Faum - Let The Dice Decide

[Jerron]

Last year during an Iceland vacation my special lady friend and I started creating a new world by using a dice rolling technique where we asked questions and rolled a D20 to answer those questions. The range goes from 1 - not at all to 10 - it's cmplicated to 20 - yes definitely so you have some wiggle room when interpreting the results.

So far we found out that the world of Faum is a huge ice planet inhabited by humans and an indigenous race called Rannsakandi - tall, slender creatures with semi-transparent milky white skin, six fiingers and a trunk-like snout whose color of clothing indicate their age and who are terribly afraid of nudity. Everybody on the planet is linked telepathically to a medium similar to YouTube and the air contains some substance that can be refined into food.

So I recently took a piece of checkered paper and a D8 and rolled for the coastlines of the planet. 1 means the line goes op, 2 to up right, 3 to the right, 4 to down right, 5 down and so on. Whenever it was not possible to continue the line I started a new line randomly on the paper. Then I rolled a D6 for every square on the paper to determine if there are mountains or not with 1-2 indicating that there are mountains. (The rivers were drawn in where they made some sense)
This method worked surprisingly well and now we have a first draft and might continue to work on a refined, more beautiful looking version.

[jshoer]

What an interesting idea. How did you keep the mountains in chains like that?

[Jerron]

It just happened. There was a 1/3 chance for a square to have a mountain on it and whenerver there was a mountain square next to an other I just connected the two.

[Falconius]

That's pretty cool. You got nice results.

[LunaticDesign]

That's really interesting idea!

[Jerron]

And here we are with the first step and we have a relief map. Since it's an ice planet and there won't be much vegetation and I'm not quite sure how to proceed now.
Faum_WIP2.jpg

[Badger]

Interesting way to make a world. I love randomly generating stuff up! It can be quite fun. Maybe you should roll to see what you do next? Make a chart for when you get stuck on something so you can roll to see what to do. If not random... then after you placed all the geographical stuff, I would think putting some cities in might come next... I think I hear dice rolling!!

Del

[acrosome]

Is this map supposed to be the entire world? If so, the southern edge needs work. It needs to either be all land or all sea, since it is one pixel stretched out across the whole map edge. Put your map into G.Projector and you'll see how funny the south pole looks.

[Jerron]

I did, and of course the polar regions always look funny and distorted when you project the map on a globe, but in this case it doesn't look THAT funny. It's just a lake covering the south pole.

[acrosome]

Then the entire southern border needs to be water. Otherwise, it isn't "a lake covering the south pole".