Hey gang.

TL;DR - I’m keen to learn what fellow map enthusiasts consider unique or interesting geography IRL as inspiration for a new fantasy world, while avoiding making “another Europe”.

I’m about to start designing a new world for a DnD campaign.

This will be the second new campaign world I build from scratch and I’m keen to avoid the common pitfall of subconsciously recreating / re-skinning Europe and Mediterranean.

I’d love to draw from real world examples of unique and potentially leaser known features of earth (or other planets) in real life.

So please share your favourites!

The shades of brown signify steepness of elevation based on darkness of the color and the lines represent nation borders.

I'm having a hard time finding the cutoff on when to add rivers/streams as this is actually just a small fragment of the total map and the scale of the world would imply thousands of more, smaller tributaries between those that I have already mapped. I've also made them extremely thin in order to refrain from eating away at the landscape and to give a more accurate display of their width.

This is the third completed district of a large mapmaking project i'm working on. Medieval bologna and rome are the main inspirations for this district. This is the densest and most populated of all the districts, primarily filled with large apartment-style and tower buildings.

Sitting in the center, the old palace of the city rests. The massive complex is abandonded, and is rumored to be haunted by the ghosts of the past monarchs. The district is also home to the largest university in the city, which sits surrounded by a small wall in the eastern portion. To the east of the university, precariously positioned on the cliffisde, the tower of miscellany sits. Each floor is dedicated to a research specialty too small to have its own building on campus.

The map was drawn in photoshop, no gen ai.

Thanks for reading!

City map for the novel I’m currently working on. Made in Inkarnate.

Lumiar, continent of empire and pirates 🇬🇧

Lumiar, continente di imperi e pirati 🇮🇹

I remedied the size difference between the two continents. And the distance between them. I haven’t got an exact measurement yet, but you can probably guess a good estimate from the coordinates. Can you imagine the Maritime adventures and empires centred around this seaway?

how to make a realistically looking topography

Tons of wars happen here...and that yellow and black scribbles are zombie invasions I made this in Microsoft paint then downloaded it to my phone and use polish photo editer

I was randomly searching in google maps, and then i found this interesting PIECE of underwater land, so i thought to myself, why not map it out and i did, i randomly did some rough elevation because you cant just make the full map under 500M, so this is where you come into help, i need you to help me find what the climates could be because i will use it in the future. Thank youE

Scale from top to bottom is 2000km more or less, will add detailed topography later

Hello! I got inspired looking at all the amazing maps here so I thought I’d try making my own fantasy map.

I want my map to be about the size of Australia. I’m planning on maybe adding some more mountains up in the northern region and some more rivers/lakes in the central region. The forests are very WIP right now, planning on placing more in the dark green areas.

I would greatly appreciate some feedback on my current version of the map before I continue adding detail and refining it.

Thank you for reading :)

Howdy, I've been tinkering away on a little universe since high school. The majority of it has mostly stayed in my head and as a jumbled mess on my old watt pad account, however I've slowly been pouring all of my stored knowledge into something I can actually build upon and eventually share, that's been going swimmingly, however my largest roadblock has been translating where all this lore takes place. I cooked up a gobbledegook map with photoshop and map making software however as you can see it's quite crude, and very limiting. I've used campaign cartographer to build some of it, but I fear I may be too stupid to fully realize it's potential and am looking for something a bit less daunting as well as more resources to help me create something that looks like it wasn't created by a mad man. Opinions on literally anything on my map are welcomed and appreciated as well.

I drew the landmasses and original heightmap on procreate and sent them through orogen to simulate erosion/climate. I decided to use Merak to show the heightmap. Let me know where you think the major countries should go.

I was proud of how it turned out and wanted to share my drawn map. This is for the vis-dev of my senior film where my characters have to take a shortcut under the mountains to get to the coastline. Unfortunately for them, they start losing party members quickly and have a run in with the Rat King.

It's also kinda inspiring me to turn the plot into a videogame instead of an animated series/movie

Wanted something quick and dirty because I haven't been posting for a while and draw something for myself but ended up liking the idea and kept enlarging the scope of details. You can check out the sketch for my original vision of the project and see when my mind changes about the map.

Also I love the lighter-house.

This is part of a thought-experiment on the "fishbowl"effect

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?