Quote from: Ravenswing;763243Okay, the demographer's comments ...

This post is very interesting and informative, but it also ties my hands a lot and I'm not sure how best to proceed.

Quote from: Ravenswing;763243* 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.

Well I'm trying to go for this old fantasy trope:
http://media-cache-ec0.pinimg.com/736x/3a/70/d3/3a70d3c368e0ec30fa41277bb0a52786.jpg

So if I took the southern river away and hand-waved underground water sources it would be believable?

Quote from: Ravenswing;763243* 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.

So where should I increase the forest cover while still maintaining a few plains and rocky hills?

Quote from: Ravenswing;763243* 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.

So should I put most of the farmland off the western edge of the map or something?

Quote from: Ravenswing;763243* 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.

Shit, this is hard. Well I'm learning a lot of stuff I did want to know at least.

What if I just scale the mountains down to substantial hills?

Quote from: Shipyard Locked;763282So if I took the southern river away and hand-waved underground water sources it would be believable?

No.

This is another thing a lot of gamers get wrong.  They might say "Oh, cool, the town can have an underground river!" but they miss an important factor: people are basically lazy.  If I was the head of the surveying team, and I was given two choices for where to start the town, that pain-in-the-neck upslope location where we'd have to dig for underground water, rig expensive wells, and pay for extensive maintenance of any wells or ducts; or that perfectly nice spot right by that there above-ground river a half-mile away, we build on the river 99 times out of 100.  (That 100th chance is that we're all high from eating the forest mushrooms.)  

QuoteSo where should I increase the forest cover while still maintaining a few plains and rocky hills?

Pretty much everywhere.  Do note that plains (other than river flood plains) in forested northern country don't just appear for no reason, because give it forty years and they go back to being forests.  They have to be cleared, intentionally, and something has to keep them cleared.

There's an abandoned farm set in the woods near my family home.  According to stuff we found by the house, it was abandoned around 1965.  The 10-acre small farm was a perfectly nice grassy meadow in 1975, birch trees were proliferating by the mid-80s, and when last I walked there, ten years ago, the coverage was far advanced, and the pines were starting to come in.  Twenty years from now you'd have to look sharp to tell a farm was ever there at all.

QuoteSo should I put most of the farmland off the western edge of the map or something?

You could.  (Don't forget the other town's farmland, too.)  For my money, I would.  If the towns are hostile to one another, I'd want to cultivate land that was easier to defend against the other guys.

QuoteWhat if I just scale the mountains down to substantial hills?

I would, in your shoes.  By an interesting coincidence, I live at the very northern tip of a traprock range stretching from northern Massachusetts straight down through to Long Island Sound.  That certainly makes travel tougher ... Mountain Road, over Mt. Tom in Easthampton (where I lived for a few years) is about at that aforementioned 30 degree slope and goes for about a mile up and over the ridge, and I wince to think of what poor horses had to go through to drag a wagon up that sucker, but the summit of Mt Tom is only 1100 feet:



Something like that would suit, I think.

Quote from: Shipyard Locked;763282Well I'm trying to go for this old fantasy trope:
http://media-cache-ec0.pinimg.com/736x/3a/70/d3/3a70d3c368e0ec30fa41277bb0a52786.jpg

So if I took the southern river away and hand-waved underground water sources it would be believable?

Maybe if it's a Dwarven city. Or a temple complex built and abandoned, now inhabited by something inimical to the other city.

QuoteSo where should I increase the forest cover while still maintaining a few plains and rocky hills?

Everywhere that isn't farmland/orchard/bare rock. If you prefer plains, then the only forests should be along the river banks. If you prefer forest, then the only "plains" would be scattered meadows.

QuoteSo should I put most of the farmland off the western edge of the map or something?

It depends on how big you want your town to be. You might even want to consider enlarging the scale of the map, since that would give you more space for things like farmland, while also allowing for longer transit times for PC parties. If everything on the map is within 2 days walk, it would be really easy to wander off the map. Also bear in mind, since your town is on a lake, with a fairly large lake just downstream, fishing can reduce the amount of land you need for agriculture, especially pasture land for food animals.

QuoteWhat if I just scale the mountains down to substantial hills?

That would work, but so would something mesa like. So rather than rounded or peaked mountains, picture steep sides/cliffs with flat tops. It would put a premium on climbing skills, and you could put sites/lairs on top of the mesas. It would certainly make for an interesting looking setting.


A comment on where you have the towns. While they are both on watercourses now, they are also about as far upstream as you can get. I'd add an inflowing stream/river to the lake the western town is on that extends off the map to the west, since the little stream entering it right now wouldn't have enough flow to create those lakes.

I think the enemy town needs to be somewhere where it is further downstream so it is getting a larger volume of water flowing by for it to use. Unless you go with a dwarven citadel, or something abandoned that is now inhabited by something inimical, even it it's a tribe of orcs or the like. In which case building it into the side of a mesa, perhaps with mazy tunnels extending up to the mesatop, could be rationalized.

At the moment your hills look something like this

Nothing wrong with that but it will mean limestone karst topology and some subsequent changes

Quote from: Ravenswing;763313No.

This is another thing a lot of gamers get wrong.  They might say "Oh, cool, the town can have an underground river!" but they miss an important factor: people are basically lazy.  If I was the head of the surveying team, and I was given two choices for where to start the town, that pain-in-the-neck upslope location where we'd have to dig for underground water, rig expensive wells, and pay for extensive maintenance of any wells or ducts; or that perfectly nice spot right by that there above-ground river a half-mile away, we build on the river 99 times out of 100.  (That 100th chance is that we're all high from eating the forest mushrooms.).

Ravenswing, you speak with authority, but I'm not sure you correct. Most of your examples are New World, and therefore problematic. People were building for convenience, not safety.

Consider Urbino in Italy. Dates back to Rome, significant Renaissance intellectual center. Spread across two mountaintops and the valley between. No sign of a watercourse.

I believe San Gimignano, the stereotypical Italian hill town, is similar.

To speak to the troped picture the OP posted, there are plenty of castles in England that rely on wells (or artifical lakes) for water sources, although I don't recall any of those *also* having large towns attached.

It is missing a starport.

Quote from: Shipyard Locked;762928Here'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

Some thoughts.

For a baser start looks ok.

The map draws some interesting questions and guesses.

There are towns up against the mountains. Defensive? Mining?
Terrace farming would be the way to go. See the Inca and other south American mountain cultures for some ideas. Possibly some European ones too.

Since the region is cold you will see alot less, to none of the reptillian races. No kobolds, Lizard men, trogs, etc, and possibly not many amphibians either.

Giant freshwater fish like the pike may be more common on those lakes.

The one lake at the bottom has a river going in but not out. The shape suggests its either spilling into the land south as a cold swamp. Like a muskeg bog. If so the place would sport alot of carnivorous plants.
If it is not filtering into swamp then the water should be going... somewhere.
That could be a mystery to perk adventurers interest. Such as a drain leading to subterrene lands.

Quote from: Naburimannu;763370Ravenswing, you speak with authority, but I'm not sure you correct. Most of your examples are New World, and therefore problematic. People were building for convenience, not safety.

Consider Urbino in Italy. Dates back to Rome, significant Renaissance intellectual center. Spread across two mountaintops and the valley between. No sign of a watercourse.

Since I gave no examples of towns, New World or otherwise, I don't know what you mean.  Certainly safety mattered a lot in the New World frontier, and stockades -- or stockaded blockhouses to where settlers could retreat -- were important constructions everywhere wood was available.

Italy -- and indeed much of southern Europe -- makes for a singularly poor example.  Urbino wasn't founded on hills because of defense -- in the days of the Empire, defense against whom, exactly?  It was founded there because Roman Italy was one of the most densely populated places on earth, and people just plain ran out of room to build except in the hills.  They still need water and cropland, and that presents formidable challenges that you don't undergo unless you absolutely have no other options.

That isn't the case with this map.  There's a perfectly good river just downslope, and a perfectly good (and likely fertile) valley around it.  This is obviously not a densely settled area where population pressure forces people into the hills; anything but.

Quote from: Naburimannu;763370To speak to the troped picture the OP posted, there are plenty of castles in England that rely on wells (or artifical lakes) for water sources, although I don't recall any of those *also* having large towns attached.

Because they weren't.  Castles need water for a couple hundred people, and that only for relatively short periods.  (Peacetime garrisons were usually a great deal smaller.)  They also need no water for the industrial purposes a town needs, since castles don't produce goods.  Wells or cisterns can handle that.

Ok, here's the latest version and my thoughts.

I'm officially declaring the topography to be much lower, no longer mountains but challenging hills. I have fused a few of the highest hills. Let me know if that works.

I've moved the towns, expanded the farmed areas and increased the forest cover. I haven't totally settled on the size of the towns, but I don't really want the farmlands to take up a realistic amount of space. I like the idea of a small region for exploring on foot, because I plan to stuff it with adventure sites that will expand the exploration space vertically (down and up). I'll settle for verisimilitude, not full blown reality.

I am open to having the exact positioning of the farms critiqued.

I'm also going to keep some meadows on this map because dammit, I want them and I will come up with any amount of bullshit necessary to justify them: large grazing animals, supernatural soil conditions, unknown tree parasite fungi, whatever.

I am still open to having the extent and positioning of the forest cover critiqued as long as it leaves room for one or two sizable meadows and/or barren hills.

Let me know what you think and in a while I'll start placing more known and unknown locations.

No particular objections on the revamp.  That farmland can easily extend a good bit offmap.  The siting's also not a problem; while farmland needs a great deal of water, an area this heavily forested would have decent rainfall.

The only remaining question: how big are these towns?  Again, if they're a thousand people apiece, there'd be a respectable number of businesses, maybe two churches, a militia captain who probably has a dozen professional soldiers under his or her command.  Businesses would be heavily skewed towards whatever large-scale trade good the towns produce: say quarrying for the western town, logging for the eastern town.

Quote from: Shipyard Locked;763658Ok, here's the latest version and my thoughts.

I'm officially declaring the topography to be much lower, no longer mountains but challenging hills. I have fused a few of the highest hills. Let me know if that works.

I've moved the towns, expanded the farmed areas and increased the forest cover. I haven't totally settled on the size of the towns, but I don't really want the farmlands to take up a realistic amount of space. I like the idea of a small region for exploring on foot, because I plan to stuff it with adventure sites that will expand the exploration space vertically (down and up). I'll settle for verisimilitude, not full blown reality.

I am open to having the exact positioning of the farms critiqued.

I'm also going to keep some meadows on this map because dammit, I want them and I will come up with any amount of bullshit necessary to justify them: large grazing animals, supernatural soil conditions, unknown tree parasite fungi, whatever.

I am still open to having the extent and positioning of the forest cover critiqued as long as it leaves room for one or two sizable meadows and/or barren hills.

Let me know what you think and in a while I'll start placing more known and unknown locations.

The towns look fine.

I'd still move the leftmost stream/river entering the lake the good town is on so it comes in to the map from off the map in order to justify a larger river volume than you would get with three very short streams.

I suspect what I would do is fill most of the lowlands with woods, with some small open spaces/meadows, and put the larger meadows on the uplands where you have the lower hills, with the exception of the riversides themselves.

Some or all of your taller hills could be rocky outcroppings. But i would definitely make at least a couple of them flat-topped just because you can put interesting things on top of them.

On the whole though, other than changing the river course, nothing I've said is anything other than how I would do it, so feel free to ignore it. What you have looks like it would work fine.

If you want to make a cool looking map, you could replace the color shapes with some nice symbols that are available for free here.