WIP: Aisling - The Known World

[Aristotle]

The known world of Aisling (ash-ling) [Vision/Dream] is pretty much just the continent Antir (an-tyr) [The Land] and nearby islands at this point. Exploration and progress were somewhat suppressed under the rule of the false gods, and society has hit some stumbling blocks since Ahmad—the one true god—ascended and drove them off. Folks will get around to it though, I'm sure.

I'm continuing to try and find my "style" using Affinity Designer, and am still not happy with any of the methods I've tried thus far to illustrate topography. This map is as much me just trying to figure out the software as it is an attempt at world-building. Everything here is subject to change, but I'm somewhat happy with what little I've gotten done.

OSR.jpg

[Aristotle]

It might not look much different, but I went back through this and got rid of a lot of individual shapes I had drawn and created more consolidated curves (now that I've started to get better with breaking and joining them).

I'm concerned that I may have too many rivers visible at this level (hexes are 240 miles, side to side).

OSR.jpg

[Aristotle]

Plotting racial/cultural diaspora and the areas they populate most heavily. I'm using a basic form of the random rolling technique featured in this blog post about mapping kingdoms and their component domains.

Diaspora.jpg

[Azélor]

That is an interesting technique.

[Aristotle]

That is an interesting technique.

Yeah, I came across it when I was researching sandbox campaign creation methods for my tabletop game. It works well on this project because I had an idea of the number of cultures I wanted to work with, but didn't really have set borders in mind for them yet. Now, between the rivers and the borders this gives me, I have a strong idea of where my mountain ranged need to go.

[Aristotle]

A quick take on the borders this produced. (note I broke off a small section of the orange diaspora, as I needed a "holy city" region.) These might get massaged a little to fall more in line with rivers and mountains, but I'll wait until I have mountains on the map to do that.

borders1.jpg

[Meton]

I really like this map, the shape of the landmass is very realistic to my eye. I wouldn't say there are too many rivers. It was also very interesting to get to know that technique of creating borders for the nations, it brings quite good results. I'm looking forward to see how you plan the mountains and how the map will develop.

I don't know whether you thought that colours are the final ones, but I would say that the colour difference between the shallow and deep water is too big. Also, I think that the zone of shallow water is a bit too narrow and uniform in the northern part of the continent.

[kimni]

Just dropping in to say thanks for posting a link to that random mapping technique. It makes things so much easier when you don't have a specific layout in mind to start off from...
I agree that the colour difference between shallow and deep water is a bit jarring at the moment.
The rivers seem fine to me. Take a look at this map of Europe's rivers: http://bookofjoe.typepad.com/.a/6a00...894098a970b-pi (and that's just the big ones).

[Aristotle]

A textured photoshop-style topography wasn't working for me in this software. A map symbols style didn't look right to me on a map this size. So, I decided to try a more atlas-like style. Not something I've really done before. It still needs to be cleaned up, some of the lines should probably be a lot less jagged, and it would have more of an atlas vibe with labels.

Atlas.jpg

[Aristotle]

Not finished naming things, and some names are placeholders, but I've started playing with my typography. Is there a good guide on this somewhere? I'm mostly doing google image searches and seeing how it's done on various real world maps.

Google Fonts is a godsend. I stumbled onto this article while looking for map labeling style guides and I'm digging the fonts it suggested. I'm using the Fell and Ubuntu families on this map.

semi-final.jpg