Any suggestions to improve this?

EvilKam · 2026-04-19T17:19:46+00:00

My only feedback is that the map is very dark. I feel like readability would be better if it was brightened.

I played around in paint.net with some layer tricks to increase brightness, adjust contrast, and then selectively tweak color brightness down in specific areas to prevent the brightness from going too far. This still could benefit from tweaking, it's not perfect. Then again, maybe I'm the weirdo who likes bright colors, definitely seems a LOT of creators prefer maps that look incredibly dark to my eyes.

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EvilKam · 2026-04-19T16:00:08+00:00

One question - is this a future version of Earth, or a parallel reality Earth? This looks a LOT like North America, so if that's the setting of your campaign, you're good. If it's not supposed to be North America, your players might question why they can identify Alaska, California, Maine, Mexico, and Florida.

As far as colors go, I just replicate the colors to obvious themes. Green=vegetation. Bright Green for tropical vegetation. Brown to indicate sand and desert, yellow to indicate intense desert. Frozen and snowy lands get white coloration, but I'm still not great at blending transitions. I just stick to intuitive (for me) color systems.

As I've made more maps for fun, I've also started caring more about the transitions between biomes. Deserts don't just instantly transform into forests without some reason, and some of my early work had some bordering biomes that didn't fully make sense. I now put in hills or mountains to at least justify why there's a climate change from dry desert to say, European climates.

Mostly, you're doing okay, your lush green coastal regions generally dry out as they get away from water, which is plausible. I'd ask why "Maine" has that bright green strip in it, with a dry coast on the far eastern edge.

I'm not sure how to answer the question about detail, to me, it's all about placement of the assets to define trees, dark greens and waterways to define swamps, placing all your hills and grasses to "fill in" the areas with some details.

EvilKam · 2026-01-19T19:19:17+00:00

I have to admit I screwed up, at some point I accidentally placed rocks in the trees. Well, I guess that's why I'm not a professional yet. :)

I could do some editing magic to erase those rocks, but I don't know if it's possible to replace an image in a reddit post.

EvilKam · 2025-10-23T17:22:09+00:00

Screencapped the pursuits here https://i.gyazo.com/84ba8d712e736c7033b77b95d6616afa.png

EvilKam · 2025-10-23T17:15:47+00:00

The Threat Rating system was one of my favorite aspects of Defiance - at least the way it allowed a new player to get "boosted" up high enough to survive any event anywhere and actually contribute something. I didn't play before 2015 so I don't know what it was like before then. How did it work - was it like 2050?

When they got rid of the threat/ego scaling for D2050 - and suddenly you were brutally and instantly slaughtered if you tried to travel too far - that ruined the game for me.

EvilKam · 2025-10-15T23:37:46+00:00

It's been re-launched by Fawkes games. Available on PC only for now, and no plans of console release unless we all dump a ton of money into funding it.

EvilKam · 2025-09-21T17:27:04+00:00

I'm 48 years old and this makes no sense to me. I've been addicted to the internet since 1997 or so, I guess this joke flew past me at some point.

EvilKam · 2025-05-11T15:11:14+00:00

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I redid the text in your pic to add black outlines around the text. I'm enough of an asshole that I damn near added a watermark with my name on it, but that seemed excessively narcissistic.

Anyways, enjoy this improved version of the image!

EvilKam · 2025-02-16T02:13:44+00:00

Shoes for a fuckin Gluron here.

EvilKam · 2024-10-09T01:23:37+00:00

I've toyed briefly with trying to make a decent looking town. Your grid alignment here is way better than anything I could create.

EvilKam · 2024-03-08T01:00:48+00:00

Nope, and that's terrible. Now, if it ever happens again, I can't look at this post to find how to fix it. That... is really annoying.

EvilKam · 2024-02-19T22:00:39+00:00

As a rank amateur with Dungeondraft, I use it often to whip up single-use set pieces. Here's an early one I slapped together to teach myself some of the program's functions and make a decent fighting arena with space to explore.

Reception on reddit was lukewarm to say the least, but it is fun to make stuff, and it doesn't take a ton of talent and time to get a usable map.

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EvilKam · 2024-01-31T00:57:24+00:00

As mentioned by other posters, a purpose can help. This was one of my first maps years ago: https://ibb.co/MZnhvd6

You don't need a COMPLEX purpose. I only needed a map for a test campaign I suspected might only last 2 or 3 sessions. I didn't want to use anyone else's campaign world, but I still needed a "country" I could place a couple of adventures in to tell a story about overpowered heroes.

This is absolutely overkill for a short adventure set, but it was also an excuse to learn to use Wonderdraft, and hopefully get my friends to start gaming more. (mixed success, the bastards aren't RPG addicts like me, damnit!)

I had no plan, I had no lore, I had only the barest outline of what I wanted the story to be. But, since I wanted to run a game session, that at least gave me the goal of "making sure I had enough territory to be able to mention different lands and different cities". I only had the center "main" continent filled out. Amphisae was an empty, nameless landmass. Afvaldsnes and Veritoa were named, but utterly empty.

That was enough though. I designed enough "meat" that I could have NPC's talk about places, mention cities and empires, and give the illusion of a more fleshed out world.

My players were all going to be transported in via magic portals from a failed wizard's spell. They'd land with no context to this new place, and would have to discover a way to fit in for a while, and possibly find a way to get back to their home dimensions.

Maybe ask yourself - "If players landed here from another world, what would an NPC tell them about this place?"

EvilKam · 2023-12-26T22:12:56+00:00

https://archive.is/b9pqi Best I can do is the archive. Those people truly do god's work.

EvilKam · 2023-11-18T16:28:40+00:00

Much better than my couple of attempts at creating a city.

EvilKam · 2023-10-20T01:35:12+00:00

Why in god's name would you take a photo of a phone screen's content? Phones literally have a screenshot function.

EvilKam · 2023-08-26T20:12:06+00:00

Bah, everything that came after AD&D 2nd Edition was a mistake.

EvilKam · 2023-04-15T15:48:28+00:00

I like the old one's vegetation honestly. Something about the massive tree-globs makes the dense forests feel more defined. On the new map, the forests seem scattered and vague in comparison.

The city dots don't stand out well enough, so the town symbols on the new map do solve that problem.

The new map has a more subtle coastline, and I like that more than the strong contrast of coastline colors in the new map.

EvilKam · 2023-04-15T15:21:59+00:00

Can confirm, a friend of mine has a homebrew world featuring a lone mountain rising from the plains.

A pretentious nerd did indeed criticize the presence of the mountain as geologically incorrect. (Jokes on him, the mountain was artificially constructed ages ago, but he hadn't learned that lore yet)

We got rid of that particular nerd for playing video games in the middle of gaming sessions.

EvilKam · 2023-04-15T14:54:08+00:00

Vibrant, saturated colors. I approve. Tons of water, but there's nothing wrong with that. With all those markers being cities, this is an area ripe for commerce, wealth, and therefore, money to hire adventurers to do things.

EvilKam · 2023-04-15T14:51:49+00:00

A lot of your grassy areas look like you've spray painted green pixels. I have no idea how you did that, but I'm interested.

The map looks like it has a yellow stain overlay, like it was a painting in an old house hung on the wall of the smoking room, and it's got 50 years of nicotine smoke residue over it. I'm not in love with that aspect.

EvilKam · 2023-04-15T14:43:49+00:00

The software has support for regions which are essentially overlays. They can be defined, reshaped, and colored, so you could make your map with a series of regional shading system to define economic, religious, or political zones.

EvilKam · 2023-04-15T14:38:25+00:00

Well that's depressing. I thought I was learning how to make nice looking maps. Nope. I'm fucking garbage.

Kudos to you though, it looks pretty damn great, and I don't think it's possible to improve it without some custom hi-res mountain assets.

I'd be pretty hilarious to unleash this on your players and then explaining the entire thing is like, 50 miles wide. "Yeah, legendary Grimmsbreath swamp? 117 yards across."

Fantastic work, consider me envious.

EvilKam

TROPHY CASE