Hey fellas, discovered this community yesterday and thought I would drop in some maps I did for a homebrew 5E setting I made.
Included 2 world maps (one labeled by land mass, the other denoting territories), a town map, and a couple battle maps.
They were built using a combination of wonderdraft and affinity photo.
Had to upload via imgur since I seem to be getting a json error when trying to upload to Lemmy directly.
Let me know what you think. Thanks!
Hi.
I’ve checked the maps, but if you had a link for the files in a higher res’ that would be great. Especially the world map it’s kinda hard to see what’s what.
I like the overall feel of the map, it feels clean and well thought of, you have overall variety an some distinctive features too. Seeing that this is 5E’s medieval fantasy setting however, there are a few things that could use some consideration.
First, the size of the territorial entities. If this is a planetary sized world, then each individual territory spans tremendous stretches of land, despite the massive geological features within themselves.
Of course, if we are talking biomes rather than countries it is more plausible, though some of the larger ones could clearly and logically be fragmented (mainly through relief). I we are talking countries, then not only it is harder to believe that in this era you would have as many “empire level nation states” capable of unifying great stretches of land, but I also feel that it “robs” you of the opportunity to create emerging power dynamics and instability from the map alone. Everything feels very balanced and neat, which will make it a bit harder to create natural points of tension for the story.
This also has to do with the overall map design (from a solely visual perspective). Though the biomes are diverse, they are somewhat monolithic, with few diversity within biomes. Also, there is a strong sense of simmetry between the four central blocks (west and east, then the two islands). The two big ones are basically of similar size and shape (a large landmass thinning out towards the south, divided by a main mountain range). Same goes for the middle islands, apparently having a single biome or being countrolled by a single entity. They are also of similar shape and basically very centred in the ocean. The southern block breaks the equilibrium a bit, but not enough in my opinion, ans you have very few small islands (1), fragmented peninsulas or city states (none) that could bring a bit more variety.
If I were to give any advice (from my individual perspective of course, it can be discussed), that would be to break simmetry and disrupt balance. Have countries or biomes of more various sizes, and likely more of them. Reshape landmasses to avoid the " left half right half" feel that makes it feel less natural. Bring more randomness!