Rectangular landmass... cardinal sin?
What exactly are the general thoughts of creating a map where the displayed landmass is rectangular? I do not mean to say that the continent is that shape... just the portion shown. Is that considered to be a "lazy" map style? I'm nearly at the final stages of my first digital map, but found myself stumbling when I realized that what started out as an idle attempt to see if I could make a map just happened to be forming in a recognizably rectangular shape.
I almost want to start over so I can find a landmass that's a little less "cliche", and I don't want to keep working on the current one if it's simply an overdone shape.
Thoughts?
Hmm.. Well, is it a regional map? Just a zoomed in portion of a continent? My first map was just a regional map I would say, and it didn't have a coastline on it, the rest of the continent was unmapped (and not a thought was paid to it), which was fine for my story.
But I'm really not quite sure what you mean by this, I think the best thing to do would be upload the map and see what people think.
No sin, no foul - it just makes plausibility a tad harder to reach. There's oodles of fantastical elements we need viewers to accept - the best way to gain that is to minimize the things they have to suspend disbelief on. So - mundane where it's not critical, normal = good. There's other cliches - the 'left-justified continent', cold= north (when half the time it could just as well be to the south). Landmasses that approach regularity instead of sorta-varied are not the most damaging possible characteristic. Indeed, you could probably play that to your advantage, if you pitch your map as a highly generalized, highly conceptualized one. *Plenty* of real maps from hundreds or a thousand years ago were poor representations of 'ground truth' yet still useful to navigators, rulers, natural philosophers, sages......
Welcome to the Guild, by the way - I missed your hello a day or three back. You draw by hand? Please show us what you're working on - we may have ideas to boost believeability without necessitating rework.
Really don't understand the "rectangular" aspect ....Like already stated...Not every map has to be Complete Known World...Many of our Worlds (Campaigns) start out in a smaller portion of the World and expand from there.
Everyone finds a Niche...Myself I do mainly Encounter Maps and Small Cities...Other Do Large Cities....(I rarely use them in my Campaigns) others like Regional Maps.
As Already said post a Map and let us take a look..
The Wayward Traveler
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Do you mean that the landmass just happens to fit neatly into the map extent? Yes, we have a term for that, "Rectangularitis". It's right up there with the classic old Right Justified Fantasy Continent and the ever so trendy new Dangling Peninsula That Neatly Fits Into a Portrait Oriented Page.Originally Posted by Mar-Evayave
That's not to say that fantasy worlds that fit neatly into the map extent in a contrived way can't work, but you want something decidedly abstract and non-modern like a medieval T and O map or a fantasy world where the shape of things really is contrived to fit into a neat extent like a flat disc. If it looks like you were trying to make a natural looking world portrayed as a modern (As in Renaissance or later) scale map then rectangularitis will look really fake. Keep in mind that most fantasy maps are really anachronistic in how modern they are compared to what limited attempts at maps were made in the real middle ages. A fantasy world can certainly have more advanced surveying, navigation, and cartography, but you need to be consistent about it.
Thank you all for the replies. To answer the confusion on what I mean, Hai-Etlik has it pretty well nailed on the head. A landmass (partial or complete; partial in my case) that fits pretty neatly into most of my map's extent. And it is right justified, too (I must have dodged the contagious Dangling Peninsula). I don't have the cold north that JBGibson eludes to, but I do have a T-shaped mountain range. The mountain peaks would of course be icy, but I had it in my mind that the northern reaches of the mountain range would be infested with evil creatures, and that the many valleys and gullies would actually go quite low and perhaps even be hot. They aren't shown on the map, but they would be in the story.
Should I start a new thread, perhaps? Or is this general forum an okay place to get feedback/comments? I had thought perhaps I would puzzle out the possibly cliche nature of my mapping before I created an official WIP thread for it.
JBGibson - Thanks! And yes, this is my first time drawing maps digitally. I've always done my mapping by hand. I don't have any way of scanning, but I could take a picture of some of my previous works with my cellphone and upload those. None of them are related to my current project in GIMP, though.
Is it a cardinal sin? Nah, probably no more than a bishop-level sin there. It's actually a form of temptation, lovely temptation to fill up every visible area with stuff (this problem is a close relative of doll-house syndrome, which manifests in cartography as needing every bit of the map filled with something).
And, as they say, a picture is worth 10 confused posts not understanding what you're discussing.
lol Well, far be it from me to put any bishops out of sorts.Here is what I have so far. This is following Gidde's tutorial on hand-drawing maps in GIMP (as best I can anyway; it seems slightly outdated in regards to some GIMP functions, which meant I had to figure out my own way of accomplishing what was described, but for the most part it has been easy to follow). I don't have a drawing pad, unfortunately, just my mouse. I'm at the stage where one begins adding the location for roads and cities.
Map test.jpg
It doesn't reach quite to the bottom, but it almost does. I had to save space somewhere for a compass rose and possible keychart. I'm considering adding an island (or string of islands) as well...
Thanks! Yes, I have been sitting here pondering what potential changes I could make to the map to "loosen" it up a bit without completely starting over. For example, the blank-ish area along the right edge is a desert (which, apart from its future label, is probably pretty impossible to tell currently). If I curved the coastline up to cut into that and then cut a little further into the desert with some hills or even mountains (something to separate the desert from the coastline), that would help break into the rectangularitis. Or can deserts be flush against ocean? I live in a very wet climate (well, wet in my mind; Michigan used to be very marshy before it was populated, and we've got huge lakes on three sides), so I'm not familiar with how deserts "work".
I also toyed with the thought of turning my mini-peninsula into something that connects (or almost connects, perhaps separated by a thin channel) to a second continent? I can always extend the size of the map. That'd be a piece of cake in GIMP.
And possibly an inlet?
Last edited by Mar-Evayave; 05-10-2016 at 10:52 PM.
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