all the tips I found for drawing a fantasy map are like :) “here’s a strategy to draw the land masses! here’s how to plot islands!” :) and that’s wonderful and I love them all but ??? how? do y’all decide where to put cities/mountains/forests/towns I have my map and my land but I’m throwing darts to decide where the Main Citadel where the Action Takes Place is

okay so i know i said most of this in the replies but it might be easier to actually reblog and say stuff instead lmao

Cities – go near water!  freshwater lakes and rivers (rivers especially) are the best places for cities because A) source of water and B) travel and trade is much easier cus you can put your boats like right there.  Basically ever relevant city ever was built on a lake or a river.

for rivers in general – because gravity, rivers run from mountains (forming from melting snow and ice (this is why they get fat in spring–more stuff melting)) to lakes/ocean where they can empty out (and even lakes will have rivers leading out that eventually get to the ocean), which can help when mapping out where those start and end.  rivers are also much thinner and faster in steeper elevations and very slow and wide when the land is flat

mountains – i like to think of what the tectonic plates look like because that’s what makes mountains!  mountains are also never standalone they’re always in mountain ranges (archipelagos are really just underwater mountain ranges babey).  a cool trick I like to do is occasionally separate mountain ranges across continents, because over time the tectonic plates shifted and literally split the range in half.  These mountains are really old tho so they’ve eroded and therefore it makes them smaller and rounder (like the appalachians) as opposed to relatively young mountain ranges like the rocky mountains which have taller and sharper peaks

Another mountain trick: if your mountains run along the ocean, the ocean side of the mountains will get a LOT of rain while the other side will be very dry–almost desert-like, in fact.  think of temperate rainforests in British Columbia vs the drier conditions in the canadian prairies

forests – depends on how warm the area might be.  coniferous forests are found further north (before you hit the tree line, and then it’s only tundra onwards) but as you head south you get leafier trees, and the leaves tend to get larger too

If you think about general elevation too, you’ll have places that might be swampy (wet + lower).  if your world has an ice age like we did, then glaciers may have carved the land, leaving piles of soil in the south that was left when the ice receded and places where the bedrock has been bared north of that (like the Canadian Shield in Canada–the reason we see that is because of the glaciers)

You might also have a land that’s dotted in a shitton of freshwater lakes as well because the meltwater filled the holes that the glaciers scraped out (this is why canada has so many goddamn lakes)

and if the ice age was more recent than it was in our world, then you might not even have the forest re-growth and it could be a lot of open plains

tl;dr i like to think of major climate events that might have also shaped the land on top of some basic rules

The Artifexian has an entire series on building your world from literally the stars down and then the ground up.

Though, for fantasy, you can make the world operate on entirely different principles:

With that done, the actual topic of city placement can be covered by videos like this:


Once you have your places, if you want help naming them in realistic ways, this video can help:

This one is on architecture, which is definitely a subset of cities:

But for a more relevant practical guide on making settlements realistic:

Here’s a quick guide for making demographics:

holy shit?

Weheyy! I made the list! 

Also look at WASD20 – it’s basically THE youtube channel for learning to design and draw maps.

And this from Questing Beast is my favourite guide for drawing city or town maps:

This, this, and all of this.
This is called Human Geography; it is an entire study and sub-field of geography for reality, and I’m a big fan of the “if you use ‘because magic’ as an excuse, have a reason why they decided to end up magicking out a solution instead of going with what makes sense” school of design.











Hey, unpopular opinion, apparently. But people don’t just “have pain for no reason” doctors say this all the time (especially to women and chronically ill people) and the truth is, Thats literally not possible. Even if your pains are psychosomatic (a word I hesitate to even use because of the way its used so often) there is a reason you are having those pains whether its mental illness, abuse, etc. If your doctor consistently tells you that “well some people just have pain for no reason” get a new doctor. That’s a doctor who is not going to give a shit what your actual symptoms or experiences are.

I just wanna add to clarify the psychosomatic thing.

That word DOES NOT MEAN you’re making it up. It doesn’t mean you’re imagining the symptom. What it means is that the symptom ISN’T DIRECTLY CAUSED BY ANY OF THE THINGS THAT WOULD NORMALLY CAUSE IT.

I fought to get a PCOS diagnosis for 2 and a half years. For the ENTIRE time I was fighting, I was dealing with 3 cysts that were not going away by themselves and eventually required surgery to remove. At one point close to the end of the battle, I suddenly went blind. I was visiting my parents and was standing on the veranda looking out over the tree we had planted in memory of my dog and suddenly I got one of the shooting pains that I was quite frankly used to at that point and my vision started to go dark. It was like the sun was setting while being completely hidden behind storm clouds but it was 2pm in the middle of Summer on a clear day. Within about 30 seconds I couldn’t see ANYTHING. I was 27 years old and I was screaming for my mother.

My mum raced me to her doctor (he was a 15 minute drive away as opposed to 45 minutes to the nearest hospital) and he quickly worked out that there was nothing wrong with my eyes and what had happened was totally unrelated to them. Then he said it was psychosomatic and I freaked out, yelling that I was NOT making this up and I definitely wasn’t imagining it. Very quickly he calmed me down and said he believed me and I had misunderstood. He explained that whatever was going on with my abdominal pains (he suggested PCOS which I hadn’t even heard of at that point) had been ignored for so long that my body was starting to do things other than the normal pain response to try to draw my attention to the problem. My sight going was my body basically jumping around in front of me going “HEY ARE YOU EVEN LISTENING TO ME HELLLOOOOOOO??????”

He gave me some prescription strength painkillers and my sight started to come back as soon as they started to kick in. About 45 minutes after it started I could see well enough to walk around without help and within a day and a half I was back to normal. On top of that I finally had a scan booked to figure out what the hell was causing all the pain.

Psychosomatic symptoms are NOT imagined or fabricated or happening for “no reason”. Experiencing them DOES NOT make you a liar. It makes you someone who has been battling with something serious for so long that your own body has started to get impatient with you.

I completely agree. Thank you for sharing this.

Psychosomatic symptoms are literally your body flipping random alarm switches just to get any alarm blaring because you’ve been ignoring the regular ones

I don’t usually add to posts but I thought it was important to add that this 100% goes for mental health, too.

When I was 18, only a few months after graduating from high school, I started having seizures. Serious, triggered at the drop of a hat, knock me unconscious for an hour or more and leave me dazed for days kind of seizures.

I was rushed to hospital two or three times within the space of a week after passing out in the middle of cooking dinner or talking with my family, but the hospital could not find anything wrong with me. I spent a week in the hospital in a planned admission, connected to an EEG monitor for 23 hours a day with the doctors hoping to catch my seizures in action and finally figure out what they were. I don’t know how many seizures I had during that week, but at the end of it, they said that even after all that, there was nothing wrong with me. After that, they sent me to a psychologist.

I was diagnosed with PNES – Psychogenic Non-Epileptic Siezures. Essentially, it was explained to me, I had been ignoring my anxiety and PTSD for so long that my body was acting out just like @kamorth ’s had. When they started treating me for anxiety and PTSD, my siezures eventually turned into panic or anxiety attacks, and then stopped altogether.

The moral of the story is don’t ignore pain. Whether it be physical, mental, whatever. Pain is your body’s way of telling you something is wrong and it has ways of making you listen to it eventually. Some of those ways are seriously disabling and once you get to that stage, it can be a long road to recovery.

Just because therapy might be helpful for some psychosomatic symptoms doesn’t mean it was fake. It means your treatment worked.

This. And a half. With bells on.

If you are a #medblr, you need to read this post and LEARN FROM IT.

The way the doctor in the first story (blindness, PCOS) explained “psychosomatic” in such clear simple terms is EXCELLENT PATIENT CARE.

I wanna send this to the NP who told my mom that her persistent toe pain was “just her chronic pain syndrome.” She doesn’t have a chronic pain syndrome. She has advanced-for-her-age osteoarthritis. Which hurts. Good grief.

Pain is NOT a diagnosis.

I got hospitalized at the end of my second year of residency for an abnormally heavy period- 16 days of heavy bleeding before I passed out while working, dropped my hemoglobin to 5.4, needed 3 units of blood, 2L IV fluids, and a procedure to stabilize me.

The final diagnosis was inflammation of my endometrium, which can happen with my connective tissue disorder but is rare. The cause? Apparently 6 solid months of long hours, long commutes, emotional distress due to several family situations, and anxiety manifested in this weird way because I am really good at ignoring my body’s warning systems. My body started with some panic attacks, which I ignored. Increased migraines- I just upped my ibuprofen use. I had pain in every ligament and tendon in my body at one point, and I just powered through. My body finally threw up its hands and yelled, “OK UTERUS, UNLEASH HELL” and I was completely unable to ignore it.

The body is so interconnected. As doctors, we can’t always explain everything, but we know it’s not “all in your head”.














Guide to Figuring out the Age of an Undated World Map.

No but take the time to actually read it because I lost like 15 minutes.

I have a friend who is really good at this type of thing.  He once found an old globe at a garage sale and he was able to pin the date of it’s making down to like a 6 month window, because it only would’ve been correct during a specific point in WWII.  

I was mad impressed, because I have no mind for geography.  I can barely remember my own state’s capitol.


This is amazing. Take the time to actually read it.

Holy shit the super specific things towards the end

Oh wow!

I didn’t know anything about the giant lake in California being created by accident?!

I love how it differentiates the maps of Narnia based on which book you’re looking at

I almost scrolled past this

As a Resident of Colorado, I applaud Mr. Monroe of XKCD for his foresight in seeing the late 2020 Uprising of the Brown Sugar Mill Radioactive Brown Recluse Spider Colony. 

I have an Atlas of the world that was made very shortly after Germany invaded Poland, and I used the flowchart to figure out exactly when.





that is exactly my point of view. if all people were given universal basic income, we could have tens of thousands of boring, tedious, dangerous, and long term harmful jobs done by robots, while humans are free to explore their passions without fear of poverty and homelessness.

in a good society, automation means a boom in the arts. language, painting, music, dance, writing, philosophy, architecture, etc. these are the sectors that advance tremendously during periods of human health and flourishing

Back in the 1960s, we were told that automation and rising productivity would mean shorter work weeks with higher pay. Instead we have multibillionaires, growing poverty, and crumbling infrastructure. The money is all there, it’s just being hoarded.


We should not be working 40h weeks at this point. We should not be feeding our capitalistic dragons.









Yup! At my job as a mental health counselor where we assess people, if we start detecting hints of what we think might be ADHD, it’s actually something my supervisor trained me to do, to just ask “So when that sort of thing happens, do you ever drink coffee or soda to calm down?” or “Does coffee actually help you wake up, or does it just not do anything?” because it’s such a commonly known fact about ADHD for people in the mental health field.








That’s a possible sign of ADHD, my dudes. :P

One of the prevailing theories explaining ADHD is that it’s caused by a lack of certain neurotransmitters, specifically norepinephrine and serotonin.  Everybody has a background level of these neurotransmitters, and when they see or do something novel or interesting, those neurotransmitters increase, and then decrease back down to normal levels.  Because people with ADHD have less of these than they should, they are constantly looking for something new and interesting to give them that jolt back to normal levels.  That’s why they’re so easily distracted and why they hyperfocus on things that interest them.

Stimulant drugs, like caffeine, cause your brain to make more of those neurotransmitters.  So while neurotypical people might get a buzz off caffeine, people with ADHD just get bumped up closer to normal levels, and so, if anything, feel calmer.  That’s why they prescribe what are basically amphetamines as treatment for ADHD and why ADHD meds are so bad for people who don’t have ADHD.


I can drink 3 cups of coffee and go straight to sleep, this is just one example of what is fundamentaly wrong with me as a person

God I really thought this was common knowledge, I forget that unless you are successfully diagnosed or are a person who studies it, that adhd isnt like, a well understood thing

Cuz like, yeah caffeine calms my brain a bit so if I have a huge soda from like circle k before bed I’ll pass out, if I’m super spastic and hyper, coffee or soda brings my brain down to a level where I can focus and be calm.

I have ADHD and I drink coffee and tea to regulate my anxiety.

They’re not just ‘basically amphetamines’ that you’re prescribed, but sometimes literal amphetamines. I’m prescribed dextroamphetamine for my ADHD. And while they say not to take them too close to bedtime, I’ve absolutely woken up, taken my morning meds, and gone back to bed for a nap on several occasions. Which is … not a neurotypical response to amphetamines.

My adhd meds are LITERALLY “amphetamine salts”, it’s not basically anything it is explicitly exactly that.

Some people I know have extended release doses to take in the morning before they start their day, and a low fast release dose to take before bed to help get their brains to quiet down long enough for them to sleep.

I have also literally drunk coffee or other caffeinated beverages in order to go to sleep, because it helps quiet my mind down. (and also before tests or things I’d need to focus for, before I got my meds, because I’d focus better but it wouldn’t make me awake or hyper just able to pay attention.)

that feel when your doctor proscribes you something containing the word “meth”

it doesn’t have the word “meth” in it because meth comes from the prefix to “methamphetamine” which is an illegal and harmful variant of amphetamine.

it’s… actually a prescription for a drug that includes everything BUT the word “meth”, if you get straight adderall.