Reply With QuoteMakes sense. I'll keep working on the map then. In the meantime...
A different perspective showing the undistorted poles.
Giving information about cultural effects would require more information about rivers, biomes, and available resources to get even semi-consistent feedback.
Rivers are important because people tend to travel along them and cities tend to form at the lowest fordable point on a river (that is, the point where people travelling on foot can cross the river without swimming). Resources are important because trade routes will form to move valuable materials (metals, drugs, stone, dyes, food, salt) from regions of high availability to regions of lower availability.
On the left-hand continent, for example, are there equatorial rainforests on the places to the right of the big mountain chain? Are there easily-recoverable deposits of materials like gold, silver, copper, tin, and iron? Are there sufficient biological resources (large animals that can be domesticated, crops that can be grown over large areas, etc.) to support large populations?
Makes sense. I'll keep working on the map then. In the meantime...
A different perspective showing the undistorted poles.
Somebody probably ought to do a thread on the interplay between geography and culture. I thought there was one drifting around some years ago, but it's been a while.
Groovey, have fun reading this: http://www.cartographersguild.com/sh...ad.php?t=27111
One introductory book would be Jareed Diamond, Gun germs and steel.
The thing about people not participating here is that Groovey suggested a particular setting and asked for feedback. People had something to comment on, but your just asking for ideas. People are not whiling to create your world from scratch.
A more charitable explanation would be that I'm a newbie to map-making and don't know how to ask the right questions. Thanks for finding me the thread and for the advice, anyway.Originally Posted by Azelor
Your problem seems more about world building than map making IMHO.
biomesmol.png
A basic biome map, made with the help of Azelor's awesome thread and mbartelsm's biome placement tutorial.
It follows mbartelsm's color legend, though with the climate zones in slightly different sizes from Earth (I believe the subtropical zone is significantly larger and the poles are smaller than in reality).
Bright greens close to the equator - tropical forested climates
Bold, darker greens - temperate and boreal forested climates
yellows and dull gray-browns - arid climates
Lime and dull greens - grasslands
Purple - tundra-like (though the final version will have less of it on mountains, I didn't quite get the height to cold ratio right)
White - ice (theoretically, in practice there'll be much less of it in the hotter areas)
I can see a whole bunch of mistakes that wouldn't fly if this map were for anyone other than myself. I didn't factor in the mellowing of climates around coastlines close to hot currents, or how those gigantic deserts might draw in moisture and create monsoon-like conditions at the west and southeast of the middle continent, and I will probably fiddle with the big continent a bit because I don't like how the river sources suggested by Wilbur are all pointing to the desert.
crap... use it at your own risk, I still need to update it but haven't found the time.
One thing about your ma stands out, and it is the mountain ranges, I think you might have gone a bit overboard with the temperature lowering (that or they are really big mountains). I say it because you ended up with permafrost on most of your mountain ranges, even the smaller ones near the equator. In reality tropical mountains have little or no snow at all. I live in Colombia and here we only have three mountain peaks with snow, even though we have the Andes all across the country.
Cities are usually on rivers or coasts, preferably on little hills (easier to defend).
Kingdoms usually have natural boundaries like mountain ranges, rivers, coasts, maybe forests.
As for strategic places, most strategic place is usually the center of a continent (of you see my map it is between the two mountains, but I the story for mine is that that is a symbolic and religious place so armies don't really like going there). Also find some places in mountain gaps (Isengard in Middle-Earth if you're a fan of LotR), you can choose some place where the land is fertile and it's close to a river so irrigation systems are possible (Wermandien plain and Mirstad in my map) etc.
About your map, I think you can use some rivers there if you'd like. I do like the shape that your continents have though, keep on the good work.
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