How to place decor appropriately on maps?

[Cradlis]

Hi there.

I created my own dark fantasy world many years ago and I'm struggling with multiple aspects, one of them being the world map. I've tried many things (on paper, on paint, even Inkarnate) and while I can make some good looking stuff (like mountainshape or coastlines), I always have the same concern : I don't know where to put things to make the world appealing (to me) and realistic. I want something as big as the Roman Empire with a variety of environments, but I don't know where to put mountains, rivers, forests, villages, marshes, desert, snow, etc. for it to be realistic enough.

What I don't want is something like the shape of Mordor in Tolkien's work. Don't worry I'm a big fan of his work and I've read all his books many times, but the shape of Mordor had always bugged me. A squareshaped country surrounded by great mountains so it can only be accessible by tiny gaps always seemed odd to me, like it was forced. "Evil needs a scary and impenetrable country, let's surround it by mountains in square". That don't seem natural and I don't want that. Maybe I'm judging myself too hard (probably is), but I've never been satisfied with all my drawings. I would like some form of tips and/or examples. I've read about the formation of mountains and how their placement influenced nature around (they're also the sources of almost every rivers), but I just can't come with a looking good/realistic world map shape in my head.

Help

[Redrobes]

My preference is to determine the height of the land first. Exactly how to do that is up to some debate but on a global scale plate tectonics come into play. On a smaller scale I dont think people can definitively say any particular arrangement would be wrong.

Once you know where the high ground is you can determine catchment areas and then river flow and lakes. Making a stab at soil types you can determine where is wet enough and fertile enough for plants to grow. Then you can set up your vegetation.

Thats most of the natural world taken care of. From there people tend to live next to resources. So fishing in bays, fords over bigger rivers, sheltered areas with game and hunting or space for agriculture. Between towns you have roads that take the most efficient way to get from one place to another and at regular nightly intervals you might get stops for travelers.

In towns they grow and are rarely planned out as much as we like to draw them on this forum. There might be a cattle market to start with then it forms a town square and then builds out. Houses tend to share walls and not be individual huts with bigger stronger ones being on the higher ground and closer to the fortified areas. If big enough it needs a defense like a wall or keep. Usually areas are feudal with regional strongholds.

So basically it comes down to understanding the natural processes at play which forms landscape and then for people each person getting by in life and working out how they might do that. All the natural processes are highly optimized for efficiency and all the people live with an inherent maximizing of efficiency too. So this is the key thing to keep in mind if you want it realistic.

[Cradlis]

I understand your points and I'll work on this for the future, although I still have a hard time to place mountains in a way that I like, for in my eyes they are the most important decors since they often, if not always, are the the markings that defines the borders between two countries. I'll try to begin with tectonic plates as you mentionned.

[waldronate]

The most importantest possible thing to know of all things that you might ever know about maps: They Are Inaccurate. Then you get confused about your map, go back and re-read The Most Importantest Thing.
The second most important thing you'll need to know is: Why Does The Map Exist? Is it to sell bits of land to unsuspecting folks in a different country? Is it to keep out undesirable people? Is it for sheer bragging rights? Is it to give a skeleton on which to hang a set of stories? Is it to try to keep stories consistent with each other? Is it to help a ship's captain to find his way home? All of these possibilities result in very different maps for the exact same physical things! Mapping is about abstraction and which things get abstracted away and which get marked down as important goes directly back to why the map exists (and who made it, to some extent because there are some real @#)*&^ jokers out there).

From what you said, I'll guess that you're looking at a medieval-ish "points of light" setting where most of the landscape is relatively unknown and there aren't a whole lot of high-precision mapping crews out there generating maps using their GIS software based on satellite photos. You should be able to mark down some places that are important, some connections between them (road and water), and some blockages that prevent people walking directly from one to another (high ground and low ground full of water are the usual barriers).

The simplest heuristics are:

Mountains (especially impassable ones) tend to come in chains. Look at most maps about the size that you care about. You'll see a handful of mountain chains on the order of 1000 miles long. Put those chains where you don't want people to just wander back and forth. Now go look at a map of the Carpathian Mountains in eastern Europe and try to figure out exactly why Mordor is flipped East-to-West. I'll wait. You're back? Good. There are reasons why mountains are exactly where they are, but Priest Bubba drawing pretty maps seven generations removed from the survey crew who mostly drew their maps based on rumors of their area of interest probably isn't going to get it quite right.

Water gets to the tops of the mountains because that's where snow accumulates. The physical world is like a teakettle with the sun boiling the oceans and the steam condensing out in high places. Then that water runs downhill until it gets to the ocean or evaporates in the desert. Liquid water flows downhill (solid water flows downhill more slowly). That's the most important rule of geophysics (water dissolves stuff is the second most important rule). So sketch the lines going from high to low and call those rivers. Rivers usually go away from mountains, but some like to follow along the bottom of the mountain range (like the Po) and some just want to see the sights on the way to the ocean (aka the Danube). Go to your search engine and ask it for things like "map of rivers of Europe" and win a fun prize!

As far as where people will settle, consider that they'll want water and food. The highest fordable point on a river is a good spot (Rome wasn't built in a day, but it was built in that spot for a particular reason). An important rule of modern sanitation is that people won't drink their own waste, but will happily drink that of the people upstream. So all water intakes are upriver (ideally from a different river altogether) and all sewer outlets are downriver.