First, I'm not going to be posting any climate maps or anything similar, because honestly I started out pretty strong and then just fucking gave up.
January surface winds and pressure. It's probably wrong. Don't tell me if it is, because I don't give a crap
Basically, I got through portions of this guide on mapping climates and when I got to a particular point, I decided I had enough information to just wing it. Part of that was the realization that there are good parallels that can be drawn with continent placement on Earth - for example, the northeastern most continent is about the same location as Europe, so it's probably not too far off to map climates on the eastern coast to Europe at the same latitudes. The size of the main continent (which, by the way, is about 60% of the land mass of the planet), the odd shape of the landmasses and the lack of significant land masses in the upper latitudes of the southern hemisphere would seem to throw a lot of complication in to the mix (from what I can gather there would be a continuous band of high pressure over the southern oceans year round). I don't have the patience to try to figure out detailed climate for every region in the the whole world.
In the end, with some creative airbrushing and a few extra gradient layers I whipped up, this is what I wound up with:
I know it doesn't look much different than the last one, but there's shading there trust me.
What I learned from the whole process is that while it's nice to have a good overall feel for how climate works, unless you have the patience and inclination (I don't) there's little reason to put a lot of effort into trying to figure it out. That probably will rub a lot of world building types the wrong way, but honestly I'm going to be zeroing in on one region and forgetting about most of the rest of it for quite some time.
Right about there...
So, aside from the pretty much standard advice on desert placement, some rough idea of ocean temperatures and maybe surface pressure, I'd say my best advice on gauging climate is to take a look at similar locations on Earth, make some educated guesses, and then make the rest of it up. Maybe after a while, if I can justify the expense, I'll get something like Fractal Terrains and try to have it automatically generate rainfall and climate or whatever. But nobody should hold their breath.
This really should be me motto for anything I do gaming-wise
I did come up with an interesting technique for the pressure gradients in the first map, driven by my near pathological aversion to hand drawing anything. I was able to adapt this tutorial to generate a layer with a bunch of contour lines, then select the ones I liked and cut and paste them. In the end, they look hand drawn - just not what they would look like if they were hand drawn by me (that red arrow in the image above? Took me four tries before it looked anything like an arrow - I'm a writer, not a drawer).
When I first started mucking around with creating a world map for the embryonic setting I have in my head, I had a pretty good idea of what tools were out there (namely GIMP and Wilbur) and what they were capable of. Before I even had an inkling of what the map or the world itself was going to look like, I also knew I wanted to use this general process:
Use a natural, as opposed to hand-drawn or generated, shape for the ocean and landmasses of the world. I had entertained the idea of using maps of Mars and projections of what the early Earth looked like. It just so happened that a more complete radar map of Titan's north pole came across one of my news feeds, so I grabbed that.
Generate the height map randomly, somehow.
Use Wilbur to create the rivers, because along with drawing coastline details I don't like drawing rivers.
Other than that, I had little to no inkling about how to do any of it. What I didn't realize is exactly how exacting that process would be.
Luckily I was able to find a number of great tutorials on Cartographer's Guild, namely Arsheesh's Eriond tutorial or RobA's Regional Map tutorial, which introduced me to a lot of basic concepts such as the "three layer sandwich", generating noise, randomizing coastlines, using gradients, etc.
Unfortunately, I wound up grinding to a standstill when it came to the height map. I had to do a lot of tweaking and fixing things when following Arsheesh's tutorial. Eventually I settled into a pattern of airbrush or blend a region (particularly around the mountains); save the grayscale map; load into Wilbur to see what was working and what wasn't; tweak again in GIMP; wash, rinse, repeat. Part of the pain was self-inflicted. I had used +Keith J Davies' mountain tutorial to generate mountains on an early prototype of the map - before I had discovered Arsheesh's tutorial and attempted to bring Wilbur into the mix. The geology of that prototype stuck in my head, particularly a ridge of latitudinal mountains that bisected the central continent. I started to develop ideas about climate, civilizations, cultures, you name it from that map, and tried to carry forward those mountains into every later iteration of the map.
Luckily, eventually I was able to get everything sorted out, resulting in the map you see above. At some point I might try to codify what I did to get it to this point, provided that it's even reproducible.
Next up, I'll go over some of the resources I'm using to take a really rough stab at climate (which I'm still working on) and eventually start outlining some of the inhabitants of this world (and quite possibly a name!).
For the past few weeks, I've been experimenting and tweaking around with generating maps using GIMP and Wilbur. I've looked at a number of tutorials on Cartographer's Guild, particularly RobA's tutorials and Arsheesh's Eriond tutorial (as well as +Keith J Davies' methods for creating mountains). I've learned quite a bit in the process.
I have become quite fond of using "found items" for coastlines. In my case I used a radar map of Titan's north pole, reversing the shapes of the lakes to become the land. It underwent some heavy processing to get to the final form. Using a variety of methods, starting from the regional maps tutorial and transitioning through various techniques used in the Eriond tutorial I was able to go from this:
To this:
To this:
And, finally, this:
The great thing about this method is that it can used with all kinds of naturally occurring shapes. Shadows on a wall. Stucco patterns. Puddles of water on concrete. Just snap a picture and start doing some editing on it and the result will likely be a pretty convincing, randomized but not too much so, coastline.
Next up, I'll talk about the pain I went through creating heightmaps in GIMP to be used in Wilbur, and some lessons I learned in the process.
Aside from getting a Tribe 8 game going, I have two other things I want to expand on. The first is the setting that I started writing for the #ADX anthology. I had a lot of stuff I chopped out to try to get it down to a reasonable word count, but I'm simply not sure what I want to do with it - just put it out there for my own satisfaction, try to publish it, Kickstart it, I'm completely not sure.
The second was my Dixton setting. It start out as a kind of Thief/Dishonored homage, but it's settled in my brain worms a bit, and I feel that I want to to shift slightly in theme and tone. Watching shows like Revolution and Defiance have kind of inspired me toward an even more Civil War-era, pseudo pre-Antebellum Southern feel.
That means going more into themes of class division and privilege. I don't want it to be a social commentary or anything like that, but I've never really dealt with this kind of thing in any depth. I definitely don't want to fall into any traps or cliched stereotypes...I want to handle the problematic subject matter well. I'm assuming that's going to mean a bit of primary source research, particularly the history of slavery in the British Empire because that is a closer analog to the dominant society in the setting. I'm definitely open to suggestions as to where to start.
The setting currently has one non-human race, the Sia, who are native to the continent where the setting is focused. They were enslaved and then set free. I think I want to move their magic toward something more animistic and visceral, involving blood and pain, but not fall into a, "It's just like voodoo or Santeria" trap. Things like The Heart from Dishonored would fit right in.
The emphasis will still be on the characters being part of the seedy underworld, as thieves and assassins and fences and crime lords. But there's going to be some social upheaval in the works. I want Dixton to be a powderkeg, and I think the PCs should be the fuse.
