Common -and unforgivable- mistakes to avoid when drawing a map? [closed]

Question

I'm about to begin drawing a map for my fantasy world. Although I did draw a few maps in the past, I've never paid too much attention to making them realistic. This time around, I'd like to be able to make a map that makes sense in a real world scenario (although it's a fantasy world with magic, I don't like the "it's magic!" shortcut to explain why things are the way they are).

I've started doing my own research, so I do have a very basic understanding of map-making. But since you see this kind of stuff daily, here's my question: what are the most important things to get right when making a realistic map? what are the most common mistakes you usually encounter?

Thank you for your help

Answer 1

Silly Rivers

A big pet peeve is rivers that start and end out of nowhere. Like from one mountain range to another.

In the real world, rivers start high up and join a bigger lower-down water source.

Inexplicable Boundaries

Maps of "the known" world which have water on three sides and then a land border at the bottom. Why does the "known" world end here and not ten miles down the road?

There should be a mountain range, desert, or other feature to suggest why the cartographers refuse to go further.

Answer 2

MISTAKES TO AVOID

• Not including the effects of tectonic plates. Mountains arise where tectonic plates meet and hence tend to form long chains. You are unlikely to see mountain chains sprout a perpendicular side chain or turn at right angles (Tolkien's Middle Earth is a prime example of this mistake).
• Forgetting that water runs downhill. Rivers usually run from mountains to seas and are unlikely to split coming down, except in very flat areas, such as river deltas. Swamps are likely to be located in flat, coastal areas of seas or lakes.
• Forgetting that rivers are more likely to be important trade routes inside a nation than borders between nations, except when functioning as defense versus hostile neighbors. Before railroads, water connected rather than divided. Note that many, even most, of the great cities of old were built on both sides of rivers (often at estuaries or river junctions), with the parts connected by fords, ferries and later bridges. Nations are more likely to be bounded by mountains, deserts, swamps or wastelands.
• Forgetting how trade routes are determined by geography and that cities often arise at trade junctions, below mountain passes or at fresh-water sources in arid regions.
• Placing highly developed nations right next to primitive ones. Technology travels. Exceptions can be made where resources to run a developed nation aren't available, such as nomad tribes next to a developed farming nation.

Answer 3

Making it hard to distinguish between rivers, roads, and national boundaries. If you use different types of lines, provide a legend or key.

Answer 4

Avoid unnecessary detail.

This leaves you freedom to develop the plot later and the fewer details you have the less you can screw up. Include only what is necessary to follow the plot and not all of the detail that can be discerned from the plot. Not every location you mention needs to be on the map.

Also, don't be afraid to have significant sections of terra incognita. Unknown territory provides room for new stories of exploration that write themselves and almost all pre-modern maps had lots of sections of unknown territory or of only the most vaguely known territory.

Answer 5

Here's my process for creating planetary surfaces. You don't have to do an entire planet. You can just squish together a few plates to make a continent and then decide how far from the equator it is.

1. Draw tectonic plates. This can be pretty arbitrary, but you can simulate the shapes by examining the shapes of clusters of bubbles in dish water.
2. Squish the plates together like sponges. Put mountains where the plates meet. Draw in a continental divide, as rugged as you want.
3. Draw rivers going from the edges of the mountains to whatever body of water is to the south. Have a lot of tributaries near the mountains combining into big rivers that crawl across the middle of the continent. The idea that most rivers run southward is false, but you do have the problem of rivers freezing if they empty into the arctic circle. Dig canyons and erode mountains around the rivers. Add glaciers where the rivers actually climb up the mountains. If the rivers can't make it to an ocean, make a lake grow until it can. That's how the Mediterranean Sea was made.
4. Hadley cells result in air flowing away from large bodies of water. Planetary rotation then causes it to go East to West. Sketch in these wind lines.
5. When the air flows hit mountains, drop moisture. This makes costal areas near mountains wetter. Downwind of mountains become deserts, so the rivers will be smaller seasonal things in those areas. One of the most common road names in eastern Colorado is "dry creek road".
6. Temperature and humidity make biomes, so draw in your biomes. Plains, forest, desert, tundra, high plains desert, jungle, etc.
7. Add cities. Cities will form near water:

• highest navigable point on a river
• where rivers dump into oceans and seas
• along the edge of any major body of water, especially natural indentations which make good harbors

They'll also form where resources can be gathered for transportation. These also tend to be on rivers, at the edges of mountains, forests, and plains.

8. Add civilization. If you've ever played rail games, you know that railways boost trade. Consider long rivers and large bodies of water to be a contiguous railroad for empire building and trade purposes. Rivers are hard to cross with armies, so put smaller territory boundaries and boundaries far from the seat of power on rivers where possible. Mountain ridges are always a natural boundary to civilization.

If your map fails to follow these patterns, for instance if you have an extreme transition of temperature or humidity zones, or you use water as a boundary for civilizations instead of a path for them, then it will look weird.