First Fantasy Continent Map

[Force4]

First post on the forum!

I've used this site intermittently as a guest for the last year or so, I'd like to thank the community at large for their fantastic efforts . I've recently started GM'ing an RPG with a few friends and thought I'd flesh out what the map looked like using GIMP. I'd like to keep the geography relatively realistic without getting too granular with world generation/modelling wind patterns, tidal currents etc.

Using Eurasia as very loose inspiration, I've established coastlines, mountains (brushes from Schwarzkreuz posted in a previous brush dump thread), and some of the major rivers.

Madsen rpg map.jpg

Bottom right chunk I planned to have a large jungle, bottom left-chunk I planned to have a large desert. Those are the only two climate restrictions.

Is there anything that looks glaringly out of place?

[ajrittler]

Nothing looks out of place to me. So far, it's looking very good.

[- JO -]

I like your choice of colours... Quite unusual, but it gives already an atmosphere !

[woodb3kmaster]

This is a very promising start! The style and color scheme complement each other quite well and, as JO said, give the map a consistent ambience.

As for whether anything is out of place: I can't fault your placement of existing geographical features. The river systems make sense, and mountain placement can be explained with decent plate tectonics if necessary. The only thing I'm skeptical of is your proposed jungle and desert locations; they're at awfully similar latitudes, which I'm not sure would happen IRL, especially given their sizes. If you want to keep them in those places, however, you could make it work by rotating the entire continent clockwise by around 30 degrees. That would put enough north-south distance between the jungle and desert that their locations would make sense in terms of climate. How easy it would be for you to redraw the mountains afterwards is another matter, one which you'd have a better idea of (since you know how the map layers are organized in your working document).

Welcome to the Guild! You're off to a promising start.

[Force4]

I could put the jungle a little further south and shrink the desert on the left to a) future-proof the setting if I need to fit a different continent into the same world, and b) sort out the climate-latitude thing. Thanks for the suggestion, woodb3kmaster!

I'm taking the lazy route so far with vegetation, I thought about doing it a little like:
Screen Shot 2016-09-10 at 9.39.47 PM.png
(http://ramah-palmer.deviantart.com/a...done-437794615)

Sample:
Screen Shot 2016-09-10 at 9.07.21 PM.png
I'm not sure if this is too abstract, but I think a brush with miniature tree images would distort the sense of scale too much?