Greetings and Salutations!

For those of you who don't know me, I'm LadieStorm, a 30 yr veteran of D&D and other fantasy roleplay, GM, and brand new (relatively) mapper. I bought CC+/CD/DD3 little over a month ago, watched a few of Joe Sweeney's tutorials and jumped right into mapping for a 5th ed campaign I'm working on. I've made a few decent maps, but it didn't take me long to realize that I didn't really know what I was doing.

So I took the plunge, invested a tad bit more money, and purchased the Tome of Ultimate Mapping. And though I'm still building other maps (always so eager to try the newest techniques I find), I've decided that the best way for me to learn, is to simply follow the Tomes series of tutorials, and walking my way though the ins and outs of the programs I've purchased.

And since I am making maps... I figured I would post my tutorial maps here to show my progress. Especially since I'm going to have lots of questions about the maps I'm making...some general tips knowledge, others specifically for cc3+ users.

So my first tutorial Map is the Isle of Tariga. As far as I can tell, the map is complete, unless you all see something I missed.

Tariga.PNG

This map brings up my first set of questions... and these are general mapping questions, NOT specific to cc3. You might notice I have sandbars and coastal rockies as part of my coastline. These were added until the tutorial 'to make the coast more interesting'. So my question is this.

If I wanted this to be a more 'realistic' map... how do I determine if my coastlines would have sandbars and rocky coast? And if a coastline would normally have these things... how does one determine WHERE to put them? Is there a correct or an incorrect way to figure these things out?