Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Malanath" data-source="post: 2865263" data-attributes="member: 25538">Conaill-  Thanks for the e-book recommendations.  I've actually viewed A Magical Society Guide to Mapping in the past, but over all I found it rather lacking.  The information contained within it, while useful, was very general and basic.  My main resource tools have been Wikipedia and Google.  Wikipedia actually has more information than I need.Deltadave-  I don't intend to fill out every detail on the map.  My main focus is going to be the area in the very light blue at the center of the map, an area roughly the size of China, and even there my focus will be on a few key areas.  My main reason for going this route was because maps contain a sense of history in them.  Wars are most often fought for three reasons:  Political, Religious or for Resources.  Having a good map determines a lot of those things.  A good map may determine certain characteristics of a religion, for example in a desert there is a high chance that water will be considered sacred where as in a place where there is a vast abundance of drinkable water such reverence isn't likely to exist.  If a group lives near huge mountains, there are likely myths about those mountains, which may culminate in a religion adopting one of them (or perhaps an entire range of them) as sacred or somehow special.  Human history is filled with religious reverence of mountains.  The size of a map also determines how many Kingdoms could reasonably fit in an area, and knowing the climate is also important because it determines how much food is available which will determine the population that a certain area can reasonably sustain.  Those are just some of my reasons for using this approach.JonMonster-  Thanks for your response!  I was more or less aware of those things when I created the tectonic plates.  You can probably tell by looking at the map that the world is a pretty rough world.  There are high mountains, deep canyons, plenty of volcanoes, and more than a fair share of strong earthquake regions.  The world itself is a rather hostile world, a world of great extremes and not by accident. The main focus will be the light blue area at the center of the map.  You can probably imagine the type of mountain range that will spring up there as three major continental plates all converge at that point, forming huge mountains that probably somewhat dwarf the Himalayas, in turn forming a somewhat natural wall separating more than half of the continent from itself.  Ice at the higher altitudes, glaciers far to the north, mudslides in the spring, small earthquakes occasionally, major ones at least every several years, fertile valleys with plenty of water that frequently flood in the spring and thick jungle like areas near the south which is closer to the Equator.Odhanan-  Thanks!  Hopefully other people who have trouble can use the trick.  It worked out much better than I thought it would.  In reality I probably should have done the Plate Tectonics first, but doing that first doesn't typically ensure that you get a good looking map.  You also can't get your mountains where you want them and the like, so I decided to just create the landmasses first, then arrange the plate tectonics in such a way as to make sure I had mountains where I wanted them.  It also gave me the ability to better envision how the world would turn out.Currently I am plotting out the mountain regions, doing some research on various biological like plagues (trying to find a rather nasty one), jotting down interesting things that pop into my head for the history as well as other things I feel will be important.  The main problem I am currently having is trying to determine what the climate will be like in various areas.  A lot of factors go into that.</blockquote>

Verification