Phaldoria, a (newbie) world building project

[krostatina]

After much thinking over it, I decided to take the advice and start a WIP tread.
The project is a world for fantasy rpg, it started a few years ago to support a gurps campaign jointly DMed with my husband. At the time we hand sketched a continental map (terribly out of scale) and several regional, town and dungeon maps. These maps should be still in our possess, but I think they are in storage at the moment, following our recent move in London. In the hope to continue the project and digitalize it, we purchased some time ago a Profantasy CC3+CD+DD package, but what the software didn't give us was time and perseverance
In this moment of my life I think I really need some creative output and I'd really like to learn something new, so here it comes back the old project.

To start with I think I'll follow the mentoring Vellum is doing with Socks. I hope it will help me clear my mind on what steps to take.
As for the software, I think I'll stick with CC3 and GIMP, since they are not completely unfamiliar to me and I don't want to complicate things further trying to learn new software on top of the technique

Forgive my english, I'm in England 6 years now but I still make my mistakes

p.s.: first sketches soon to come, with brief of the idea.

[krostatina]

I just realized that the mentoring thread has stopped 3 months ago, I'll jump forward and post a sketch I'd like to work on.
Some problems are clear even at my eyes comparing it with real world maps:
- the coastline is unnatural
- the continent shapes are not varied
- even if it's better then the map we started with, it's still badly out of scale (to give you a measure, the ring of islands should be around 1-2 hundred km of diameter, and the map should span from pole to pole). I could sort this assuming the planet is musch smaller then the Earth, but this will change too many other assumptions (climate, calendar and so on), better redraw the map
- I would have liked to have one of the polar regions to be connected to one of the continents and mapped, but it will imply distortions that I'd rather leave out of the map. I'll probably go for an "Hic sunt leones" kind of thing for that area.

Any critic, suggestion and comment is wellcome.
map1 001.jpg

[krostatina]

I'm slowly working through the tutorials, this is a map of the area around one of the main cities, I shoud add some roads that lead out of the mapped region and some symbol for the plain area. I have problems with the text function of GIMP, I read I'm not the only one, does anybody have a solution?
I need to practice a bit the symbol positioning, but as a first try I'm not too unpleased.
What do you people think about the river? I read that river positioning is almost a religion for some of you Perhaps a river who splits in a delta should be more distant from the mountains and more bendy on its course, right?
Saityan.jpeg

[Vellum]

krostatina Welcome to the guild, looks like you have jumped right in!! I have a question, are you trying to establish / refine an entire world or just work out localized areas as the last map shows? thanks for taking a look at the tutorial I started with Socks, this was to be more or less the way I go about hand drawing the type of maps I've posted up here on CG. There is no software used, just paper and pencil. Entire world layouts (my method) are more or less a 1 unit high by 2 unit wide layout, so you can use an 8.5 x 11 (copy paper) in landscape mode or better yet an 11 x 17 landscape. If you use the 8.5 x 11 (or the equivalent UK paper size) try to use the 1x2 proportion area of the paper only. Copy paper is pretty cheap and you can mass your continents until you get a layout you like and then go for coastline / terrain refinements. Hope this gives some insight to what I was trying to get Socks to do.

[krostatina]

Thanks, Vellum.
Yes, I was trying to do an entire world map, the second map was to try the tutorial, mainly.
I`ll try to define the continents following your suggestions, Thank you again!

[Vellum]

Something else to do is print out an earth map to use as a reference on water/land mass proportions while you work. I'm guilty of having too much land mass when I do layouts myself I generally just think about 25 / 75% land to water as I can graphically visualize this better as I sketch. Good Journeys