How to cheat at map creation

[Gareth3]

I'm terrible at drawing realistic coastlines for fantasy worlds , and figuring out the climate and terrain that comes from the map. So I've found a way to cheat. Have a look at this picture. Do you recognise it? If so, would you find it distracting if this was a setting for a medieval conworld?

[sangi39]

Possibly annoyingly for you, but yes

More: show

It's New Zealand's South Island flipped over horizontally.

As for the second part of your question, I probably wouldn't find it all that distracting

[Gareth3]

That's right. It's extremely familiar to me, because I live there, but I thought people from other countries might not recognise it. The flip isn't arbitrary, it makes the climate match a Northern Hemisphere pattern. Cold in the North, warm in the South, but still wet in the West and dry in the East. The appeal of this is that I can easily look up the geography, climate, and even the vegetation of any part of an island the size of Iowa. Human geography will be completely different, of course. I'm glad it wouldn't distract you too much.

[Salmoneus]

Yeah, I recognise it. And yes, I'd find it infuriatingly distracting. I'd constantly be going "what's going on? So this is post-apocalyptic, then? Why have the climates flipped?" and so forth.

And I don't get it: if you flip the north-south orientation, you can't just look up the RL climate, ecology etc, because it will all have changed. Unless you mean it's flipped but moved to the opposite latitude in the opposite hemisphere... in which case why flip it? Who said stories have to take place in the northern hemisphere? [Since on a non-earth world, that basically just means "I need to have cold stuff at the top of the map", since in every other regard 'northern hemisphere' is meaningless on another planet - it's not a fact about the geography, just a fact about the map. So don't say "to make it match a northern hemisphere pattern", just say "because I wanted the cold areas to be visually at the top of the screen", because that's what the former means in real terms]


EDIT: p.s. for me it's that old shield volcano that gives it away.

[Gareth3]

I just prefer "cold up North" for a fantasy setting, so I flipped it and put it in the same latitude in the Northern hemisphere. It's interesting you mention the shield volcano. I could get rid of it, or just raise the sea level so it's an island rather than a peninsula.

[StrangerCoug]

I personally thought it was a Photoshopped version of Italy so it looks more like a fat pegleg than a boot.

[Xhin]

Not a bad strategy

[Zaarin]

Not a bad strategy

Just putting mountains and hills on it makes it automatically unrecognizable. :p

[Gareth3]

You have to wonder about that North coast.

[Nortaneous]

>straight lines

anyway my conworld is composed entirely of blown-up indonesian islands, though i merged one of them with england

[Buran]

Guess what this is.


The continent is from this. The mountains are from this.

[Gareth3]

No, I didn't recognise that. What does the yellow area represent on the original map?

[Hydroeccentricity]

The map of South Island is very obviously South Island. Nobody's going to be fooled just because you flipped it. But I guess that's fine if you don't mind that. You could avoid the problem by pasting together pieces of multiple islands to make a new one. Someone did that once with satellite photos and it looked amazing.

[WeepingElf]

No, I didn't recognise that. What does the yellow area represent on the original map?

The catchment area of Nelson River, obviously.

[finlay]

I didn't recognize it. I think the north island has a more distinctive shape, anyway. But I agree that you should maybe distort it a bit or edit out the volcano. Make it your own thing. Also, if you put it next to something completely different it will be less obvious that it comes from a map of New Zealand.

[Buran]

Drainage basins provide nice, natural shapes for continents. Flip, distort, and merge them, and you can end up with some pretty good looking coastlines which are hard to recognise. More generally, there are a lot of natural shapes out there besides continents and islands; you can draw upon drainage basins, rivers, mountain ranges and anything else you can think of.

[Akubra]

Indeed, that's what I did for continents and island in my own conworld. Sometimes I also take photographs of patterns, like peeling paint. They're unbeatable if you want islands à la Sulawesi!

[Abi]

I've always had the idea of throwing a bunch of blankets on a bed, then taking a picture from above. Instant topography.

[clawgrip]

[Akubra]

Now that's what I mean! Great job, clawgrip!

[Torco]

if you're gonna copy a real island, copy one people don't know... for example, chiloé or some island russia, china and japan are fighting over?

[CatDoom]

Paleogeographic maps (i.e. maps of the world or a region during previous eras of geologic time) can be good resources too; this site has some really nice-looking ones.

[din]

For my con-country, I raised the seabed in one area so that the height differences under water became hills and mountains. It's not too easy to find free, high quality height maps of the ocean, though, so I still drew everything by hand based on the maps I had.

[su_liam]

If you clipped off Christchurch, it'd go a long way toward obfuscating the geography for most people.

Cut and paste topography is hard but rewarding.

[Gareth3]

Thanks for the feedback, there are some good ideas there.