Mapping a world: Start with regions, or start with the world?

[Kromey]

First of all, thank you all for your input -- it's all really useful! And thank you RobA for putting this thread where it belongs.

Not to be mean or anything but its Newb not Noob... the world noob was meant to insult newbs or newbies that first start playing the game... so unless you want to insult yourself go for it..

That's actually exactly what my intent was -- a little bit of self-deprecating humor.


Given that this is my first attempt at mapping out a world, for my own sanity's sake I think I will ignore projections for now, and just map as if the globe were in fact a flat sheet, which works well given where all the major trade routes and hubs lie, making almost all travel confined to that one flat "projection".

Really good point about fantasy maps not necessarily having to be hyper-accurate like modern maps. They just need to be close enough to give my players a good idea of what's where, and allow me to give more-or-less consistent travel distances as they sail around.

So, given that, my first map will be the continent-sized archipelago they are currently island-hopping about, and then a few of the more noteworthy islands will get their own blown-up maps. I'll follow that up with a world map, and produce regional maps from that as needed.

I've gotten a decent start on the first region already, although the tutorial I was following evidently doesn't produce much effect at all on the coastlines when dealing with a large archipelago-like region -- looks like it would produce really nice coastlines on large land masses, but a lot of smaller ones results in almost no effect whatsoever. Still, I'm happy with what little progress I have made so far, and should have something to show off in the WIP forum in the next few days.

[RobA]

... And thank you RobA for putting this thread where it belongs.

No probs, that's why I'm here! Also your response was caught in our overly aggressive spam moderation queue (it relaxes as you get more posts) which I also took care of.

-Rob A>