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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

(http://i.imgur.com/1uLXlbP.png)

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 (http://www.cartographersguild.com/content/) 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

(http://i.imgur.com/xVjnIb7.png)

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.

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 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metacomet_Ridge) stretching from northern Massachusetts straight down through to Long Island Sound.  That certainly makes travel tougher ... Mountain Road, over Mt. Tom (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Tom_%28Massachusetts%29) 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:

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:FarrerThomasCharlesMountTom1865.jpg)

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 (http://www.chinatravelpage.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/Lijiang-River.jpg)

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.

(http://i.imgur.com/E3udM24.png)

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 (http://www.deviantart.com/morelikethis/artists/372336459?view_mode=2#/art/Sketchy-Cartography-Brushes-198264358?_sid=29bb7ac1).