# Mapmaking Discussion & Philosophy (WIP/Critique) > Regional/World Mapping >  How many mountains is too many? ^^;

## Nettle

Hi hi everyone  :Smile: 

I'm Nettle and I'm a DnD player who's gotten a little carried away with building her own world/campaign and now map! I've come at this project with a lot of enthusiasm and basically no idea what I'm doing ^^; I've been going over resources here but I'm on a bit of a mental overload and would greatly appreciate some feedback! As I'm sure you can tell this is half done in quite a few ways as I keep going back and redoing bits. I specifically wanted to add a volcano to the landmass bottom left and bottom centre was originally going to be fens, but that was me at first going "wouldn't it be cool if..." which I know isn't the best method for building a map. Also the massive lake top left? I realised I hadn't drawn a river draining it! o.o so I put one in but I'm not sure it's right :/ Please, all the constructive criticism for how landmasses work!

Hand drawn in Adobe Illustrator. Apologies for the bad image quality, I haven't yet worked out how to make it good image quality and within the allowed file size

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## Falconius

Looks great so far.  The amount of mountains depends solely on the amount of mountains there are to be represented, yours look really good and fit nicely (the other limiting factor is artist patience of course, same goes with trees and forests).  I didn't see any river issues, you should note that not all lakes drain to the ocean, particularly in very arid places, it's just a general rule.  Alternatively they may feed seasonal rivers or be fed by seasonal rivers and only drain part of the year.  I'm not sure what critisism you are expecting because it all looks top notch.

There is a minor note that you'll learn from observation, and that is river typically end their journey to the ocean by dumping out land mass, and more often then not build little peninsulas into the ocean, particularly rivers which form deltas.  It all depends on the specific circumstances of course, for instance it there is no sea shelf or the river erodes more than it builds etc.

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## Nettle

Thank you for getting back to me, I've been looking at it so much, I can't tell anymore. It's nice to hear its good :D

The inspiration for this place was Iceland, but much bigger - the top part is almost in the Artic circle so is cold/frozen most of the year whereas the southern landmass is not, but scaling is a whole other issue. I wanted at least one volcano BUT I didn't originally do this with plate tectonics in mind so I've been trying to reverse engineer it. I'm think rifting, particularly with the bottom right plate. Does this work? (I'm not sure why the image is coming out blue, it's not on my computer?!?)



With the lake, I got rid of that river - it was really ugly anyway ^^; - and i'll keep thinking on it. And I can add some bits to the delta with the bottom center land mass, but i'll look more into rivers. Is there a good thread on here about them?

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## Confutus

Just so you know, there are lakes with no outlet. Technically known as endorheic, they lose water by evaporation and seepage. They are usually briny and salty, and there are many of them, although they are usually small and found in arid areas.  Examples include the Great Salt Lake (North America) the Dead Sea (Israel), and the Caspian Sea. (Asia). If you want one of those, you should not include an outlet. A freshwater lake does need one.

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## Eowyn Cwper

Your art looks really neat for someone who doesn't know what she's doing! It's true that your seas have got pretty big but I love the overall look. ^^

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## Greason Wolfe

If you look in the Tutorials/How to sub-forum, there is a sticky thread near the top that is all about rivers. You might find it helpful.

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## waldronate

How big is this map? A map a few thousand miles wide is somewhat different than one a few dozen miles wide...

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## Nettle

> Just so you know, there are lakes with no outlet. Technically known as endorheic, they lose water by evaporation and seepage. They are usually briny and salty, and there are many of them, although they are usually small and found in arid areas.  Examples include the Great Salt Lake (North America) the Dead Sea (Israel), and the Caspian Sea. (Asia). If you want one of those, you should not include an outlet. A freshwater lake does need one.


That's really heplful, thank you! It is supposed to be a freshwater lake so I'll need to go back to that and make it drain to sea. The northern landmass is also really far north in the world (almost in the Arctic circle) so although it's frozen a lot of the year it does melt in the short summers. But seasons is a whole other thing for me to consider o.o




> Your art looks really neat for someone who doesn't know what she's doing! It's true that your seas have got pretty big but I love the overall look. ^^


Thank you and thank you :) this is with a lot of reworking! I started this in November last year and I've moved so much around and redrawn so many things as I've learnt new info and new features in Illustrator. You should have seen the rivers to start with - I didn't know about width profiles so I had lots of lines that were narrower than the last to give the same effect. I only recently discovered outline path as a feature which is what transferred my rivers from a single line to what they are now. And I know there's a lot of sea space but I was planning on giving it a big and rounded border so it should be ok in the end!




> How big is this map? A map a few thousand miles wide is somewhat different than one a few dozen miles wide...


That's a very valid question ^^' I don't have a fully functioning scale yet - it's definitely looking at thousand+ miles, most likely a couple of thousand of miles but I built this without thinking too much about scale so I'm going to need to really think on it. North to South was supposed to be edge of Arctic circle (so very cold) to edge of...well I'm not sure. Not as far south as the tropic. But the main landmasses are literally called Winter Edge & Summer Edge. I'll probably shrink that scale though, otherwise all the features get realllllly big o.o

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## Nettle

The lake now drains to the sea :)

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## Confutus

As it should.  :Cool:  Clearly resupplied with meltwater from those undoubtedly glacier-clad mountains to the north, keeping its water cold and fresh.

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## Mapsburgh

I think "wouldn't it be cool if..." is a totally valid way to approach creating a map.

One thing to think about is who, in your world, is drawing this map, and how much do they know about the places they're mapping? A lot of things that might seem geomorphologically implausible if we assume high accuracy can make sense as a stylized way of representing something the mapmaker doesn't know much about. For example, the roundish blob of mountains in the southwest isn't something we see on the real earth -- mountains are usually in linear ranges -- but if all the mapmaker knew was that this land had mountains in the middle of it, that's a fair way to draw it. If this is for an RPG you can even work that into the campaign -- some areas may get "clarified" once the PCs actually go there.

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## Nettle

> As it should. 8) Clearly resupplied with meltwater from those undoubtedly glacier-clad mountains to the north, keeping its water cold and fresh.


Oh they are, it's very cold up there :)




> I think "wouldn't it be cool if..." is a totally valid way to approach creating a map.
> 
> One thing to think about is who, in your world, is drawing this map, and how much do they know about the places they're mapping? A lot of things that might seem geomorphologically implausible if we assume high accuracy can make sense as a stylized way of representing something the mapmaker doesn't know much about. For example, the roundish blob of mountains in the southwest isn't something we see on the real earth -- mountains are usually in linear ranges -- but if all the mapmaker knew was that this land had mountains in the middle of it, that's a fair way to draw it. If this is for an RPG you can even work that into the campaign -- some areas may get "clarified" once the PCs actually go there.


Hi hi. Well just as long as I don't completely bypass all laws of nature ^^' It is for my DnD campaign and while that might give me a bit of leeway I want it to be as accurate as possible! Just how impossible is it for something like that to occur? Could, for example, 3 continental plates crash together to form something like this? The area is a big source of raw magic but I don't want to use magic as an excuse to just do whatever - I want to use magic as a flavour for worldbuilding but not the building blocks!

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## Rossbert

In the XKCD What If? section there was a bit that delved into the topography of Mars and how it would change as the water level rose that might be a bit interesting along with this topic.

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## Khadrim

> I think "wouldn't it be cool if..." is a totally valid way to approach creating a map.
> 
> One thing to think about is who, in your world, is drawing this map, and how much do they know about the places they're mapping? A lot of things that might seem geomorphologically implausible if we assume high accuracy can make sense as a stylized way of representing something the mapmaker doesn't know much about. For example, the roundish blob of mountains in the southwest isn't something we see on the real earth -- mountains are usually in linear ranges -- but if all the mapmaker knew was that this land had mountains in the middle of it, that's a fair way to draw it. If this is for an RPG you can even work that into the campaign -- some areas may get "clarified" once the PCs actually go there.


Wouldn't mountains the Ahaggar Mountains be a good model for the blob of mountains.

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## Quikdraw7777

That map looks awesome.

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## Nettle

I'm back on this map after working on a couple of other projects. Thoughts on how much of this is inaccurate as far as mountains go? This is going to be an area affected by magic but I want to know what obeys our rules and what would be obeying magical rules :')

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## MrBragg

Realism would depend a bit on the scale.  If this is a relatively small island, it's perfectly reasonable to have a bunch of mountains more or less centered in the middle.  If, on the other hand, it's a 3000 km wide continent, a huge mountainous plateau in the middle would need some very specific geologic conditions in order to arise naturally.

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## Bedwyr

Honestly it does a decent job of replicating the terrain characteristics of Hawaii's Big Island (at least from memory of driving around it).

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## Nettle

> Realism would depend a bit on the scale.  If this is a relatively small island, it's perfectly reasonable to have a bunch of mountains more or less centered in the middle.  If, on the other hand, it's a 3000 km wide continent, a huge mountainous plateau in the middle would need some very specific geologic conditions in order to arise naturally.


So I still need to work out my scale properly - thats a whole other learning curve - but I can say it's big. Like... 1000miles? ^^'

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## Greason Wolfe

Based on that scale, your mountains look as though they cover more area than the Himalayas. Not necessarily a bad thing, just something to consider. Artistically speaking I do like the way they look.  :Smile:

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## Kilo11

It's also worthwhile to consider the shaping of the mountains. The ones you have appear quite sharp and pointed, which is cool graphically, but also has some geological import; I think it means they are newer, and/or made of more dense rock, but I am no geologist (so I may be entirely wrong there  :Razz:  ). 

My two cents on the above map would be that if you really intend this island to be roughly 1000 miles across, then make these mountains much shorter and include more individual peaks. The reason I suggest that is that the graphic details here really make one think of a small island with big mountains in the middle (above, someone already mentioned Hawaii). But never would I remotely imagine this to be a small continent with a mountainous massif in the middle, because then the mountains would be like 30 miles tall (again, just going off of the graphics of them). I think the underlying point is just that the visual details affect our perception of what is being represented, so you don't want us to be totally misled by the map. 

Now, all of that being said, maybe you want the mountains to be unreasonably tall and generally massive, for story reasons. If that's the case, then leave this exactly as it is. But then you'll need to hit the point rather hard in the story so that it is clear that these ain't your granddaddy's mountains! 

In sum, the mountains look cool, though you might think about scale and number of them, and I am excited to see how this develops further!  :Very Happy:

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## Nettle

> Based on that scale, your mountains look as though they cover more area than the Himalayas. Not necessarily a bad thing, just something to consider. Artistically speaking I do like the way they look.


-me realising how messed my scale is- woops. I will continue to think on it! thank you, i think i've really started to find my style! i think they look so much better than the original ones :')

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