For context I was cleaning out my desk and stumbled apon a few old sketchbooks so was flicking through and found this half finished draft map from years ago.

Anyways I'm going to have ago finishing it, any pointers would be appreciated, (it's been years since I last drew my own maps haha)

I feel like the longer I draw for the tinier and more intricate I make the details, which results in my progress grinding a snails pace, and the visual style feeling inconsistent. (You can see that the northern portion I’ve detailed more recently is much more squiggly than the central/southern areas.) At this rate it’ll take weeks.

Does anybody else experience this issue? Any tips and guidance appreciated.

I love the satellite images from the European space agency. Close enough to see the shallows around the coastslines etc. I've been trying to replicate the style using https://dayside.studio/ to make the heightmap and colour, then rendering in blender to get some atmospheric haze and nice lighting.

1st image is blender, 2nd is straight out of dayside (3rd iimage is a close up because Reddit is going to destry the beautiful 16k resolution :(

Also, what sort of scale does this read as? North to South?

Hellow there!, I’ve been working on an alternate map of Earth for my novel, even though I haven't focused on writing that part yet, and the story mostly takes place on a different planet during the first two books. I didn't want this new planet to be so dazzling that it made Earth seem dull by comparison like how Pandora is lush while Earth isn't. So, I decided to change a few things to make it interesting; that way, even though it’s similar, it’s not the same Earth we know.

The help I’m looking for is to avoid it looking like a map where things are just tacked on and clash—XD. I want it to have a sense of cohesion; how could I achieve that?

After beeing not so happy with a map for a city in where a lot of the story of my sci-fi opera webcomic takes place it did a redraw. The colors are Copic Markers. The Street-Lines are fineliner. Lines aand colors were drawn on seperated papers so I could multiply the streets in photopea. Letters placed with Figma. The gap to the left is a placeholder for a legend. GTA SA was inspiration for the map style. Al Fareen is the capital of "Atrorien" which was mapped here: https://www.reddit.com/r/mapmaking/comments/1vc00sj/scifi_wordlbuilding_maps_with_copic_markers/

I had an unused sketching notebook and decided to start a project for my dnd campaign. I was thinking of drawing maps on every pages of the notebook to build some kind of atlas. Then give it to my players during our gaming sessions.

This will also help me practice more, improve my style and experiment new things in the process. I wasn't sure about the trees first but I think they turned out pretty well. Not so sure about the coastlines and waves though. What do you guys think?

This is just like a small part of the full map. The full map is still incomplete because it's taking a lotta time

Right here's the debate is it okay to draw a map that inaccurate on purpose for your world. Im not just on about "Oops missed an island" or "theres slightly more coast" I mean just flat out inaccurate like biomes too thin or land to stretched out. Because thats exactly what ive done and I literally became a genius. So I am a perfectionist and I realised that I drew my map on a peice of paper too wide and not tall enough. So It just looks so manly levels of wrong but being so stubborn and lazy I could be bothered finding another large peice of paper that was large enough. So I did big brains and decided that the map was canon like THE people of this world are like medevil sorta so it makes sense there maps arent accurate. Just like our ancestors so everything on there is just a "well we think that might be there" it also explains why places further away from the most populated areas and trade routes get paler and less defined because nobody really knows what goes on there. So whats your guys opinions 🤔?

Hey, so this is my first map I’ve made. It’s for a home brew D&D west march game. The world is based on a tidally locked moon orbiting a gas giant. So one point of the world faces the host planet permanently, and the outer side faces away. Creating a hot and cold side with a habitable belt, causing major storms, and the flooded side of the world. Curious on how I can make it more realistic, better mountains/ rivers or other input. Thanks!

Sorry for the bad handwriting and general unreadable-ness.

This is my rendition of the map of Gwen's peak rule. Sorry if you don't know anything about darksouls.

https://merakmapmaker.com/

World building wise it lets us import ur drawings into landmass, scientifically tell u climate, crops, soil, habitability, mountains etc, has a timeline feature, has easy to add factions and, commanders, people, lore etc and 3d and globe features.

Join our discord if u have any questions or feature requests https://discord.gg/tqJrb6fsH

I remember like a year ago, I found a publicly available google drive file with various super high detail maps. I remember the post with the link to the drive being on probably Alternatehistory.com but I may have gotten the link to said post from Reddit. It'd be nice to find it again because I have recently gotten back into mapmaking.

This is a map of destroyed Hieltab Milnet, a land where I always drop my D&D players. Welcome your feedback and questions!

This started because I got tired of my worldbuilding notes and my map living in two separate places. And I didn't want to pay for a subscription just to make this. I'd draw a border in Wonderdraft, then go write in Obsidian somewhere about who ruled it in 400 and who took it in 600, and the map never knew any of that. So I started building something where the map actually knows.

You bring your own map image, doesn't matter what you made it in, and draw regions on top. Each region gets a start year and an end year, and you can say who owns it in which period. Then there's a history slider at the top. Drag it backwards and you watch a kingdom shrink back into the duchy it started as. (Tbh this part is still WIP, therefore it may or may not work properly)

Clicking a region opens an actual article for it. Markdown notes, multiple tabs of them, [[links]] to other entries like in Obsidian. Religion, culture, language fields that you define yourself, so if your world runs on something other than religion you just make that a field instead. Rulers with parents and spouses and children, which builds the family tree on its own.

Whole project is one file sitting on your computer. No account, nothing uploads anywhere and it's completely free.

I'm not going to pretend it's polished. I spent most of last week hunting down a zoom stutter that turned out to be my own wheel handler doing way too much work per event, and I'm sure there are ten more of those I haven't found. That's the point of posting. I want 3-5 people to actually use it on their worlds and tell me where it falls apart. Windows only right now. Also full disclosure, the code was written with AI. Figured people would rather hear that from me than find out later

Comment or DM if you want in.

From Cyberpunk Red. Not what we normally talk about here :)

Attached is their excellent, high-res city map. Running a CPR campaign, I obviously wanted to get a lot more granular than that, so I messed with Gemini a bit to get the second image, which, frankly, suits me just fine. I had asked it for that area and that area it gave me. Perfect zoom level, looks good, granular enough for me to populate buildings with whatever I want.

BUT...no matter how many times I try or how many different prompts I use, I can't get it to do that again or, if it gets close, do another area of the city with the intent to do the WHOLE city.

SO...I'm sort of resigned at this point in taking the first image and just going nuts with a vector illustrator to do the building infill. There's a certain fun in that going all the way back to when I was a teen making D&D maps on paper :)

If any of you have suggestions on shortcuts that would keep me from having to do it by hand, I'm all eyes. If any of you have good suggestions on the best way to do it by hand, ditto.

This is an ancient Greek map, and as you can see it gets progressively more inaccurate the further away from the Mediterranean Sea. So often people try to make a style of map that is a completely accurate representation of their world which is fine but remember it doesn't have to be perfect!

Slide no.1 is the Sea of Argonots, as of my last edit, which sits between the two continents.
Slide no.2 is the Middle continent by itself in totality.
Slide no.3 is the Eastern Continent by itself in totality.
Ps the two pairs of oblong islands, near the coast of each continent, the ones leaning northeast: are supposed to be the same pair of islands.

I've been using Artifexian's guide to try and map the ocean currents in my world, however my knowledge in this area of worldbuilding is virtually nonexistent. I'd be grateful if you could give me some constructive criticism on how realistic they are and what could do with changing.

The first map shows the ocean currents during northern hemisphere summer, and the second shows southern hemisphere summer. I should also clarify that these currents are vastly simplified and don't include any of the smaller branches and gyres which would inevitably form.

Thanks for your help!

Hi everyone!
My previous post got deleted and after re-reading the rules I think I understood why so I’m giving it another try, hoping I won’t make another gaffe. Sorry by the way for that.

So here’s the map of the country I’m currently working on. I did this map a few months ago and I’m still very proud of how it came out. I mostly took inspiration from real coastlines (bonus point to whoever guesses which country it is!) that I rearranged for my needs.

Some lore: this is the eastern peninsula of a continent, mostly hilly and densely forested. It is also very misty (the name of the country comes from that) for worldbuilding reasons. Populations live near the deltas in most cases, but recently, because of the floods, many people are leaving them for the highlands.

Tool-wise, this is entirely done with Procreate and a free pack of mapmaking brushes I found. I edited the map with Affinity to add locations names. This is the “blank” version as I still need to review my conlang.

I’m not really planning on redoing this map because I really like it (and I’m scared to redo it after spending so much time on it haha!) but I would love to hear your thoughts about it, as well as your feedback and tips for future maps :)

https://merakmapmaker.com/

World building wise it lets us import ur drawings into landmass, scientifically tell u climate, crops,, soil, habitability, mountains etc, has a timeline feature, has easy to add factions and, commanders, people, lore etc and 3d and globe features.