I finally saw the difference between my old mountain maps and my new ones

I pulled out a map I drew back in 2021 for a D&D campaign and compared it to one I finished last month. The old one had every peak looking like a brown triangle with snow caps, no texture or depth at all. The new one uses contour lines and cross-hatching to show elevation changes, which took me about 3 weeks to figure out through trial and error. The biggest change was learning to look at real topo maps from USGS for reference instead of just guessing. Now my mountain ranges actually feel like they belong in the landscape instead of sitting on top of it. Has anyone else seen a big jump in quality after studying real-world geography details?

2 comments

2 Comments

jordan1341mo ago

Oh man, that's exactly what happened to me when I switched from drawing maps for fun to actually making them for a D&D campaign I run... I used to just draw little squiggly lines for rivers and call it good. Then I spent like two hours looking at a real topo map of the Colorado Rockies and realized my rivers were all wrong - they don't just flow straight down mountains, they curve around hills and stuff. Now I catch myself staring at random Google Earth screenshots trying to figure out how valleys form. It's weird how much time I spend on this stuff now, like I'll be at work and suddenly think about how a ridge should connect to the next peak. My wife thinks I'm nuts but my players actually notice the difference.

seanh911mo ago

Oh gosh @jordan134, you've hit on exactly the problem. A trick that helped me was to draw the ridges first, then the rivers just naturally fall into the low spots between them.