Land ho! An exercise at building maps off of ideas.

[Raelifin]

Welcome. I've recently decided to map out a new section of my world Phaedoras. Now when I say "map out" I don't actually mean draw a map; I mean form a good idea of how the land looks. Some people do this by drawing a map, others like to visualize the placement of nations/peoples. For me, I like to think of how everything meshes before drawing a map that could be potentially constraining.

I'm going to start with figuring out what I expect from the landmass to be. This might be your entire world, so make sure you write it all out.
1. This will be the home of a group of outsiders (other races) that "invade" the main focus of the world.
2. This area is north of the main area.
3. I want a much larger landmass than my others. Something more akin to Asia.
4. Because of it's northern orientation, the general climate will be cold/temperate.
5. I want a feeling similar to Great Britain for the races and climate.
6. I want a lot of coasts but also primarily land travel.
7. I already have in mind one of the races and I want to make sure it has access to forests and plains so it can have castles (something unknown to most of Phaedoras).
8. One of the races I want to make will be swamp-dwelling so I want a large swamp or several swampy areas.

With a little research, I decide to try and come up with an area similar to Scotland but not an island. Actually, I think I'm looking for something more like Canada. I'm going to pick a starting area and build off of that. The starting area will be coastal, with heavy cliffs eroded from the tides. Above the cliffs will be a mix of deciduous and evergreen forests that build up into a mountain range. I've decided that the mountains should lead up to the north. After researching Canada, I'll implement a form of frozen badlands similar to the Canadian shield. I'll have mountains head up into these badlands and so the mountains themselves will form a barrier of sorts. Looking up, I can't have too large of a barrier, as it would interfere with land travel. I think I'll place the mountain range on the most eastern side of the southern coast and have the range go from sw to ne. So, now that I have a basic idea of one area, I can build of of that until I'm satisfied.

Following the mountains north, I think I'll have a pocket of evergreen forest that is available as survivable (but very cold) terrain on a peninsula that juts out to the east and slightly south. Beyond that cape, the waters are to cold to navigate safely and there is no hospitable land. As a recap so far, we have a large continent with a southern coast and a frozen north. On the far east edge of the continent is a mountain range and travels up the east border. Something a bit like this:



Now, I want a lot of lakes in the starting area and I think I'll extend the rivers by saying that the high elevation on the coast lowers farther inland thus forcing the rivers to flow northwest. At some point we need to introduce the swamps and I see no better reason that now. For these wetlands I think I'll have some low elevation coastline (saltwater marshes). After a bit of coast, I'll have the high elevation line desolve into some hills which will form the north-east edge of the gradual slope into the sea. North of the wetalnds, I'll have some forests and mixed plains thanks to a low mountain range that goes east-west. I've added some to the crappy map, for all you visual learners.



Looking at this again I can visualize the tectonics which is behind the general landmass. Oh! The peninsula in the east needs some islands! I better add those now. They'll be fairly barren due to the icy weather and will most likely be the home of more monsters than people.

I think I'll stop it at that. If I were to continue, I'd probably add some nice forests in the west. Off of this you can start developing individual regions more or draw a decent map and concrete more of your ideas. Feel free to post any thoughts, objections or suggestions. The more input, the better!

[So-Keher]

I think that a region the sise of canadas is way big for a starting point that isn't the mainland. You could run several camapigns inside sucha a map. Myabe something more like the size of denmark, sweden or norway? or china-ish?

EDIT: wait are you actually talking about the main region?

[Raelifin]

Phaedoras right now is quite small. Two islands that are about 500 miles across is the entirety of the world. This would be an expansion.