Here's a region map for exploratory play (work in progress). Explain to me what's stupid about the geography or playability or whatever.

Overall climate = cold but not too bad.

Dark grey = Mountainous
Grey = Hills
light grey = plains

Green crosses = Substantial woods

Blue = Streams, rivers, lakes

White shape up north = Starting town
White shape down south = Enemy town

I can't read a map if it hasn't got hexes. This is as true for game maps as it is for real life.

Also: I am always careful, while on foot, not to step directly on top of any hex boundary lines. Because, how would you know what hex you are in?

Yeah, players dig grids/hexes.

edit: Towns look rather far from farmlands. The southern one is off a water source. Are there roads?

What is your definition of "Mountainous" "Substantial woods".

One thing I always mention to people who draw a map of their fantasy land: figure out where the equator is, and the pole. Even if it's not on your map do know what the latitudes are. It helps to define the climate and environment of the cities and lands.  

So, specifically for your map, which only covers 20 miles of latitude, it would be nice to know what the climate and seasons are. Are these towns in the north, say where New Hampshire or the Great Lakes are? Then there will be long winters, lots of snow, colorful leaves falling from trees in October, maple trees with syrup, no gators in the lakes and rivers but they will be cold much of the year, etc. Or are they in a southern climate like Florida or California? Then there will be little snow, fewer trees dropping leaves, possibly palm trees, gators in the swamps. Also armies can march year round where they can't in the north.

Next up: Longitude. The numbers don't matter but you should know how far away the nearest coast is. More importantly: is this a high traffic area or a backwater zone? Are kings and princes arguing over this land or is it largely ignored? Is this in Connecticut or central Maine? If there is a major mountain chain nearby with one good pass then this might be a strategically important area. Or not. See what I'm saying?

Also: don't forget that rivers were the highways of history, up until recently. This makes waterfalls very important. If there are none and the river is wide and deep then big ships or boats can move up and down them. If there are some scattered about then such river navies are curtailed. Some waterfalls can be portaged around and such places are choke points. Expect a strong lord to have a castle/fort there. All this will effect trade, army movements and more.

QuoteCriticize viciously: A D&D region map I'm working on

WELL YOU CAN'T DRAW FOR SHIT

Ok more seriously, why are all the towns in the mountains? The towns want supporting farmlands, yeah? I feel like I'd put the one town at the forested foothills north of the SW lake, and the other town SE of the center lake, or if it's orcs or something, in the NE woods, at the base of the mountain.

Add more ruins, battlefields, haunted areas, alien crash sites, etc. I believe in density of cool shit - and I put something cool in every single square or hex...but even if you had 1 mile wide hexes, that's still a lot of space for something cool to be lost.

I have a 20x20 world for Tunnels & Trolls (Akalabeth) and it has a nasty long history, so even ruins have history upon history. And as I've run it many times over the years, players have run into the ruins left behind by their previous PCs from other eras.

Quote from: Spinachcat;762962Add more ruins, battlefields, haunted areas, alien crash sites, etc. I believe in density of cool shit - and I put something cool in every single square or hex...but even if you had 1 mile wide hexes, that's still a lot of space for something cool to be lost.

I have a 20x20 world for Tunnels & Trolls (Akalabeth) and it has a nasty long history, so even ruins have history upon history. And as I've run it many times over the years, players have run into the ruins left behind by their previous PCs from other eras.

I encourage you as well to add more things--farmlands, industry sites--like what do those towns do for food? income? The one on the river is probably a logging town, or does a lot of fishing. The other one seems a bit to far from water, it might function that way, but if its Middle Ages fantasy, they may want to be closer. Of course wells can make up for that (and magic.)  

You also need paths/roads, villages have to get some things from outside their own area, so they'll have commonly traveled areas.


Oh and Spinachcat? Running any T&T online?

You could also go to the Cartographers' Guild and get some tutorials to help you do something more palatable. There is tons upon tons of maps there, so you might even decide to steal one and use it for your game. There is some really astounding stuff on this website...

The two western lakes have waters flowing in, but not out. It happens, but it's rare. I'd add an outflow to both.

I'd move the northern settlement 10 miles to the east into the north crook of the  lake. It'll give it defensive protection and better access to water.

Similarly I'd slide the southern settlement around the mountain and put it on the lake between the lake and the mountain, on the lower instep of the boot shaped lake.

If those town shapes are accurate and to scale, those are actually pretty big cities. If you want a couple relatively isolated towns in a frontier region, they should be smaller.

On a personal note, I tend to think RPG maps seriously underestimate forests. I'd fill most of the area, with the exception of agricultural land around the towns, and maybe some villages/manors/etc., depending on how many smaller population centers you want (though I'd minimize those), with forest. It also gives more places to hide monsters and humanoids.  

If the towns are enemies, they need a source of conflict. A newly discovered resource somewhere between them could work.

Apparition is right about he western lakes. Looking at the watershed and catchement area I doubt a lake the size of the largest one there would exist. The nothern one could be a glacial feature with a terminal morraine or landslip or whatever forming a dam to create that lake but he large of the two looks unlikely the most likely outcome if there is no outflow would be that the southern half woudl be a marsh rather than a lake per say this woudl effect the type/variety of forest round the lake.

As it stands you have a very wet location and that should reflect in the setting elsewhere.

 I don't think the towns are too big. Starting town is about 1 mile long and 1/4 of a mile wide. Baddie town is smaller still.

There locations are unusual. Typically towns form as a result of trade, defense, transportation etc ... Defensive towns in this location would be on the top of those hills away from the damp river valleys (as you see in say Tuscany) with good sight lines and no way an enemy could get above them. Trade towns would likely form along the northern and southern main rivers which look better drained than the west and are wider with some degree of navigability. As people have already noted you may get towns in the river valleys acting as agricultural centres but my guess would be this region is prone to flooding and so they might be sited futher up slope.
Starter town is in a particularly poor location for defense, agriculture or trade and its only advantage is a fresh spring and possibly being on a road if one winds through the hills heading to baddie town.

The forest around Starter town would have been cleared to provide fuel and building supplies for starter town likewise the forest to the eastern edge of Marsh lake in the SW. It is very likely that the forest in the central NW to SE valley would have been cleared for farm land and its where most of your people would live. Prone as the area would be to flooding I am not sure a forest would have developed in the valleys so those areas may well end up being water meadow rather than woodland. It's hard to know without more detail on climate and geology.

The topolgy looks very "lumpy" and broken terrain like that would seem to be indicative of a hard rock like granite being exposed so you need to make sure your descriptions of the area match the greography much lilke with the climate. This affects the likelihood of caves or caverns etc.

Lastly from a polical perspective its hard to see how starter town and baddie town would stay enemies for very long as they are about 12 miles or 3 hours walk apart along what would be an easy road following the contours of the hills. Again your setting needs to include reference to this.

I'll answer some questions and issues and post a revised map based on comments. You can then viciously criticize that.

QuoteYeah, players dig grids/hexes.

I appreciate the value of hexes, but I feel that this region is small enough that they aren't crucial.

QuoteWhat is your definition of "Mountainous" "Substantial woods".

I guess "mountainous" on this map means "high and difficult enough to make horses impossible and climbing a non-trivial choice". "Substantial woods" is supposed to make a distinction from everywhere else where trees are too scattered to matter on a travel scale.

QuoteAre these towns in the north, say where New Hampshire or the Great Lakes are? Then there will be long winters, lots of snow, colorful leaves falling from trees in October, maple trees with syrup, no gators in the lakes and rivers but they will be cold much of the year, etc.

Yes, that's the right image, though I do want to have more atypical geography too, like boiling lakes and such.

QuoteMore importantly: is this a high traffic area or a backwater zone? Are kings and princes arguing over this land or is it largely ignored?

Backwater zone, barely explored, largely ignored at the moment, although the two towns are the northernmost settlements of two factions who are rivals in reclaiming lands that were once too bizarre for expansion.

QuoteAdd more ruins, battlefields, haunted areas, alien crash sites, etc. I believe in density of cool shit - and I put something cool in every single square or hex...but even if you had 1 mile wide hexes, that's still a lot of space for something cool to be lost.

Don't worry, I'll put a ton of stuff in later, on a secret non-player map, but I need to get the basics down first. I guess I'll put one known adventure site on it now for discussion.

Quotelike what do those towns do for food? income?

The western one is a former re-conquest base, turning into an exporter of strange luxury substances. I've added farms to their area for discussion. The eastern one is a fortress mostly fed through herding and underground flora/fungi.

QuoteOn a personal note, I tend to think RPG maps seriously underestimate forests. I'd fill most of the area, with the exception of agricultural land around the towns, and maybe some villages/manors/etc., depending on how many smaller population centers you want (though I'd minimize those), with forest. It also gives more places to hide monsters and humanoids.

Trouble is I want snowy plains and barren hills for adventuring too. How do I make it realistic?

QuoteIf the towns are enemies, they need a source of conflict.

They are rival cultures who both want whatever there is to find in the barely-explored region.

Anyway, here's a revised version that incorporates some of the comments. Let me know what still needs work.

Yellow stripes = farmland
Red = road
Weird pink thing = Known mega-dungeon

I believe you have an excellent start. The terrain is varied, and appears natural.

However, I would criticize that you're focusing perhaps too much on rough distances by miles, instead of what probably is more applicable: days along a road. Assuming that you used a standard number of days between settlements by foot, you can cut it by 50% to account for travel by horse or by 25% to account for travel by wagon.

This allows you a greater level of flexibility whenever you wish to figure out how long it takes to move along the wilderness, while engendering the idea that days of travel (and accounting for food and supplies by characters) is a better way of looking at the world around them.

Frankly (and this comes from my player's voice) that I vastly prefer days of travel rather than mileage when it comes to suspension of disbelief.

Take my advice as you will.

Quote from: ZWEIHÄNDER;763180Assuming that you used a standard number of days between settlements by foot, you can cut it by 50% to account for travel by horse or by 25% to account for travel by wagon.

It's a common gamer error to assume that horse or wagon travel is a great deal faster than foot traffic.  Neither is the case.  What they do is make the riders a good bit less tired, but horse travel -- with the exception of post riders -- is just marginally faster.  Wagon travel, in the days of pitted, unmetalled roads and with periodic breakdowns of wheel or axle, was a good bit slower.

Okay, the demographer's comments ...

* Towns are built on watercourses, each and every freaking time.  They don't have to be navigable -- although any town of any size is built on navigable waterways -- but they do have to provide enough drinking water to survive.  An adult human needs at least two quarts a day to survive, and your average low-tech town needs ten times that much per person for industrial uses: forging, fulling, milling, pottery, the like.  There is no way whatsoever that a town would be built up a mountain slope if there was a perfectly good river a half-mile away.

* Apparition is right about forests: low-tech is heavily, heavily forested, unless you've got a heavily populated area ... which doesn't describe these two towns in the back of beyond.  New England, a hundred years after the Pilgrims landed, was still 80% forested.

* How many people are we talking about in these towns?  A thousand?  Five thousand?  In basic terms, a town of a thousand people will consume twenty-five bushels of grain, around 800 quarts of wine, tea or beer, about thirty cattle, and about five hundred smaller livestock ... DAILY.  The amount of farmland needed to produce that food, for a thousand people, is about five square miles, which would make your yellow crosshatched area too small by tenfold or so.  The amount of cropland needed for five thousand is about the size of your entire map.

* "Trouble is I want snowy plains and barren hills for adventuring too. How do I make it realistic?"  With this setup?  Not easily.  It's possible to have A barren hill ... the top thousand feet of Mt. Monadnock in New Hampshire (well under nominal tree line) is bare because about 200 years ago, local farmers believed that wolves were denning there, and so they got together and set fire to the whole freaking mountain.  It burned for weeks, enough to scorch away the topsoil.  But otherwise you get barren hills by being above treeline in a forested area like this, and that means very far north, and that means agriculture becomes problematic.

* Speaking of your mountains ... they're crazily skewed for your scale.  You've got mountains routinely going from flatland to summit to flatland in only three miles, which is ridiculous if you're looking for mountains to be impassible by most traffic.  That calls for a 4-5,000 feet summit, and in the space of as little as flat-to-summit in a half-mile, that's geologically absurd.  Your southern town, for instance, would have to be built on something like a 30 degree slope, which no one does except under extreme population pressure.

* Lastly, mountain lakes without outlets are rare; they pretty much need to be caldera lakes, and you wouldn't get two side-by-side, ever.