This is really cool but I also thought it might be useful for writing research or inspiration!
Maps
Just For Fun – Generate your own random fantasy map
Just for fun – because everyone deserves a break, especially today.
Want to escape into your own fantasy world? Need some inspiration for NaNoWriMo? Check out this cool fantasy map generator at Martin O’Leary‘s site!
Generating fantasy maps
Inspiration
I wanted to make maps that look like something you’d find at the back of one of the cheap paperback fantasy novels of my youth. I always had a fascination with these imagined worlds, which were often much more interesting than whatever luke-warm sub-Tolkien tale they were attached to.
At the same time, I wanted to play with terrain generation with a physical basis. There are loads of articles on the internet which describe terrain generation, and they almost all use some variation on a fractal noise approach, either directly (by adding layers of noise functions), or indirectly (e.g. through midpoint displacement). These methods produce lots of fine detail, but the large-scale structure always looks a bit off. Features are attached in random ways, with no thought to the processes which form landscapes. I wanted to try something a little bit different.
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