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!
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.