable as well.
There is a strong sense of symmetry, but that is just a result of how the original pangeaic land mass broke apart with the movement of tectonic plates. You can see this for example, in how the southern coastline of gamalt fits into the eastern coast of halsi, and how gamalts south western coast fits into the eastern coast of innan, etc. The symmetry is also intended to be representative of the early historical power dynamic between the two continents of himna and gamalt.
Having said all that, I appreciate the perspective, in further projects I will be sure to consider your notes, I think it would be fun to build something from complete randomness, like perlin noise, and just run with it.
