all the tips I found for drawing a fantasy map are like :) “here’s a strategy to draw the land masses! here’s how to plot islands!” :) and that’s wonderful and I love them all but ??? how? do y'all decide where to put cities/mountains/forests/towns I have my map and my land but I’m throwing darts to decide where the Main Citadel where the Action Takes Place is
okay so i know i said most of this in the replies but it might be easier to actually reblog and say stuff instead lmao
Cities - go near water! freshwater lakes and rivers (rivers especially) are the best places for cities because A) source of water and B) travel and trade is much easier cus you can put your boats like right there. Basically ever relevant city ever was built on a lake or a river.
for rivers in general - because gravity, rivers run from mountains (forming from melting snow and ice (this is why they get fat in spring–more stuff melting)) to lakes/ocean where they can empty out (and even lakes will have rivers leading out that eventually get to the ocean), which can help when mapping out where those start and end. rivers are also much thinner and faster in steeper elevations and very slow and wide when the land is flat
mountains - i like to think of what the tectonic plates look like because that’s what makes mountains! mountains are also never standalone they’re always in mountain ranges (archipelagos are really just underwater mountain ranges babey). a cool trick I like to do is occasionally separate mountain ranges across continents, because over time the tectonic plates shifted and literally split the range in half. These mountains are really old tho so they’ve eroded and therefore it makes them smaller and rounder (like the appalachians) as opposed to relatively young mountain ranges like the rocky mountains which have taller and sharper peaks
Another mountain trick: if your mountains run along the ocean, the ocean side of the mountains will get a LOT of rain while the other side will be very dry–almost desert-like, in fact. think of temperate rainforests in British Columbia vs the drier conditions in the canadian prairies
forests - depends on how warm the area might be. coniferous forests are found further north (before you hit the tree line, and then it’s only tundra onwards) but as you head south you get leafier trees, and the leaves tend to get larger too
If you think about general elevation too, you’ll have places that might be swampy (wet + lower). if your world has an ice age like we did, then glaciers may have carved the land, leaving piles of soil in the south that was left when the ice receded and places where the bedrock has been bared north of that (like the Canadian Shield in Canada–the reason we see that is because of the glaciers)
You might also have a land that’s dotted in a shitton of freshwater lakes as well because the meltwater filled the holes that the glaciers scraped out (this is why canada has so many goddamn lakes)
and if the ice age was more recent than it was in our world, then you might not even have the forest re-growth and it could be a lot of open plains
tl;dr i like to think of major climate events that might have also shaped the land on top of some basic rules
The Artifexian has an entire series on building your world from literally the stars down and then the ground up.
All my worldbuilding videos
Though, for fantasy, you can make the world operate on entirely different principles:
With that done, the actual topic of city placement can be covered by videos like this:
Or
Once you have your places, if you want help naming them in realistic ways, this video can help:
This one is on architecture, which is definitely a subset of cities:
But for a more relevant practical guide on making settlements realistic:
Here’s a quick guide for making demographics:
holy shit?
Courtesy of https://acoup.blog/2019/07/12/collections-the-lonely-city-part-i-the-ideal-city/ I bring you a summary of the agricultural boundaries around your average city. The biggest driver here is transportation costs-so roads and especially rivers and ocean ports distort the map. While it might not make sense to travel 100 miles by donkey-cart to bring your apples to market, putting them on a ship and taking them across 100 miles of sea makes perfect sense. -Closest in of all, sometimes inside the walls, sometimes right outside them, you’ve gotta have your horticulture and Dairy zones. Vegetable gardens, pen-fed animals, things that spoil quickly and need a lot of work to get the best results from. Milk goes off quickly, unless you start making cheese right away, so dairy maids need to collect from relatively dense farms that are sometimes inside city walls. This land is so close to market that there’s no reason to not wring every scrap out of it. That means you get irrigation, terracing, and lots and lots of day-labor when you need weeding, harvesting or other activities. The manure of the city and the animals brought into it can also be used as fertilizer. Classical high-inputs, high-outputs style of farming, that’s what you’re looking at. -Forestry is the next ring out. “Forestry?” I hear you cry. “What kind of fresh nonsense is this?” Well don’t think of this as your typical stand of pines for construction material-this is forestry for firewood, and that means it’s highly managed and often squeezed into spaces between other land uses. Obviously, a city of dwarfs with a coal mine, or a city with magical steam-heating aren’t going to need as much wood, so this can vary in size depending on the climate and the supply needed. Trees in this ring are generally cut intentionally to produce long, thin branches, and cut on a cycle so that they are sustainably harvested. Wood is cheap, but it’s also heavy so transportation costs are high, and it’s thus ideal to keep them low with a constant local supply. -Grain agriculture dominates the next zone out-well, grains, pulses, wine grapes, olives, whatever your dominant crops are. Obviously, at this layer, we have varrying densities of production depending on the exact productivity of the land, which can be mixed with the 4th zone if the productivity of the land is low enough. The dominant organizational structure out here is the village, each of which will have a cluster of houses and fields worked either communally or by individual families radiating outwards in some fashion. This is a HUGE area-a city of 500,000 people would need an area of land equal to the state of Massachusetts. -The final zone is that of ranchers, and pastoralist herders. Meat on the hoof travels *very* well, so it can be farmed at huge distances from the cities and then driven by whatever your equivalent of cowboys are to market. Or maybe your dominant animal is geese or pigs, but anything with legs can just walk itself to slaughterhouses. Grazing lands need to be big because you need both lowland and upland grazing to provide abundant pasture in all seasons. This is a FREQUENT cause for strife, because what looks like an empty field to you, a farmer, is a rancher’s wintering grounds and he will slit your throat if you bring a plow near it. However, agriculture tends to push less-dense pastoralists out in the long term-Unless You Are the Mongols.
