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Just realized my mountain ranges looked fake because I was drawing them all the same.
I was working on a map for my book and the peaks felt like copy-pasted triangles, so I tried looking at real satellite images of the Andes for an hour. I started drawing one big central spine with smaller, broken ranges branching off at angles, and suddenly the whole continent had weight and history. Does anyone else use real geology pictures to fix their fantasy geography?
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emma5222mo ago
My friend's D&D map looked like a kid's drawing until he traced over a real river delta from Google Earth. The way the water split into a hundred little streams made the whole swamp region feel alive.
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wade_hall1mo ago
Try tracing a city's sewer map next.
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nathan8512mo ago
That thing about the central spine and the broken branches is the whole key. It's not just copying shapes, it's stealing the logic. Those broken ranges tell you where the ground gave up first. It makes the map feel cracked instead of drawn. @emma522's friend got that with the river delta too, the land is fighting the water and losing. You start seeing the story in the dirt, and that's what readers walk through.
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