Fantasy Map generation - bottom to top - Part 2 - What and where?

Now that I have an Idea of what the landscape looks like, I am about to set a couple of rules.

the darker a part of the map is, the steeper it is. one pixel should be around 5km, making the whole map 8000km wide - big enough to fit Germany right beneath the right-angle river, or the single island in the south about the size of Sicily, also scaling sailing-distances where the 'continents' are closest to Mediterranean levels. This should make for a Adventure-friendly environment, even if Ancient Greece-style Triremes are the state of the art. This should be enough for any Antiquity to Medieval style setting. the red parts contain a special kind of flora and fauna that is somewhat different to the rest of the world's baseline. Survival in the other 'zone' is difficult but not impossible. (like war of the worlds terraforming) the bright yellow parts have a more surreal atmosphere, and contain strange poisonous flora. Life venturing there must bring it's own supplies or starve. All lakes enclosed by land are fresh-water, everything else is salty. Water that is enclosed by the 'red zone' isn't salty, but slightly acidic. (as in it could be drunk, but outsiders would get heartburn in the short term, and would not really be able to sustain themselves on it without complications.

Now that that's established, I head over to the Seventh Sanctum, and hit the fantasy race generator once, and pick what I like. Regularly, one could skip this step, and just assume baseline Human everywhere, but I'd like some variation - also different creatures have different needs and mindsets - which should be reflected in a fantasy-map.

If you're here just for the mapmapking, you might want to skip this.

The Fantasy Race Generator

• The race of gnomes. They are white-skinned and have red eyes. They have a rich culture. They worship a single god who works via assorted servants and messengers. They control an impoverished ocean kingdom that is the site of a lost civilization.
• The race of Ogres. They change genders as they age. They produce great warriors. They avoid all kinds of magic except summoning magic. The god that created them in turn abandoned them.
• The misshapen race. They are pale-skinned and have strange ears. They naturally hybernate. They are an all-male race. They control an island chain. A great doom awaits them, and they know it not. If they are all male, I can imagine what doom awaited them.
• The race of raccoon-people. They have a rich culture. They practice some forms of spiritual discipline, but some would debate if it is an actual religion. They are intimately connected to an important prophecy.
• The race of evolved mice. In their culture, code-breaking is a highly prized ability. They are exceptionally good at light magic. They existed only as slaves, but most won their freedom in revolt against their masters. Their history is unknown even to them.
• The race of elves. They are yellow-skinned and have red eyes. They have perfect memories. The only kind of magic they can do is air magic. Their gods are said to be dead or have fled this world. They have no country of their own, but work for other races. since we want nations.
• The race of elves. They are orange-haired and have gold eyes. They can change genders under certain conditions. They can see in the dark. They are exceptionally good at flesh magic. They are in general, atheists. They control a desert country. They came from another dimension.
• The gigantic race. They are yellow-armored and have three arms. They interbreed easily with other species. They take naturally to mountain ranges. They are well-known for their postal system and dangerous poisons. They turned their back on their old gods to follow stranger ones. Their government is extremely corrupt.
• The race of Griffin-people. They are genderless, and are able to reproduce on their own. They are well-known for their canals. They were created as part of a breeding experiment that went horribly wrong.
• The race of evolved weasels. Their magical practices tend to focus on divine magic. They are very lazy. They have no defining religion, preferring to pick and choose from the pieces of other religions. They are the descendents of another race.

Now let's place them.

The Genderless Griffin-people have a thing for canals…wouldn't that go really well with a prominent Landmark we have. Depending on how over-the top we want them, they could have built the giant canal… or maybe their ancestors did.

Our evolved mice could live nearby, since they are ex-slaves (someone must have dug those canals) - also they are mice and codebreakers, so they might be heavily into numbers and very sneaky - I'd add some around there, using the canal itself and the red zone as protection against their former masters.

Our gigantic yellow friends also have an Ideal place for them - that mountainous island, I'm sure everybody else would hate.

Now, the ocean kingdom of that white-skinned goblins should be easy to place too. How about here:

The races we have left now have no location descriptions for them, so I assign them to other random criteria.

Flesh magic sounds like something, lots of 'regular' people would find disturbing, conditional gender-changing also doesn't sound regular, and we have no red-zone inhabitants yet, so our Orange-haired 'elves' go in a red zone, preferably further away from already placed settlements.

While we're at placing elves, the more 'regular' yellow ones should go somewhere too. I tend to just say that they are still somehow related, so let's place them closer.

Now, all that we have left are gender-changing Ogres, Raccoons and Weasels, and we still have a whole 'continent' left, so placing them should not be that hard.

I'd make the warrior Ogres red-zone guys too, so we have at least one more of them. therefore, I need to place them here

Which leaves the remaining landmass to our two rodent-species, I'd place them here:

And here:

Now that that's taken care of, let's go to…

The political map

I placed good visible dots where I assigned the 'starting locations' of the different races/factions, and took a big brush with a high falloff and 50% opacity, and clicked on every point a couple of times. What we get is a good picture of where the early (potential) conflict zones are.

Since I placed the first two factions very close together, I drew the border along the obvious lines - borders of red-zones, elevations, coastlines and rivers.

Same goes for our Elves and warrior Ogres -

 As for our two rodent-species, they do not manage to keep their respective lakes from each other (allowing for lots of piracy and naval incursions … because adventure-friendly), also they clearly fought for every single hill in previous conflicts.

Now there are two factions that could expand unhindered - at least as long as they hit resistance, creating additional borders for our yellow-giant friends

For our seagoing Gnome-pirates (Arr), I imagined Viking style expansion, combined with no real enemy to concentrate on, I gave them lots of small islands they could probably reach, and quite some colonies at remote and shallow shorelines. - this is what we end up with.

Or even better:

From here it could go either way… I'd find it likely that our sailor-gnomes' outposts would probably be hard to control centralized, and turn into their own little respective kingdoms, our corrupt yellow giants could use their strengths, and easy interbreedability to their advantage, and hire out 'mercenaries' to the other factions, while keeping to their home-landmass. If we would like our Griffon-people to have a bigger empire, the Mouse-kingdom could be pushed back to the atoll in the east, their shared islands could form their own little kingdoms with the other factions instead of fighting them. Also the green-zone elves could severely pushed back by their neighbouring factions.

The sweet part is, that the map does a great deal of storytelling on it's own.

Fantasy Map generation, bottom to top. Part 1

I've seen this tutorial by shmorkin, and instantly ran into trouble. If I was doing a fantasy-map, sooner or later, I'd like to have a good topology map, which can be done with the use of some simple steps and filters in GIMP, but then I'd have nation borders that wouldn't make sense, or I would have to indulge into a copy&paste orgy, just to make that mountain pass follow the border. Also I usually don't write tutorials.

Now since realistic is such a bad word in fantasy (your deserts are in the wrong places, also how is that sea of fire affecting the overall climate?), I'd suggest we want believable maps. 

Also Political borders mostly tell lots of little stories, something that will argument your writing-project a lot, when done right.

Before I start to explain my workflow, I want to add, that I'm using the GIMP, version 2.9.1 which I grabbed from git-hub and compiled myself… so my version might behave different from yours..

I usually start with generating topography by using 

Filters → Render → Noise → Plasma

this is also the point where I tend to throw interesting textures I found in the image, in the hope of being able to use some parts of it.I used one from this page just for demonstration purposes. Also this is highly optional - the plasma will provide a good basis, but you will notice that the map patterns tend to be rather monotone after a while. I overlapped the texture with Burn to preserve the grain of the plasma.

After that, merged the two layers (I tend to use the new from visible option, but merge should be fine too), and used

Filters → Render → Noise → Difference Clouds

what could work on it's own, but this way, it preserves some information from the previously used pictures. In the result, you can already see hints of landmass and sea, also there are some potentially interesting features, we probably could reinforce before the next step.

I took a copy of the new layer and ran 

Colours → Desaturate 

on it, to get a feeling of where the low and high parts would be, and I liked the resulting images, so I kept them for later.

After that I ran the - in my opinion - most important tool for this

Distorts → Emboss

This is where you get to define if your map is a Lunar crater-landscape, or a group of islands with hills and lakes. Now my first try resultet in something that looked like a post-apocalyptic desert to me, so I added one of the previous desaturated images onto it (again via Burn, since it's messiness tends to create additional artefacts - we want lots of artefacts for our map). If I hadn't kept some of the desaturation-results from above, I could have run Difference Clouds again, followed by Emboss. After getting a feel for how Emboss works, one could also paint certain features by Hand. After looking at my result for some time, I decided to run Difference Clouds on a copy from visible anyway, and overlay it to the older Image - in this case with Darken Only, because It looked better than the other options.

At this point, we could be proceeding with adding more effects, more Noise, until we get the result we want, also if none of them are satisfying, raising contrast and/or blurring - followed by newly embossing. It might also be a good Idea to apply low-opacity paintstrokes to undesired regions. After all that, I usually run 

Colors → Auto → White Balance

to lighten the image up a bit for the next step.

Looking at this Image makes me want to add some craters, and turn it into a rather desolate landscape, but for the purpose of this tutorial, we want more limiting terrain features, and therefore a coastline. I decided to start with the lighter part on the left, that already looked like water.

This step mainly consists of manually drawing edges with the Free Select Tool, following the generated terrain-features to get a 'believable' look. Also I made a new layer for every shape I drew here.

Since I am lazy, I clicked the rest of the land together using the Scissor Selection Tool, which is a lot faster, but provides far less detailed results. I also added some mall islands to the coasts of the bigger landmasses.

The whole thing was somewhat tightly packed, also It's good visible where I ran out of motivation, so I decided to crop the whole map, and turned it 90° clockwise to get a good format again. (the original image was 1600*1600, now it's 1600*1000)

Now let's take a look of the terrain we are going to work with. For this I merged all the black outline layers together, selected them with the Select by Colour Tool, and cut their shapes out of the white placeholder layer, I used as a background.

Of course one could do this the other way around, but I find it easier to review the final landmasses before moving on.

Next, I'm checking the texture for things that should rather be sea, as well as some weird landmarks, like the two canyons, meeting at a right angle on the upper left landmass.

After that, I take the last image that had colours and overlay it with the effect that looks most pleasing - in my case it's Grain extract. I deactivate the white layer and generate a new layer from visible, and adjust it's colours with Hue-Saturation until it's all shades of brown and green. I added some patches of red for a slightly surreal fantasy element. I also cut some additional patches out of the white layer, because it looked like there would be some really interesting places.

 Now, there are still some white patches, and a lot of things to correct, but also there are a lot of terrain features that could potentially tell a story or two. (I also made some last minute color corrections)

Since this is getting really long, I'd prefer to make this a two-parter.

Next time I'm distributing resources and name terrain features, to get our initial population seed - the rest should happen automatically.