I got stuck here as well, partially because one of the main things that trips me up about world-building: maps. I like having a basic sense of the geo part of the geo-political and cultural landscape, but I don't have the greatest map-making or artistic talent. I noticed the map in the one WWN world-building video I mentioned, and so I just flat out asked them what mapping program they used. It's apparently Inkarnate, so I've been toying with that the past day or so.
While I had previous versions I could use as a base (see:
v1 and
v2), I ended up having making some fairly big changes. I followed WWN’s advice not to go too detailed, so it’s just a
sketch currently. I did the first of those prior iterations in
Campaign Cartographer 3+ and the second in
Tiled using a couple of pixel hex tilesets I bought on itch.io (
tileset 1 and
tileset 2). I’m probably going to go with CC3+ again, but I’m just leaving it as a sketch for now while I work through kingdom creation.
As a side note: (1) islands are a lot of work and (2) no matter how weird or unrealistic you think that the shapes of your lands look, the real world produces far weirder and more varied geography. I'm beginning to think that one reason why fantasy maps look unrealistic is simply because people don't make their geography look weird enough.
I wonder if starting with a fractal terrain tool would work better. I assume part of the issue is the coastlines and other features don’t match our intuitive expectations of what they should look like, so it’s like some uncanny valley thing.
Agreed. This is the other thing that I find challenging. There is a reason why I often find myself reusing names. Right now, I'm just putting placeholder names and flagging them so I can come back to this point at a later stage. I do try to apply certain guidelines for name generation though.
Aside from naming the region, I’m just using generic names too. “Orc Nation”, “Kobold Nation”, “Vuple Nomads”, and so on. I’ll give them proper names once I go through kingdom creation and pick linguistic touchstones. It wasn’t worth further delay trying to figure out names for everything while I was trying to put together the framework.
For example, one naming guideline that I put in place for this current project is "no 'th' sound."
Kevin Crawford’s makes a pointed observation on fantasy names devised by GMs. I’ve opted to keep the English names for the distinctive features because those can be evocative to players in a way that foreign ones won’t, but I’m going to lean heavily on linguistic touchstones for everything else. (Also, no “th” is a good guideline!)
I am having a different sort of issue. Fantasy adventure often imagines these incredibly varied landscapes: e.g., small islands over here, mountains here next to the "blasted lands," desert next to the jungle, grasslands next to the ancient farmlands, etc. But in my case, I know that I'm basically dealing with a large tropical mega-archipelago with volcanic mountain chains.
Roll a bunch of stuff then try to figure out how it makes sense?
So if you get: pit, ancient farmland, canyons, swamp, rain forest, weathered mountains. You could have the pit be a permanent whirlpool that legends say leads to paradise, but no one who has entered has come back alive. The ancient farmland is an island chain that was terraformed to support growing food from non-tropical climates. The canyon is a trench on the bottom of the sea where a sea-dwelling, sapient species lives. The swamp is a fouled, boglike area between several islands where sea-dwelling Outsiders went to die (like beached whales except more evil). The locals are deathly afraid of whatever could be in there (so that means treasure, right?). The rain forest is the default biome for islands. The weathered mountains are a central chain of islands with a large, dormant volcano at the center that hasn’t erupted for eons and has worn down over time into a big hill with a caldera.